XEclogue

by Lisa Robertson

erotic poetry/prose work

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1993

Reviews

[emily blatta · Rating 4 out of 5]

I feel like if you were to read this out loud in the garden at night, you’d cast a very powerful, very wicked spell.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

From Eclogue One: Honour...

I have felt regret but turn now to the immensity of a rhythm that in the midst of her own mettle was invisible. I'll describe the latinate happiness that appears to me as small tufted syllables in the half-light, greenish and quivering as grasses. Ah, the tidy press of the catalogue, the knotted plantlets of a foiled age, the looming test of our grim diaphany, let me embrace these as the lost term "honour" while I lace this high pink boot I call Felicity.

(Lady M finds her thoughts a little agitated; her sight wanders and is fed by an artificial rudeness whose particular odour floods her mind. It's as if she were dreaming on a bus.)

From Eclogue Two: Beauty...

When I was lounging in the Grove I saw a Vision: it was like a flickering screen reporting a very pleasant history of love, thick-set with trees and starred with flowers and diverse fountains, all belonging to the sweet or to the dangerous affairs of love. I interpreted the image then drew up these two books as my oblivion.

From Eclogue Three: Liberty...

What follows is the interminable journal of culture. This neutral and emotive little words seems, in the operatic dark green woods, so harmless and legal but it's liberty totalized, an incommensurable crime against the girls. To question privilege I'm going to shame this word. I will begin by gathering around my body all the facts, for they affect my person. Consider my feeling of resentment. I could have used it to fortify my courage. But everything was happening very fast and I thought it would be a waste to use it then. Violence and deceit, contempt and envy changed their colour, enclosed our labour. The phantom body now buttresses the vilest swindles with sub-Garbo hauteur. Violence and contempt, deceit and envy, sabotage my method and I learn to love it. I am aware that I bring horror - I embody the problem of the free-rider, inconveniencing the leaf-built, the simple-hearted, the phobic, with the unctuous display of my grief:
[...]

From Eclogue Four: Cathexis...

All the flowers are glass flower and looking into them the

senses would vibrate in a gelatinous thrum. Each leaf's a

sumptuous dervish; hurled from the vasty sun, its fretted

points so hard and bright and tangy, it leaves a feeling of dan-

gling - yet, with an oily ease, fronds like a fern's give hint to

the deep blue minutes the green boys take. The hot dark stip-

pled tints are indefatigably pleasurable and like widows or

hairpins the mitten-shaped leaves are really those pleasures

that do not, like those of the world, disappoint your expecta-

tions. Al these briskly flecked notions sieve through a giddy

tissue, unnatural red and rubbed grainless as if a green touch

had deferred or shucked history.

From Eclogue Five: Fantasy...

I want to tell you about the hegemony of my supple extensions. My pliant starlets float like symptoms. They float int he indicative case, fling accusations, insults, blasphemies and curses. They're cerebral and illegal. They force me to ask - by what aberration do I submit myself to some dead parody of growth, the rotting pastiche of the abject, a morbid inertia? Events congeal into image with no social aggression. The dream-truth is somewhere back in those fake labiate, fitting so tightly your torso feels molded. Sound rushes ahead of the edge of the cut in big nasty syllables. My starlet don't need art and its cheating edifice. They're ham-fisted and redolent. They project their phantasie on my body:

From Eclogue Six: Nostalgia...

(This is how Lady M enters: Sinuously flanked by Roaring Boys who pan her stance with flicks of birch; spouting the nonsense of swans; swagged in the mulberry light; on the moletn silk; flaunting the lovely ambiguity of the word "Grace.")
LADY M Splendid ardour most obviously mine! April is a mere tuck in your shirt.
NANCY You're menacing and delirious. Your face could go back...
LADY M Which brings me irrevocably to the sulking plums: The dusk is a precise record...
NANCY Of the deadly metonymy of your hips.
LADY M I was raised a girl. I found myself my best possession.
NANCY Or looser hip whose elegance ribbons my yard.
LADY M I choose my fate.
NANCY Like those whose phantasies condemn us.

From Eclogue Seven: Exile...

In this allegory, gratitude pays for slim liberties. Nancy was a sufferer among the rest, who afterward ate out their substance. She was thinking in the field of metahysterics, yet talking like a boy. Born an identical twin, Lady M has a particular interest in the way a mass of grim detail pays. She would like to render homage to the cowardice of the mob; better still, to the charge of excess she flaunts the pangs of their dying economy. Lady M mourns the waste of the substance of the world: her virility stems from dragged politics of exile. Stepping from the conventional pieties to the frontier of the resent, she disclaims the sopping glamour of gratitude. Their motto? We expect total acquiescence.

From Eclogue Eight: Romance...

The March trees torch the profligate sky because I say so. A tiny

flapping boy with sullen fits drifts like a sheet of golden lust. In

this Empire of no tense he bullies the dust, he lends the blacik

street a gleaming arch, he flaunts his hidden rope burn like

defeat. So what about his consummate Latinity? He has been

moving in the pale night with the urgent authority of a mean-

ing. The flicked fringe of his anger flatters mangled angels and

he weeps like a twin in the heat. The greenwood never wanted

him, nor the puckered gully he calls thought. A seabird rises

like an angel in the night and shrieks its brackish laughter at his

dream. The swains of justice pinch out the lights - a pronoun's

snout is gentle torture.

From Eclogue Nine: History...

(Knowing memory only bruises the past, Lady M scans the face of a feigned document whose ardent stammer she has already echoed, then languidly rejected.)
NANCY We cannot think tranquility a throne. Yet time extends this barely tolerable pleasure.
LADY M It is a crumb in our syntax.
NANCY We need not inure ourselves to peace and luxury - bu out privilege lies in understanding how the senses detect what is not servitude.
LADY M Who then would write the biography of Boys' desires?
NANCY We ourselves will claim requisite authority.
[...]

From Eclogue Ten: Utopia...

Dear Nancy,
Are these, then, our only choices: to slip away into oblivion, or to be left behind, clinging to dirty ghosts? We must assume otherwise. If, under the cover of coherence, we were to applaud the irretrievable passing of that world through which we thought ourselves to be moving, if we were to reconfigure our grief as a mocking epilogue, to become what we can no longer desire, and among these dispositions, to admit that we have been susceptible to charm and flattery, perhaps then, though hyphenated by doubts, we could jam the grim identifications, the splayed economies, the trussed fusions, and enter into the sibylline promise of a new calendar.
[...]

[Joe]

Marvell (17th C):
from his Utopian poem "The Garden":
Mean while the Mind, from pleasure less,
Withdraws into its happiness:
The Mind, that Ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other Worlds, and other Seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green Thought in a green Shade

see also Spencer "Epithalamion" for a vernal, colonial taking possession of, erasure/annihilation. Emerging theories of genocide--Annihilation! a green Thought in a green Shade! where one passage of Xeclogue took me, w/its evocations of deep history of poetry, powerful rejoinders to. From "Utopia"

"Dear Nancy,

....

When a boy walks into the philosophical, he's on a private earth. He's out of his skin; risk slips into his syntactic cleft then falls out. The private earth dissolves, blooms, contemplates its horizon. The fiction of his belated ground subjects our pleasure to a bitter economy. Liberty stands on this bare, bare, rocky and chilly ground. But what the boy bewails is history." Points to another form of expropriation, an affective-economic one?

[Elizabeth]

I’ve been meaning to read this book since I heard about it during my MFA. It comes up in so many discussions of ecopoetry, nature writing, experimental engagement with the pastoral. The structure and engagement with ideas of the Pastoral, both classical ideas and Romantic ideas, is interesting. Lisa Robertson is multi-valenced. She resists being identified in the text, creating this book as a series of conversations between “Lady M” (based on a real woman whose correspondence was published) and “Nancy.” There are also “The Roaring Boys” and pop culture references. Swerve. Swerve again. What is the role of a poem? Of art? Where do communication and emotion argue? These seem to be the arguments Robertson engages with.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lisa Robertson has redeemed the adjective.

[atito · Rating 4 out of 5]

"you're bound in silver Nancy--now receive delight"

[H · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stunning haunting brilliant ; some part of me won’t be the same

“Are these, then, our only choices: to slip away into oblivion, or to be left behind, clinging to dirty ghosts?”

[Sunblinding · Rating 4 out of 5]

Can't claim to understand half of what the mad lass is going on about, but fuck if I don't love it dearly all the same.

[Michelle Robert]

Read for class

[Jesica · Rating 2 out of 5]

I really truly enjoyed the experimental form and language, but I had a hard time figuring out what was going on. But that isn't going to deter me from reading Lisa's other books. I really enjoy it when poets play/experiment; it's fun to be introduced to a new way of reading a poem, idea, image. I just wish Lisa would have put more anchors in the form, the language so that I could follow along. Maybe in a couple of years I will come back to this book and it will all make sense.

[Rebecca · Rating 5 out of 5]

wow.

[Elizabeth Metzger · Rating 5 out of 5]

currently reading as in over and over and over again. the tops, baby, the tops. read it. seriously.