Lisa Robertson (poet)

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For other persons of the same name, see Lisa Robertson.

Lisa Robertson (born in 1961 in Toronto) is a Canadian poet who currently lives in France.

Contents

[edit] Life

In 1979, she moved to British Columbia, 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.

Although it is not necessarily acknowledged as much as her ties to The Kootenay School of Writing, she is integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene. Robertson was a member of the Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, and Billy Haines, among others. She has also written on architecture, as well as sites in British Columbia, such as New Brighton Park and Value Village. Robertson contributed to the "Beneath the Pavilions" column in 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 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, and Albertine Sarrazin.

In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize. Robertson is currently Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley.

[edit] Work

Her work is a deep questioning of language, history and gender that can help a reader to feel the world as constructed by words in new ways, sometimes uncomfortable, often beautiful often ugly.

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 Moure, Gail Scott, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and Charles Bernstein.

[edit] 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 Cambridge. 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 metereology 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, metereological prose, and Anglo-centric subjectivity, guided by authors like Wordsworth, Reverend Blomefield, Luke Howard, Thomas Forster, Aikin, Aratus, John Constable, and William Cobbett.

[edit] 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 Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Vancouver, BC: 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)

[edit] Selected Essays

  • "Coasting" with Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994)
  • "The Weather: A Report on Sincerity." DC Poetry Anthology 2001. [1]
  • "How Pastoral." Telling it Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace. (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2002)
  • "My Eighteeneth Century." Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003)
  • "On Palinode." Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)

[edit] Selected Interviews and Conversations

[edit] References

    [edit] Notes

    1. ^ Link here for this text on-line

    [edit] External links

    [edit] See also

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