Lisa Robertson interviewed in See Magazine

See Magazine in Edmonton recently interviewed Lisa Robertson about her most recent books, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture and The Men:<!--newline--><!--newline-->Peeling back the city's skin<!--newline-->Lisa Robertson unearths a secret Vancouver<!--newline--><!--newline-->Lisa Robertson is really the underground queen of Canadian letters -- despite her Governor-General's award nomination in 1998. The small presses that have published her poems are a who’s who of unknown imprints: Tsunami, Sprang Texts, Meow, DARD, The Berkley Horse, Nomados.<!--newline-->Her most successful work to date, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (OSA), takes the form of a series of essays on.. well, let's just quote from the publisher's description: "essays on Vancouver fountains, the syntax of the suburban home, Value Village, the joy of synthetics, scaffolding the persistence of the Himalayan blackberry. There are also seven Walks, tours of Vancouver sites–poetic dioramas, really, and more material than cement could ever be."<!--newline--><!--newline-->"My decision to form a fictional architectural office was based on the fact most new architectural firms don’t actually get any built work to do," explains Robertson. "They’re just writing proposals. Their practice is actually a language-based rhetorical practice, describing architecture that doesn’t actually exist... I figured I could do that as well as an architect, and be a sort of virtual architect."<!--newline--><!--newline-->Robertson is speaking from France, where she lives with her husband -- a long way from the urban fabric of Vancouver that inspired the essays .<!--newline--><!--newline-->The Soft Architecture manifesto, the first essay in OSA, was first published as a catalogue piece. "I had no idea it would become a whole series of texts," says Robertson. At the time, Robertson was writing a column for a Toronto art magazine called Mix, "Beneath the Pavillion", that was supposed to be about the arts scene in Vancouver.<!--newline--><!--newline-->"At that point, I was already becoming interested in Vancouver as an architectural site. Without really telling them that I was changing the assignment, I turned it into a column about the relation between art and architecture in the city.<!--newline--><!--newline-->"I basically tried to teach myself how to describe what I observed in the city in a way that had some velocity, some density to it."<!--newline--><!--newline-->After Robertson wrote the manifesto, she headed to England for a residency at Cambridge. There, she realized that the manifesto’s ideas were "kind of complicated and opening up."<!--newline--><!--newline-->"When I got back from Cambridge," she says, "I continued to make my living as a freelance writer, mainly writing catalogue essays. When someone commissioned a catalogue essay or magazine article from me, I would try to convince them to let me write it as the "Office for Soft Architecture", and for them to publish under that pseudonym.<!--newline--><!--newline-->"At first people thought that it was pretty odd," she says. "But I managed to convince them, and then it sort of became a thing."<!--newline--><!--newline-->The collected works of the Office were published when Seattle-based Clear Cut Press approached Robertson for a manuscript. Being a small American press, however, Clear Cut was never able to promote or distribute the book sufficiently in Canada, so when Coach House Press approached Robertson for material, she offered the chance to publish OSA for a pan-Canadian audience, and the book was finally out in wide release in Robertson’s home country last year.<!--newline--><!--newline-->Her next project, The Men: A Lyric Book, started off as poetic marginalia while she finished work on other projects.<!--newline--><!--newline-->"It’s the least premeditated of my published work in that I didn’t have any specific critical framework that I set out to explore or address," she explains. "It wasn’t planned and I wrote lots and lots and lots of these poems before I even imagined it being a book. Then I couldn’t imagine it being a book because it was just so unlike the other poems I had written."<!--newline--><!--newline-->The poems stayed stacked in storage for five years, until Jay Millar of BookThug press contacted Robertson about publishing a manuscript with him. "I got this big box of BookThug books that were just beautiful. I liked his editorial sense–it’s rooted in experimental Canadian poetry but also has a real international reach, and the books felt good in the hand and were beautifully typeset. He seemed like a lovely guy to work with."<!--newline--><!--newline-->Readers of The Men will notice that Robertson has exchanged the "we" of her previous work for the first person singular. The effect is, naturally, of a more personal or autobiographical engagement. And rather than the polyphonic textures of her earlier books The Weather or Rousseau’s Boat, The Men has what Robertson describes as "a simpler melodic voice line."<!--newline--><!--newline-->Robertson attributes these qualities to the fact that she was reading Petrarch’s sonnets while writing. "Within that renaissance sonnet tradition, there’s a suppleness to the voice, there’s an effect of simplicity. That’s what was pleasing me in reading Petrarch. So that’s what I was trying for in my poems."<!--newline--><!--newline-->JAY SMITH