R's Boat

by Lisa Robertson

I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple.
Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment.
Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses.
The boldly original Canadian poet Lisa Robertson has received high praise for the uncompromising intelligence and style of her poetry. In R's Boat, she brings us to the crossroads of poetry, theory, the body, and cultural criticism. These poems bring fresh vehemence to Robertson's ongoing examination of the changing shape of feminism, the male-dominated philosophical tradition, the daily forms of discourse, and the possibilities of language itself.
Praise for Lisa Robertson's The Men:
"In The Men, as in much of her work, Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture."-Village Voice
"Robertson writes both from within and against the tradition-splitting, seeding, and suturing the cracks in each ideational edifice. . . . Her occupations with past forms lead not to a backward-looking poetry but forward to a fresh field of inquiry, an imaginatively created utopia."-Boston Review

Genres: Poetry, Canada

96 pages, Hardcover

First published April 2, 2010

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

R's Boat is divided into six parts: "Face", "Of Mechanics in Rousseau's Thought", "The Present", "A Cuff", "Utopia", and "Palinode"...

from "Face"...

A man's muteness runs through this riot that is my sentence.

I am concerned here with the face and hands and snout.

All surface stream dark circumstance of utterance.

What can I escape?

Am I also trying to return?

Not the private bucket, not the 7,000 griefs in the bucket of each cold clammy word.

But just as strongly I willed myself towards this neutrality.

I have not loved enough or worked.

What I want to do here is infiltrate sincerity.

I must speak of what actually happens.

Could it be terrible then?

I find abstraction in monotony, only an object, falling.

Gradually the tree came to speak to me.

I heard two centuries of assonance, and then rhyme.

Had I the choice again, I'd enter whole climates superbly indifferent to abstraction.

I saw amazing systems that immediately buckled.

Here I make delicate reference to the Italian goddess Cardea who shuts what is open and opens what is shut.

I conceive of an organ slightly larger than skin, a structure of inhuman love minus nostalgia or time.

Honeysuckle, elder, moss, followed one another like a sequence of phrases in a sentence, distinct, yet contributing successively to an ambience that for the sake of convenience I will call the present.

I experienced a transitive sensation to the left of my mind.

I am concerned here with the face and hands and snout.

[...]

from "Of Mechanics in Rousseau's Thought"...

The women is itself not a content

It is an unwavering faith in the fictional

Because they don't exist

This work was made under the auspices of opulence

In incandescent occidental forest

In soft pale-green medium-sized notebook

(titled Many Notes Towards an Essay on Girls, Girlhood)

In the coolness descending from trees at night

Mainly I wanted the phoneme to spread around me like a sea

I walked beside the absence of

Then one had encountered oneself by leaving

And this posed the basis of a rhythm


As for the theology of certainty

The wrongness is philosophical.

[...]

from "The Present"...

You step from the bus into a sequencing took that is moist and carries the scent of quince

You move among the eight banner-like elements and continue to the edges of either an object or a convention

And in Cascadia also

As in the first line of a nursery rhyme

Against cyclic hum of the heating apparatus

You're resinous with falsity


It's autumn

Which might be tent-scented or plant-scented

Their lands and goods, their budgets and gastronomy quicken

You want to enter into the humility of limitations

Coupled with exquisite excess

You walk in the green park at twilight

You read Lucretius to take yourself toward death, through streets and markets

In a discontinuous laboratory towards foreignness

You bring his prosody into your mouth

When you hear the sound of paper

[...]

from "A Cuff"...

It is always the wrong linguistic moment

So how can I speak of sex?

One's own places realism in doubt

But now I want only the discretion of realism

I can't say it any more clearly than this


Philosophers taught me a conversion narrative

How the 4 elements change into each other by flattering

I think of them or meet with them in reading

On Oct. 2 showing their vanity and falsehood

With the frontispiece of him in laurel-crown


The room runs to swags

And popular flower pornography

The house amplifies the trembling as if its inhabitants are lodged in an ear

To make something from what I am

From proximity, bitterness

Is just brutal

So I turned to syllables


And if I degenerate into style

It's because I love it very much

All week long

Like a first thing

Like a technique or a marriage

Where conditions are incomprehensible

Thus satisfying the narrative of the body

Intentionally tawdry and valueless

And this is a recurrent pleasure

Because it gushes it's painterly

[...]

from "Utopia"...

In the Spring of 1979

Some images have meanings, and some have a change in soul, sex or century.

Rain buckles into my mouth.

If pressed to account for strangeness and resistance, I can't.

I'm speaking here for dogs and rusting ducts venting steam into rain.

I wanted to study the ground, the soft ruins of paper and the rustling things.

I discover a tenuous utopia made from steel, wooden chairs, glass, stone, metal bed frames, tapestry, bones, prosthetic legs, hair, shirt cuffs, nylon, plaster figurines, perfume bottles and keys.

I am confusing art and decay.

Elsewhere, fiction is an activity like walking.

Any girl who reads is already a lost girl.

[...]

from "Palinode"...

Though my object is history, not neutrality
I am prepared to adhere to neither extreme

That which can no longer be assumed in consciousness becomes insolvent
Because it doesn't finish I can be present

So I decide to speak of myself, having witnessed sound go out
Fear is not harmful, bu illuminates the mouth

I am not qualified to comment on the origins of the shapes
The archive pivots on a complicity neither denial nor analysis can efface

It is not true, it shines from your face
Against the hot sun that hits us, nothing's peace

And pairs cannot absorb one another in meaning effects
Go backward and forward and there is no place

This is the border - nothing further must happen
The spurious clacking of grass is a dry spell in though but not abstract

Just as in dreams there is no limit to further over-determination
I do not wish to enter into that discussion

Memory's not praise or doubt
It is not a substitution, since there is no prior point

There is no limit to its capacity, nothing that it shall not create
I do not in any way wish to escape.

[...]

[Nikki · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrative, aphorisms, daily affirmations, sentence structure, repetition, silence, gender, language, form, abstraction, dialogue.

[Phoebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

memory and ego! interference! deep in beauty, of course.

[Carrie Lorig · Rating 5 out of 5]

i am a pop star and this is how i feel

[Sabelka · Rating 4 out of 5]

"(...) I wished to pass scrupulously through myself
With subtle stamina."


"I had insisted on my body's joy and little else.
I will not remember, only transcribe.
This is the first time I've really wanted to be accurate."


"Mainly I wanted to traverse a failure
(...) As for the theology of certainty
The wrongness is philosophical."


"I wanted to make something free
The streets helped me see
How it is that I am soldiered
With political bestiality of each era."


"So I pass from institution to intuition."


"The idea of the indexical
Is pleasantly estranged, dissolved
In the memory of matter"


"Because of my body
In the absence of a system"


"The effect of the downflowing pattern of shade on the wall was liquid, so
the wall became a slow fountain in afternoon.
Our fears opened inwards."


"I wanted language to be a vulnerable and exact instrument of glass, pressures and chemicals.
It has provided us with a cry but explains nothing.
I understand passivity."


"I wanted narrative to be a picture of distances ringed in purple.
Then I wanted it to be electronic fields exempt from sentiment.
Then I wanted it to be the patient elaboration of my senses.
Both are mixtures of enigma and proof."


"It was more an undulation than an object,
more a gesture than a weight."


"It has to do with light, the way light folds on things, the way light folds on
my point of view.
I was timid in the visual, so I came to utterance —rhythm and subjectivity
that is.
Into dirt, into earth or whatever.
How do you tread into the world?
(...) Splendid and slow, a waft of dark inwardness surrenders to a system."


"And if I become unintelligible to myself
Because of having refused to need
I transcribe a substitution
To lose the unattainable.
Like the negligent fall of a scarf
Now I occupy the design."

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

We would all like to be able to write this way, "The idea of the indexical | is pleasantly estranged in the memory of matter," but this time out I prefer it when the subject is actually Rousseau.

[tayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

my poet mother :)

[Jared Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like delicate men in positions of power

They want the mental idea of the perfect plant

[Jane Freiman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved, especially “Utopia.” Parts are very similar in form to Cinema of the Present

[Luigi Sposato · Rating 5 out of 5]

repetition done so tastefully I have lost taste for almost all others.

[nam · Rating 4 out of 5]

this one will have to be re read in a few years

[H]

“I awake into an original greediness/ Into glossy persimmon-crested notebook called Sylvine” (23)

“We manipulate memory/ To make things free” (46)

“Every angel is fucking the seven arts./ Each leaf had achieved its vastness” (55)

“Money is ordinary and truly vernal./ intensities and climates pass over the face./ form is not cruel” (61)

“Two o’clock, four o’clock/ By form I mean the soul of course, that crumpled socket, that splendid cosmetic” (65)

[George · Rating 2 out of 5]

Despite all its marine imagery, found this drier than sand.

[Mandy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll actually be writing a review of this as part of a class assignment. I'll put it up here when it's finished. :)