The Apothecary

by Lisa Robertson

I want an ingenious fibre to be treated as funny tragedy expressing a classic argument against materialism which runs like this: which changes of costume are bound to be dangerous? The Apothecary is an extinct fern called a sentence unfurling in the mists. It is also Lisa Robertson's first book. Originally published in a small edition by Tsunami Editions in Vancouver in 1991, it quietly disappeared until it was re-released in 2001 on a need-to-know-basis. BookThug is now pleased to make this text available in a more permanent and pleasing edition. The Apothecary stems from the author's desire to remake the sentence � to let it be capacious, preposterous, convivial, and hang it from a pronoun worn like a phantom limb. Robertson wants that ghostly pronoun to reinvent itself afresh in each sentence. Looking towards the eighteenth century, sometimes through a lens occasionally borrowed from contemporary sources, the text of The Apothecary is precise, intoxicating materia medica dispensed by one of Canada's most important contemporary posts at the beginning of her career with the use of florid instruments.

Genres: Poetry

40 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 2006

Reviews

[Troy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really don't have the apparatus to read nor know this book/poem.

The book seems to be Lisa Robertson's version of détourned language, but where the Situationists/Letterists were trying to "expose" the logic of capital by chopping up pre-existing "texts", Robertson seems to be chopping up language to expose/explore something else. It's not a cut-up like what Burroughs did, but more a way to bloat language and words until they pop, blossoming into something else. Not like the surrealists who wanted to expose the subconcious, or the dadaists who used similar techniques to mock everything, but Robertson seems to want to do something new, and this poem/book is a guide to what it is she wants to do. But I can't decipher it. It's beyond me.

It's beyond me because it's REALLY dense. More dense than reading Deleuze or any other theory that I've been reading lately, and it's a lot of unpacking of each of her word choices, and desperately trying to construe each endless endless endless adpositional phrase. If I was so inclined, I would make a sentence diagram or parse tree of her poetry and I imagine the result would be more of a scribbled rhizome mess rather than coherent and clear branching tree. And yes, that sounds cool and like something I'd want, but that coupled with the strange use of words means I just read randomized words marching before my eyes.

I read it out loud with a friend (I've been doing that a lot lately) and neither one of us could get it. (However, my friend had a literal and idiosyncratic reading that didn't seem right to me.) Lately, I've learned that if I'm having problems with poetry it will usually make sense once I read it aloud, but not in this case. I mean, you can just read it as pretty phrases; as a sing-song Lewis Carroll riff, where you know Carroll is elucidating some logic or math problem, but you can just read it for, well, the poetry, fully ignorant of whatever point he's trying to get across.

But let me show you what I'm talking about (chosen at random):

I have linked milkiness to the mediation of status
gurgling in order to mimic the span of a tenuous clock
and I know that to grant recluse is comical until a
landscape remains unseen.

See? This one isn't as dense as the others and the prepositional phrases aren't as out of control, but what is it? She has linked milkiness to mediation of status? What is a "mediation of status"? How do you link milkiness? She gurgles to mimic the off movements of a clock? How to you "grant recluse"? How is granting recluse "comical until a landscape remains unseen"?

Maybe this is a five star book, but it's not the rupture with language I need to pull a Ramones and go start my own damned poetry.

[Thoth Harris · Rating 1 out of 5]

Appallingly pretentious, culturally vandalizing rubbish.

I usually say that postmodernism has some use -- when it comes to aesthetics. But not in the case of works like this, that despise meaning, any connection with meaning. Products like this only gain certain amounts of small popularity because everyone in their circle pretends they “understand” it. Nobody truly enjoys this stuff.

[⏺ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really interesting to read the start of her tone and writing, which was finetuned over the years. Here the Stein influence is more evident, and the language is overwrought less effortlessly. The overall content is almost inscrutable, especially in the first, larger section, but smaller parts of sentences are very interesting and communicative nonetheless.

[H]

“I am at the beck of the dismissal of a floral inhibition, hanging shrewdness in my apartment like an hourglass and I find that isolation douses the parasitic practice of rudeness I recognized little by little in my anorexic kitchen” (15)