Lisa Robertson (poet)
Encyclopedia
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet
who is best known for a collection a poem entitled The Weather, which was inspired by the shipping forecasts announced on BBC radio. She currently lives in France.
, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing
, which is a non-profit society that offers an alternative to the mainstream pedagogy of most Canadian universities.
She has been integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene and is an honorary board member of Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, Liz Magor, Allyson Clay, Kathy Slade, and Hadley+Maxwell, among others. She has also written on architecture and sites in British Columbia. Robertson contributed the "Beneath the Pavilions" column to Mix from 1997-1999.
She co-edited the poetry journal Raddle Moon with Susan Clark
in Vancouver
, and has worked as an arts journalist
, a book seller, a copy editor, an astrologer
, a guest lecturer
, and an essayist. She has written on the work of Robin Blaser
, Denise Riley
, Dionne Brand
, Peter Culley, Ted Berrigan
, John Clare
, Lorine Niedecker, Pauline Reage, Michele Bernstein and Albertine Sarrazin.
In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize
and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley
. From 2007- 2010 she taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In Fall 2010 she was writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
She intentionally alters her writing style for each book-length work, although tends to not to stray too far from the form of the sentence and the issue of civic referentiality. Robertson refers to pronouns and self-referentiality as masques or puppets.
Many poets and writers have influenced Robertson. She has mentioned Djuna Barnes
, Mina Loy
, the French feminists, Marguerite Duras
, Nicole Brossard
, Erin Mouré
, Gail Scott, Lyn Hejinian
, Susan Howe
, bpNichol
, Steve McCaffery
, and Charles Bernstein
.
. Variously described by others as a collection of poems inspired by BBC
shipping forecasts, Wordsworths's The Prelude
based upon a poetics derived from British meteorology and its importance in contemporary culture and history, Robertson herself suggests "the weather" can refer to culture-specific customs, the problematic concepts of the universal
, sincerity
, friendship
, the constitution of the English subject, and the historical merging of Romantic
conceptions of identity and language.
In preparation for its completion, she researched pastoral poetry, meteorological prose, and Anglo-centric subjectivity, guided by authors like Wordsworth
, Reverend Blomefield, Luke Howard, Thomas Forster, Aikin, Aratus, John Constable, and William Cobbett
.
Canadian poetry
- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...
who is best known for a collection a poem entitled The Weather, which was inspired by the shipping forecasts announced on BBC radio. She currently lives in France.
Life
In 1979, she moved to British ColumbiaBritish Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...
, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing
The Kootenay School of Writing
The Kootenay School of Writing is a Vancouver-based writers' collective.Founded in 1984 after the forced closure of David Thompson University Centre in Nelson, British Columbia KSW relocated to Vancouver to offer inexpensive courses , to sponsor colloquia and critical talks on writing, visual art,...
, which is a non-profit society that offers an alternative to the mainstream pedagogy of most Canadian universities.
She has been integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene and is an honorary board member of Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, Liz Magor, Allyson Clay, Kathy Slade, and Hadley+Maxwell, among others. She has also written on architecture and sites in British Columbia. Robertson contributed the "Beneath the Pavilions" column to Mix from 1997-1999.
She co-edited the poetry journal Raddle Moon with Susan Clark
Susan Clark
Susan Clark is a Canadian actress, possibly best-known for her role as Katherine on the American television sitcom Webster, on which she appeared with her husband, Alex Karras.-Personal life:...
in Vancouver
Vancouver
Vancouver is a coastal seaport city on the mainland of British Columbia, Canada. It is the hub of Greater Vancouver, which, with over 2.3 million residents, is the third most populous metropolitan area in the country,...
, and has worked as an arts journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...
, a book seller, a copy editor, an astrologer
Astrologer
An astrologer practices one or more forms of astrology. Typically an astrologer draws a horoscope for the time of an event, such as a person's birth, and interprets celestial points and their placements at the time of the event to better understand someone, determine the auspiciousness of an...
, a guest lecturer
Lecturer
Lecturer is an academic rank. In the United Kingdom, lecturer is a position at a university or similar institution, often held by academics in their early career stages, who lead research groups and supervise research students, as well as teach...
, and an essayist. She has written on the work of Robin Blaser
Robin Blaser
Robin Francis Blaser was an author and poet in both the United States and Canada.-Personal background:Born in Denver, Colorado, Blaser grew up in Idaho, and came to Berkeley, California, in 1944. There he met Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan, becoming a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance of...
, Denise Riley
Denise Riley
Denise Riley is an English poet and philosopher who began to be published in the 1970s. Her poetry is remarkable for its paradoxical interrogation of selfhood within the lyric mode. Her critical writings on motherhood, women in history, identity, and philosophy of language, are recognised as an...
, Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand
Dionne Brand is a Canadian poet, novelist, essayist and documentarian. She was named Toronto's third Poet Laureate in September 2009.-Biography:...
, Peter Culley, Ted Berrigan
Ted Berrigan
-Early life:Berrigan was born in Providence, Rhode Island, on November 15, 1934. After high school, he spent a year at Providence College before joining the U.S. Army in 1954 to serve in the Korean War. After three years in the Army, he finished his college studies at the University of Tulsa in...
, John Clare
John Clare
John Clare was an English poet, born the son of a farm labourer who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation of its disruption. His poetry underwent a major re-evaluation in the late 20th century and he is often now considered to be among...
, Lorine Niedecker, Pauline Reage, Michele Bernstein and Albertine Sarrazin.
In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize
Griffin Poetry Prize
The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language....
and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley
University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...
. From 2007- 2010 she taught at California College of the Arts in San Francisco. In Fall 2010 she was writer-in-residence at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Work
Her work is a deep questioning of language, history and gender.She intentionally alters her writing style for each book-length work, although tends to not to stray too far from the form of the sentence and the issue of civic referentiality. Robertson refers to pronouns and self-referentiality as masques or puppets.
Many poets and writers have influenced Robertson. She has mentioned Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes
Djuna Barnes was an American writer who played an important part in the development of 20th century English language modernist writing and was one of the key figures in 1920s and '30s bohemian Paris after filling a similar role in the Greenwich Village of the teens...
, Mina Loy
Mina Loy
Mina Loy born Mina Gertrude Löwry was an artist, poet, playwright, novelist, Futurist, actress, Christian Scientist, designer of lamps, and bohemian. She was one of the last of the first generation modernists to achieve posthumous recognition. Her poetry was admired by T. S...
, the French feminists, Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Duras
Marguerite Donnadieu, better known as Marguerite Duras was a French writer and film director.-Background:...
, Nicole Brossard
Nicole Brossard
Nicole Brossard, O.C. is a leading French Canadian formalist poet and novelist.She lives in Outremont, a former city in Montreal, Quebec. She wrote her first collection in 1965, Aube à la maison. The collection L'Echo bouge beau marks a break in the evolution of her poetry...
, Erin Mouré
Erin Mouré
Erin Mouré is a Canadian poet and translator of poetry from languages which include, French, Galician, Portuguese and Spanish to English. Her mother Mary Irene was born 1924 in Galicia, Poland and moved to Canada in 1929. Erin’s father is William Moure born in Ottawa Canada in 1925...
, Gail Scott, Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian
Lyn Hejinian is an American poet, essayist, translator and publisher. She is often associated with the Language poets and is well known for her landmark work My Life , as well as her book of essays, The Language of Inquiry .-Life:Hejinian was born in the San...
, Susan Howe
Susan Howe
Susan Howe is a American poet, scholar, essayist and critic, who has been closely associated with the Language poets, among others poetry movements. Her work is often classified as Postmodern because it expands traditional notions of genre...
, bpNichol
BpNichol
Barrie Phillip Nichol , who often went by his lower-case initials and last name, with no spaces , was a Canadian poet. He became widely known for his concrete poetry while living there in the 1960s...
, Steve McCaffery
Steve McCaffery
Steven McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo . McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Toronto in 1968...
, and Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein
Charles Bernstein is an American poet, theorist, editor, and literary scholar. Bernstein holds the Donald T. Regan Chair in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of the most prominent members of the Language poets . In 2006 he was elected a Fellow of the American...
.
The Weather
One of her best known works, The Weather was written following her six-month Judith E Wilson visiting fellowship at the University of CambridgeUniversity of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
. Variously described by others as a collection of poems inspired by BBC
BBC
The British Broadcasting Corporation is a British public service broadcaster. Its headquarters is at Broadcasting House in the City of Westminster, London. It is the largest broadcaster in the world, with about 23,000 staff...
shipping forecasts, Wordsworths's The Prelude
The Prelude
The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind is an autobiographical, "philosophical" poem in blank verse by the English poet William Wordsworth. Wordsworth wrote the first version of the poem when he was 28, and worked over the rest of it for his long life without publishing it...
based upon a poetics derived from British meteorology and its importance in contemporary culture and history, Robertson herself suggests "the weather" can refer to culture-specific customs, the problematic concepts of the universal
Universal (metaphysics)
In metaphysics, a universal is what particular things have in common, namely characteristics or qualities. In other words, universals are repeatable or recurrent entities that can be instantiated or exemplified by many particular things. For example, suppose there are two chairs in a room, each of...
, sincerity
Sincerity
Sincerity is the virtue of one who speaks and acts truly about his or her own feelings, thoughts, and desires.-Sincerity in Western societies:Sincerity has not been consistently regarded as a virtue in Western culture...
, friendship
Friendship
Friendship is a form of interpersonal relationship generally considered to be closer than association, although there is a range of degrees of intimacy in both friendships and associations. Friendship and association are often thought of as spanning across the same continuum...
, the constitution of the English subject, and the historical merging of Romantic
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...
conceptions of identity and language.
In preparation for its completion, she researched pastoral poetry, meteorological prose, and Anglo-centric subjectivity, guided by authors like Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....
, Reverend Blomefield, Luke Howard, Thomas Forster, Aikin, Aratus, John Constable, and William Cobbett
William Cobbett
William Cobbett was an English pamphleteer, farmer and journalist, who was born in Farnham, Surrey. He believed that reforming Parliament and abolishing the rotten boroughs would help to end the poverty of farm labourers, and he attacked the borough-mongers, sinecurists and "tax-eaters" relentlessly...
.
Selected bibliography
- The Apothecary (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami, 1991; reissued 2001)
- The Barscheit Horse with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart (Hamilton, Ontario: Berkeley Horse, 1993)
- XEclogue II-V (Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993)
- XEclogue (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami Editions 1993, reissued by New Star Books, 1999)
- The Glove: An Essay on Interpretation (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993)
- The Badge (Hamilton, Ontario: The Berkeley Horse/Mindware, 1994)
- Earth Monies (Mission, BC: DARD, 1995)
- The Descent (Buffalo, NY: Meow, 1996)
- Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 1997; UK: Reality Street, 1997)
- Soft Architecture: A Manifesto (Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1999)
- The Weather (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 2001; UK: Reality Street, 2001)
- A Hotel (Vancouver: Vancouver Film School, 2003)
- Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria, OR: Clear Cut Press, 2003)
- Face/ (New York: A Rest Press, 2003)
- Rousseau’s Boat (Vancouver, BC: Nomados, 2004)
- First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant. Belladonna 75. (Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2005)
- The Men: A Lyric Book (Toronto: BookThug, 2006)
- Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House Press, 2009)
- R's Boat (University of California Press, 2010)
Selected Essays
- "Coasting" with Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. Telling it Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace. (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2002)
- "The Weather: A Report on Sincerity," from DC Poetry Anthology 2001.
- "How Pastoral: A Manifesto." A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana SpahrJuliana SpahrJuliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S...
. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994) - "My Eighteeneth Century." Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003)
- "On Palinode." Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)
Selected Interviews and Conversations
- "Correspondence" with Steve McCafferySteve McCafferySteven McCaffery is a Canadian poet and scholar who was a professor at York University. He currently holds the Gray Chair at SUNY Buffalo . McCaffery was born in Sheffield, England and lived in the UK for most of his youth attending University of Hull. He moved to Toronto in 1968...
. Philly Talks #17. (Philadelphia: Kelly Writers House, 2000) - "Lifted" with Kai Fierle-Hedrick. Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)
External links
- Lisa Robertson's piece titled "The Venus Problem"
- Chicago Review special issue (51:4/52:1) on Lisa Robertson (poems, essays, interview)
- Dispatches from the PoetryFoundation.org Journal
- Readings from The Office For Soft Architecture
- Test Reading: from The Men
- Lisa Robertson reads at a Toronto Value Village
- "Mostly Experimental: Recent Writings By and About Contemporary Women Poets & Writers" review of American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, ed. Claudia RankineClaudia RankineClaudia Rankine is an American poet and playwright born in 1963 and raised in Kingston, Jamaica and New York City. She has taught at Case Western Reserve University, Barnard College, University of Georgia, and in the writing program at the University of Houston. As of 2011, Rankine is the Henry G...
and Juliana SpahrJuliana SpahrJuliana Spahr is an American poet, critic, and editor. She is the recipient of the 2009 Hardison Poetry Prize awarded by the Folger Shakespeare Library to honor a U.S...
. - Steve Evans reviews Rousseau’s Boat This piece, titled "Solitary and Free", appeared in "Jacket Magazine", #27 (April 2005)
- "Wooden Houses" poem by Robertson in "Jacket Magazine", #27 (APR 2005)
- Review @ Village Voice: 09/29/06 Alan Gilbert discusses The Men
- Joshua Corey discusses The Men extended piece from the popular weblog Cahiers de Corey
- Conversation review of 'The Men' by Melissa Flores-Bórquez and Edmund Hardy at poetry mag "Intercapillary Space"
See also
- Canadian poetryCanadian poetry- Beginnings:The earliest works of poetry, mainly written by visitors, described the new territories in optimistic terms, mainly targeted at a European audience...