[Wgcp-whc] minutes from Lisa Robertson visit--March 1, 2013

[Richard Deming]

Dear Friends,

 I wanted to send word about our most recent session, held on Friday March 1, which featured a visit from the poet Lisa Robertson.  Robertson had given a reading the night before for the Graduate Poets Reading Series, our collaborators in bringing this author to campus.

The session began with Robertson talking about her interest in philosophy, an influence that appears explicitly and implicitly throughout her work, and especially R’s Boat, which in its earlier version (as a chapbook) was entitled Rousseau’s Boat, a reference to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker.  Robertson began by locating her interest biographically by saying that for her poetry and philosophy had been positioned alongside one another since she began writing.  Although she had only ever taken one philosophy course as an undergraduate, she did work with the acclaimed Candian poet Robin Blaser.  Blaser himself made a great deal of use of philosophy and Robertson saw in him the possibility for considering poetry as engaging in the history of ideas without standing apart from that history.”  She pointed to “The Practice of Outside,”  Blaser’s seminal essay on Jack Spicer as being particularly influential in the ways that she sees the interface of poetry and philosophy.

She enjoys being a perpetual amateur in terms of philosophy.  That outsider status means that she can read philosophical texts in ways that are not systematic and she can be drawn by instinct or even by aesthetic whim.  Philosophy offers a difficulty by which she can be aware of—attentive to—the cognitive experience as an experience unto itself.  Because she is so trained in poetry, poetry doesn’t have that sense of newness and unfamiliarity. She cited Hannah Arendt’s (though it is a decidedly Heideggerian claim as well) that thinking as an activity is always bound up with a sense of beginning. The persistent unfamiliarity of philosophy creates a persistent sense of a present tense, which she feels produces the conditions for poetry

She began her interest with an interest in Heidegger and Nietzsche, and over time this changed to focus on French post-structuralists (such as Barthes, Deleuze, and others). But her main interest is Hannah Arendt in large part because of her ability to bring together metaphysical concerns with social and political realities.  Moreover, Robertson believe that it was important for her to connect with a woman within the history of ideas and thinking.

 Robertson said that what she takes from philosophy includes the process of making distinctions at very subtle and nuanced levels and these distinctions generate a complex of responses that poetry can engage because it so often activates a variety of levels of meaning and meaningfulness. 

In the course of the discussion, the point was raised that the poems of R’s Boat tend to not build a narrative tension, but there is a consistency that keeps the reader’s eyes on the page.  In that way, the poems are a kind of immersive experience.  Robertson indicated that was how she feels when writing and that she tried to create a kind of neutrality or even sense of tension as she was composing.  She drew the material from over 60 notebooks that she has been keeping for decades.  These notebooks are not diaristic, but contain thoughts, meditations, drafts, and passages from various writers, artists, and thinkers.  For “Face” she culled all the sentences that were written from the first person (using “I”).  She wanted to use them all and didn’t want to only have the best so she write in a way to even them out.  This evenness means that the work’s overall structure doesn’t ebb and flow and provide places for readers to step out unto the end. Her work with constraints allows her to attend to formal elements of design that can then make sense for the unintentional and the unconscious to come into the work without being overdetermined. She also indicated that she had inherited a tradition (she called it part of her Canadian poetic tradition taken from Blaser, Fred Wah, BP Nichols, and others) that conceives of the book as the compositional unit.  She is interested in the experience of duration, an experience of time itslef, and that prolonging an immersive experience for the length of a book is her ideal.  She brings a book to a close when she feels the experience can no longer be sustained.

The conversation did address the question of closure, which Robertson is interested in, at least in terms of an aesthetic experience of something being complete rather than left wholly open.  The closure—and there was some wondering if resolution might be a more fitting term—isn’t explanatory or a moral certainty, but does provide a frame for the experience of the poem itself.  Robertson said that when she is finished with a book she loses a direct engagement with it and turns to the next project.  The newness of a new project then allows for that newness and openness that she is looking for in aesthetic experiences.

As is evident this was a provocative and generative (and heady!) conversation with one of the foremost poets of her generation.  It was a pleasure to have her amongst us to discuss this important work. Our thanks to her and to Justin Sider and Sarah Stone who helped us bring her to campus.

The Poetics Group will next meet on April 5th and the focus of our discussion will be Alice Notley, who will be reading on April 18th at 4 PM in the Beinecke.  She will then join us for a discussion on April 19th.  Our focus will be Notley’s recent book Culture of One. Copies of this book have been ordered and I will let everyone know when they arrive.  Here is a clip of Notley reading from the work: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T-KCAFO_Uc4

 

Also, our own Ravi Shakar asked if I might send word of a book launch that is happening on March 11th.  I will paste that information below.
May everyone have a restorative spring break.

 

Ever and forward,

Richard Deming, Coordinator 



Drunken Boat’s Book Launch of Lisa Russ Spaar’s “The Hide-and-Seek Muse” at The Studio in Hartford (3/11 at 6 PM)

Lisa Russ Spaar’s The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry
Prior to WordForge Reading on March 11 (6 p.m.) The Studio @ Billings Forge, 563 Broad St., Hartford CT

Drunken Boat invites you to celebrate the launch of Guggenheim fellow and award-winning poet Lisa Russ Spaar‘s The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, featuring her memorable micro-essays on some of America’s finest poets and the relevance of poetry in contemporary life. As novelist Ann Beattie has said about the book, “for people who are a bit wary of poetry, this is the perfect antidote: the poems are amazing, and so are Lisa Russ Spaar’s short essays in the Hide-and-Seek Muse…. anyone who cares about an inner reality that might be somehow communicated – nailed; set free; amplified; questioned — would embrace the chance to read poems that elucidate so much about the mind and the heart….I loved every minute of reading this book.” The book includes poems by the following poets and Lisa’s essays on them for The Chronicle of Higher Education‘s “Arts &Academe” blog:

Kazim Ali ~ Debra Allbery ~Talvikki Ansel ~ Jennifer Atkinson ~ David Baker ~ Jill Bialosky ~ Suzanne Buffam ~ Jennifer Chang ~ Ye Chun ~ Michael Collier ~ Randall Couch ~ Stephen Cushman ~ Kate Daniels ~ Kyle Dargan ~ Claudia Emerson ~ Monica Ferrell ~ David Francis ~ Gabriel Fried ~ Alice Fulton ~ Rachel Hadas ~ Brenda Hillman – Edward Hirsch ~ Jane Hirshfield ~ Mark Jarman ~ Laura Kasischke ~ Jennifer Key ~ L. S. Klatt ~ Joanna Klink ~ Hank Lazer ~ Paul Legault ~ Willie Lin ~ Maurice Manning ~ Cate Marvin ~ Heather McHugh ~ Erika Meitner ~ Carol Muske-Dukes ~ Amy Newman ~ Meghan O’Rourke ~ Eric Pankey ~ Kiki Petrosino ~ Carl Phillips ~ John Poch ~ Bin Ramke ~ Srikanth Reddy ~ Michael Rutherglen ~ Mary Ann Samyn ~ Philip Schultz ~ Sarah Schweig ~ Allison Seay ~ Ravi Shankar ~ Ron Slate ~ R. T. Smith ~ Larissa Szporluk ~ Mary Szybist ~ Brian Teare ~ William Thompson ~ David Wojahn ~ Charles Wright
 
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