Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

by Lisa Robertson

A New York Times Notable Book of 2010

Verses, essays, confessions, reports, translations, drafts, treatises, laments and utopias, 1995–2007. Collected by Elisa Sampedrin.

Lisa Robertson writes poems that mine the past — its ideas, its personages, its syntax — to construct a lexicon of the future. Her poems both court and cuckold subjectivity by unmasking its fundament of sex and hesitancy, the coil of doubt in its certitude. Reading her laments and utopias, we realize that language — whiplike — casts ahead of itself a fortuitous form. The form brims here pleasurably with dogs, movie stars, broths, painting's detritus, Latin and pillage. Erudite and startling, the poems in Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip, occasional works written over the past fifteen years, turn vestige into architecture, chagrin into resplendence. In them, we recognize our grand, saddened century.

Genres: Poetry, Female Authors

104 pages, Paperback

First published April 14, 2005

Reviews

[Laura]

it's hard to believe that there's enough room on any pages in the world for all this complicated sad fragmented sensual loveliness.

[James Murphy]

Phooey. I blame myself when I fail to connect to a book or author, poet. In this case Lisa Robertson has done her work, but I fail to get it. These poems are so obscure and difficult I have trouble finding allusion and experience enough to relate to them. I'm overwhelmed. At the end are 4 prose poems she calls essays; it's only there that I begin to find myself on solid ground. But then on the last page was something I thought lovely, a little untitled poem in which she likens poetry to a transcendant upward motion against all physical laws, so that it becomes not motion at all. Unfortunately, in the pages before this I was unable to overcome the resistance of atoms she writes about here and so couldn't achieve that motion. I'll try this book again next year, but for now it's my bad.

[Elizabeth Metzger]

(Another version of the same beginning is simpler and more direct: in the long science of submission it is the mind that, quietly spectacular, unhooks the bodies and opens the face.)

my fidelity is my own disaster.

[Christine]

Magnificent! The way her writing incorporates feminism with the continual fragmentation of the gendered-self is rattling, revealing passages in the body that I never even knew existed. Robertson's strongest work yet.

[Emma]

“This is the topic we discussed in your kitchen this winter.
I said I didn't know what thinking is.
You said you were trying to understand your sense of an inner voice, which was separate from thinking.
I didn't understand.
Ilet myself go blank.”

[Elisabeth]

"Equipped with such formidable mortality
whatever style I choose operates in me like a sky--
it passes and changes and persists and I possess nothing
but the sum of naming, curious and
frantic."

[Zoe]

i was giddy chuckling and kicking my feet while reading this. felt close to my reading experience of kevin killian. had to text nao and claire lots of lines from it bc they were so silly &smart. SO GOOD.

BEST PART. of reading it was lowkey picking up my paris immediately after and being shocked on pg 11 to the point of jolting in bed when i discovered a thread of SEQUIN THEORY. on pg 89 of magenta soul whip, lisa robertson writes, "from an interior space we heard the word sequin repeating in relation to leaves and the image was yellow-gold leaves moving on dark water." well get this because pg 11 of my paris says: "leaves along street turning up little gold sequins in the setting sun...we pausing to watch sunset. little gold-tipped brown ripples. endlessly reproduced in cinema. brown light seeping up between leafy banks of seine." and in me and claire's long poem that preceded my paris (a la the baudelaire fractal 🤯), it says, "....." [claire let's write something about sequins rq]

well anyway it's just so cool to see authors speaking to and about each other!!! the paved road of language!! a connective force!!! we are all appropriating and talking over each other and into each other's brains! gail scott is right: "full lips smiling. pleasure!"

other quotes i liked:

- "in young women enamoured of their own intensities the latin element wells up and knits from lust the pelt on the wall that's ocelot or shadepelt or the imagination of matter. nothing's frugal"
- "i believe my critique of devastation / began with delight. now what surprises me / are the folds in political desire / their fragile nobility, Sundays of / rain. listening to music, things pass. / i cry softly thinking of friendships then / begin again to invent the line of / my life amidst utopia" <333333 speaking to sooo many things in my life esp the first part thinking of convos with emma about fetishization/defanging of utopia
- "my own ignorance has to do with / this luminous pocket i've arrived in / as through a secret knothole"

and here's more sequin theory:

"we had undergone an influence of death which was itself imprinted on such a moving sequin: the breath sequins, the heartbeat sequins, the organs and their slowing articulation sequins which drifting from the foreground appear to dim since they gradually go out to illuminate some event so distant we will enver own the moment of its perception"

also what is Commodious. i like it

[Arun]

Collected by Lisa Robertson's editor Elisa Sampedrin, this book spans essays, laments, translations, philosophical fragments, and poems written between 1995 and 2007. The lines unfurl—some tailored in Latin, some in Epicurean fragments, others in the syntax of appetite, desire, gender, melancholy, ornament. I'm still heavily moved by Robertson's 'The Baudelaire Fractal' which I finished this July, yet I found this earlier work sharper-edged, wilder in form, and somehow even more porous. I expected something quieter, but I was instead met with a kind of intellectual heat, kind of perfect for this summer. There were some Latin phrases I didn't understand (and didn't need to, necessarily) and at least fifty words I had to look up to know their definitions (I feel like my vocabulary expanded enormously). Despite this, I know her language is so full of feeling that it vibrates. Robertson constructs a textual space in which prose and critical inquiry coexist. Poetic language functions as a philosophical medium, and epistemology is inseparable from aesthetics. She aligns herself with Lucretian atomism and Epicurean thought, not only through direct reference but in the compositional logic of the work itself.

[ItsMe ButNot]

I'm whipped up by this. I hope she never stops writing poetry. This is her 'most like an epic' to date.

[Mary Kathryn]

Haters will call this book pretentious, but it's a deeply satisfying, sexy, workout for the mind book of feminist poetry. She nails it with her couplet "Utopia is so emotional./ Then we get used to it." How long does it take before paradise dulls? "Draft of a Voice-Over for Split-Screen Video Loop" is esp. seditious. Brainy girls will cheer her on as she challenges us to resist the temptation of the feminine as decoration, mystery and emotion: "It is not our purpose to obscure the song of no-knowledge."

[Karen Lepri]

This book is an amazing exercise in intellectual rhetoric via poetry--perhaps a nod to the Romans or a life-ring thrown to a drowning (morphing?) language at sea in today's media-laden, digi-textual, post-document (?)world. References to Romanticism, Ancient Greeks, and more abound amidst a cadence and diction determined to redirect your attention, save you from the depths of pretty lyricism, and maybe make you learn something (Google is useful for decoding certain references!)

[Carrie]

underlining like mad.

[Peaches]

I've been in love with this book since I started reading it in Fall of 2018. It is a spectacular and unique book full action and truths. I waited so long to finish it because it exploded my understanding of what a poem could be and I didn't want it to end.
Magenta Soul Whip is my absolutely favorite book title. What Lisa Robertson embodies in her writing is sticky, scholarly, humorous and heartbreaking. One of my favorite books, with poems I will forever be reading. Particularly, "After Trees" & "Wooden Houses." A very special writer! Let the confusion, and the detail wash over you.

[Will Quabbit]

Magnetic and musical. I don't particularly have comments on the "content", as in whether there are any ideas or philosophies in the conventional sense. But I love Robertson's music, which takes the language of intellectuality as its material and runs with it. The speaker feels magnanimous, the words charged with urgency, but lightness and humor undergird the whole thing. Each line has a transparency that still manages to - almost - resist the intelligence. There aren't fussy poeticisms or irritatingly opaque strains towards profundity. Rereadable and enchanting.

[t.a.]

From 'The Stricture'

‘This is wrong’
‘This is beautiful’
‘This is social’
‘This is not thinking’

It is the handiwork of appearing only.

This is the topic we discussed in your kitchen this winter.
I said I didn’t know what thinking is.
You said you were trying to understand your sense of an
inner voice, which was separate from thinking.

I didn’t understand.
I let myself go blank.

I began by taking everything that was doubtful and throwing
it out, like sand.

[Trinity Hannah]

One of my very favorite collections of poetry. Lisa Robertson is so keen and fierce in her use of language—there’s something really illuminating and generative about her poetics that opens up worlds of meaning. So good!

[marianne]

maybe was too conceptual for me,,, in the sense that there was very little concrete imagery or language,, but the words were pretty and rhythmic and some lines landed with a lovely shock ! i think maybe it just wasn't for me,,, her writing is wonderful i just might not b smart enough to understand

[atito]

now this was wild and also wow

[Caitlin Golding]

"I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger."

[Blake Levario]

Lisa is so good.

"Your failures are no longer sacred."

[Mic Jones]

I will be re reading this book always

[Kelsie Conley]

i finished this then read it again

[Bill Brydon]

Lisa writes with strength and confidence
“One animal says to another animal it is not safe you must not return I love you. Another says to her sister animal when you go you will never return then she dies in a camp. Another is a child and she stops living because of deceit. The animals in their velvety dressing gowns have thought bubbles. They break the incest taboo during a long cruel close-up and you can’t help but watch.”
Also the entire Essay on Lust is in my quotes

[H]

So delightful & heady & inspiring & singular

Sometimes you find a book that just clicks in w the neuroses/ patternings of your own syntax… this is definitely one of those for me. While still existing in a space that leaves me intrigued/ seeking deeper understanding. I’ll have to read many times to keep grasping. Really really masterful.

“So long
Figtree
Especially”

“My Fidelity is My Own Disaster”

[Ryan]

Within my own limited reading habits I can't think of anyone who writes like Lisa Robertson, and whose mind, in their writing, I love as much. Perpetually astonished.

And the object itself, (dear Coach House) is something everyone should want desperately.

[Opal McCarthy]

"A young girl slept under/ the opening fingers. But what can we/ keep. All night they sleep. We launch into rest/ and the flames burn through/ alone in its clearing. The brave thing would be/ to sleep in a hut again, dawn to nervy/ dark, studying/ the ground."

[Dusie Press]

I haven't even finished it yet, but this is a definite writerly-changing experience! I now need to find every bk she has ever written and reexperience them all!

[Theodora Danylevich]

oh. my. what a supremely sexy book. on so many levels.

(reading still in progress)

[Abraham]

so far: incomprehensible with notes of genius

[Tiffany]

holy sh*t.