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3 Summers
Recite your poem to your aunt.
I threw myself to the ground.
Where were you in the night?
In a school among the pines.
What was the meaning of the dream?
Organs, hormones, toxins, what is a body? In 3 Summers , Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.
‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’— The New York Times
‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village Voice
Lisa Robertson 's books include Cinema of the Present , An Epic , The Men , The Weather , R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture . Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.
I threw myself to the ground.
Where were you in the night?
In a school among the pines.
What was the meaning of the dream?
Organs, hormones, toxins, what is a body? In 3 Summers , Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The 10 poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices — Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras — in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time — embodied here in Lisa Robertson’s forceful cadences — can tell.
‘Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy. . . . Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt. . . . She wields language expertly, even beautifully.’— The New York Times
‘Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.’— The Village Voice
Lisa Robertson 's books include Cinema of the Present , An Epic , The Men , The Weather , R's Boat and Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture . Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip was named one of The New York Times' 100 Notable Books. She lives in France.
- GenresPoetry
120 pages, Paperback
Published October 18, 2016
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149 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews
December 21, 2016
Discovered that I can't read Lisa Robertson without writing, and I actually can't read Lisa Robertson unless I'm writing.
February 12, 2021
I'm screaming at my past self, three stars? babe...
January 17, 2022
3 Summers is divided into eleven parts: "The Seam", "Toxins", "On Form", "On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next", "The Middle", "A Coat", "Rivers", "Party", "Third Summer", "An Awning", and "Rose".
From "The Seam"...
From "Toxins"...
From "On Form"...
From "On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next"...
From "The Middle"...
From "A Coat"...
From "Rivers"...
From "Party"...
From "Third Summer"...
From "An Awning"...
From "The Seam"...
To have a bath, to write in bed in a hotel
so obvious and so easy
an entire day till the light starts to fade
to arrive at the long duration of an instability.
How to walk with this till the end
speak its tongue like a guest
at the discontinuous table
my hands shake
lilacs are everywhere- pg. 15
From "Toxins"...
Now, the glorious suture or the
philosophy of the tree. The tree doesn't 'have'
'a body.' This means that when it comes to
the need for changing, the tree just waits. It
takes all my art to live beside a tree
with uncaused devotion and the
abandonment of determinism and
I am sad.- pg. 23
From "On Form"...
You could say that form is learning
you can see form take shape
at the coronal suture's first arcade
it's explaining it's appearing
unestranged from enormity's
prick of a spiny plant like a rose
experimenting it's bursting and
usually it's repeating why is form
a dog is a horse as a deer as a
fish and a bramble a grater rapacious
the second cervical vertabra is
repeating is a question we can
ask with our bodies and what is
a tooth coccyx is the beak of an ancient
dove below the sacrum the tip of
[...]- pg. 32
From "On Physical Real Beginning and What Happens Next"...
Cognition in the room
felt like sensuous human activity
real sensuous activity as such
and natality's ornate
quiescence tied to fear's
superb circumference at
home in the dominant expressive
housekeeping of the street
a composition is set in motion.
Unmotivated by any bodily movement
Marx finds in Lucretius the defiant probability.
The I-speaker
on her silken rupture
spills into history.- pg. 44
From "The Middle"...
I had thought
to be a woman breathing
through the door of my body
I would begin to bark
so as to violate my preferences.
I began to bark through the door of my body.
Its future's untenable.
ow I have extra organs.
I got lost here to transform myself.- pg. 54
From "A Coat"...
dozens of watches
yards of linen
tons of iron
bootpolish silk or gold
a table a house a piece of yarn
a coat and ten yards of linen
iron linen corn
twenty yards of linen and one coat
the value of the linen and the value of the coat
the coat is directly the linen
such as linen brings to viewfor Stacy Doris, - pg. 74
From "Rivers"...
People who love art
what so you so if you're afraid?
Women who're making
branch of wildrose
to give some anonymity to the present
with your brains and your desire
not near humans
you are worthy of geometry- pg. 87
From "Party"...
To have a form of existence to come
towards the world to be avid
with disorder in not resembling
the idea of the world a father
evil pardon sadness night obscenity
to be politics hurts- pg. 92
From "Third Summer"...
My basic weakness prevails rigorously
I dream the following
is there an ironic cosmology?
separately from this - the idea of an administrative néant
the scale of the trees establishes an authority
beyond which all the tiny players
narrowly avoid fatal incidents
(it is always summer in Poussin)
the mistakes I made about solitude
won't change quickly
the passions are elements in this vision
an old tired rivergod observes but can no longer act
his is just one of several simultaneous provincial scenes
featuring also the dog who would only eat cake- pg. 96
From "An Awning"...
We're essentially tent-stained.
Palpably sparkly.
Reflection, opacity and fraudulence join in our mouths.
Begin the play.
[Glorious ignorance soaks the whole scene.]
Look at the effect produced by the yellow, red and green awnings
suspended over a vast theatre.
It's intrinsically rippling.
Take everything lustrous into this tent:
Collaborative fruiting!
Smooth and naked constellations!
Whole seas of fleets!
Shininess of Art!
Dresses!
Holy fakes!
All the money!
Then spawn each category of light-craving arrival.
This is often done by yellow and red and purple awnings, when
outspread above faces.
Their definitely curiously resplendent insouciant protestation.
[Here tone is a humour in the pagan sense.]for Hadley Howes, - pg. 104
March 30, 2017
Always good, but I'll be honest, for some reason around Nilling I stopped reading these quite as closely.
December 3, 2024
I've read this twice – two Junes five years apart. (In this season, at 10pm in Edinburgh, the light is most rose.)
October 5, 2018
from prairiefire.ca. Reviewed by Dr. Ryan J. Cox.
In her latest poetry collection, 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson manages something exciting: she captures the visceral quality of embodiment—and its corollaries like desire and materiality—while offering those experiences to reader through the meditative filters of language.In Robertson’s poems, the body is something lived in and something thought about simultaneously, and is further linked with the contouring structures of language and discourse. 3 Summers is an exciting book because it represents an embodied poetics, that feeling that “[w]e were always running away from our bodies and then we weren’t” (28).
This sense of the body is present from the beginning of the book. The opening lines of “The Seams,” the poem that opens the collection, grounds the reader in a particular body in a particular moment: “4:16 in the afternoon in the summer of my 52nd year/ I’m lying on the bed in the heat wondering about geometry/ as the deafening uninterrupted volume of desire/ bellows, roars mournfully, laments/ like a starling that has flown into glass” (10). The specificity of the first line situates and grounds the image in a comprehensible space while the second bridges the sensual quality of the heat with abstraction of geometry. Abstract or analytical thought happens in a body and always happens in a body. What may be the most important part of this passage, however, is the invocation of desire. Throughout the book, Robertson evokes desire, but, as is the case here, does not necessarily resolve it. It remains a constant force, but these aren’t love poems and there is no reason to seek relief from desire. The significance of the reoccurring fly that crawls along the page of a book, whose presence causes the pages to quaver, is that it connects “The Seams” with Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems where the speaker observes two flies making love on the ceiling, In Webb’s poem, the pleasure of the text is not necessarily in the expression of desire and the lover’s embrace, but in the chaos of wanting, the recurring and visceral desire for the absent. Desire foregrounds the body, it is strange and awkward and exciting for those very reasons. Robertson’s use of unresolved desire—like Webb’s—does not explain the body, but describes it. As she writes in “The Middle,” “Next I realize that all along it’s been my body/ that I don’t understand./ I just have to describe what it means/ supernatural, negative and sexual/ and blooming on one side. It’s fierce and then/ it’s tired” (62). The body is discernable, it can be described through the senses or the wants of desire, but it resists complete understanding. The body in Robertson’s poems is knowable but resists reduction to thingness. This is what makes it productive space for this book.
3 Summers is an exciting book to read. The text is littered with beautiful Steinian flourishes. The quality of language in this book alone is worth the price of entry, however, what makes this book is Robertson’s approach to the subject matter. As a book length work of experimental Canadian poetry that considers the body, it calls to mind bpNichol’s posthumous organ music. While organ music is a fascinating and beautiful book—its opening line is among the best written by a Canadian—3 Summers is more fully realized as Robertson isn’t synecdochal and remains fully present. Robertson’s book lingers with you after you read it, never fully finished with you. This is perhaps the best reason to read it.
In her latest poetry collection, 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson manages something exciting: she captures the visceral quality of embodiment—and its corollaries like desire and materiality—while offering those experiences to reader through the meditative filters of language.In Robertson’s poems, the body is something lived in and something thought about simultaneously, and is further linked with the contouring structures of language and discourse. 3 Summers is an exciting book because it represents an embodied poetics, that feeling that “[w]e were always running away from our bodies and then we weren’t” (28).
This sense of the body is present from the beginning of the book. The opening lines of “The Seams,” the poem that opens the collection, grounds the reader in a particular body in a particular moment: “4:16 in the afternoon in the summer of my 52nd year/ I’m lying on the bed in the heat wondering about geometry/ as the deafening uninterrupted volume of desire/ bellows, roars mournfully, laments/ like a starling that has flown into glass” (10). The specificity of the first line situates and grounds the image in a comprehensible space while the second bridges the sensual quality of the heat with abstraction of geometry. Abstract or analytical thought happens in a body and always happens in a body. What may be the most important part of this passage, however, is the invocation of desire. Throughout the book, Robertson evokes desire, but, as is the case here, does not necessarily resolve it. It remains a constant force, but these aren’t love poems and there is no reason to seek relief from desire. The significance of the reoccurring fly that crawls along the page of a book, whose presence causes the pages to quaver, is that it connects “The Seams” with Phyllis Webb’s Naked Poems where the speaker observes two flies making love on the ceiling, In Webb’s poem, the pleasure of the text is not necessarily in the expression of desire and the lover’s embrace, but in the chaos of wanting, the recurring and visceral desire for the absent. Desire foregrounds the body, it is strange and awkward and exciting for those very reasons. Robertson’s use of unresolved desire—like Webb’s—does not explain the body, but describes it. As she writes in “The Middle,” “Next I realize that all along it’s been my body/ that I don’t understand./ I just have to describe what it means/ supernatural, negative and sexual/ and blooming on one side. It’s fierce and then/ it’s tired” (62). The body is discernable, it can be described through the senses or the wants of desire, but it resists complete understanding. The body in Robertson’s poems is knowable but resists reduction to thingness. This is what makes it productive space for this book.
3 Summers is an exciting book to read. The text is littered with beautiful Steinian flourishes. The quality of language in this book alone is worth the price of entry, however, what makes this book is Robertson’s approach to the subject matter. As a book length work of experimental Canadian poetry that considers the body, it calls to mind bpNichol’s posthumous organ music. While organ music is a fascinating and beautiful book—its opening line is among the best written by a Canadian—3 Summers is more fully realized as Robertson isn’t synecdochal and remains fully present. Robertson’s book lingers with you after you read it, never fully finished with you. This is perhaps the best reason to read it.
July 22, 2022
i borrowed this book from Smári at Hybrida in the middle of nowhere Sweden. i read it one time and felt it was so simple
we were in the countryside but couldn’t sit on the grass for fear of ticks
i read it again a few days later and found some little flowers of insight. mostly that poetry can be so simple, can be notes from a life, nothing special. one night Gediminas and i saw deer running across the field and into the forest after we’d been to the lake to watch the sun never set
3 Summers felt a bit like that
we were in the countryside but couldn’t sit on the grass for fear of ticks
i read it again a few days later and found some little flowers of insight. mostly that poetry can be so simple, can be notes from a life, nothing special. one night Gediminas and i saw deer running across the field and into the forest after we’d been to the lake to watch the sun never set
3 Summers felt a bit like that
June 28, 2017
Light is the actualization of transparency, seems an apt insight for this volume.
I found myself out of my depth at times, but always somehow found my way back to the deeper implications submerged in the text.
'On Form' was a particularly disorienting poem, a stream of overlapping and extended metaphors for embodiment. 'Third summer' a dizzying dream of bodily perceptions.
I could read this a hundred times, and hopefully each time return enlightened.
I found myself out of my depth at times, but always somehow found my way back to the deeper implications submerged in the text.
'On Form' was a particularly disorienting poem, a stream of overlapping and extended metaphors for embodiment. 'Third summer' a dizzying dream of bodily perceptions.
I could read this a hundred times, and hopefully each time return enlightened.
September 5, 2017
This book took a huge risk in styling its content as extended poems on various themes from nature to reminiscing about summer. While I sticky-noted many individual lines and plan to use many of them as epithets in my own poetry, too many poems lost my interest with confusing syntax, abstract musings, and irregular grammar. For those of you who loved it, right on!
March 11, 2023
Like an abstract collage of words, "3 Summers" is experimental pulling concepts and ideas from ancient philosophers and old texts. Lots of references to form, time, body, trees, souls, shapes, hormones. Call it mind-bending! Or if I may quote the poet from one of her poems, "I call this the immaterial material."
July 24, 2023
I start a school called how can I live.
In my school called how can I live
in my theory of appearing
I lay out my costume.
We don't belong to culture. We're sunsets.
We simplify thought
until it resembles
stripes.
Our skin itches.
I beg you - show me something unknowable.
In my school called how can I live
in my theory of appearing
I lay out my costume.
We don't belong to culture. We're sunsets.
We simplify thought
until it resembles
stripes.
Our skin itches.
I beg you - show me something unknowable.
November 3, 2017
My review of this book in Artforum: https://www.artforum.com/inprint/issu...
May 30, 2022
Sometimes I need a record
Knowing it doesn’t matter
And sometimes I need
A flower machine
Knowing it doesn’t matter
And sometimes I need
A flower machine
June 17, 2022
How can we kiss and think????
July 12, 2022
Bay life
July 22, 2022
the Great Health confected with the help of the new spectacles would, if it were a scent, have a base note of decay, as do all the greatest perfumes (!!)
August 6, 2024
in summer empire will fall
Displaying 1 - 17 of 17 reviews