Now That's What I'm Talking About

So here I was all set to start a post about the exhaustion, enervation, etc., of the confessional tradition and a recommendation that poets declare a moratorium on use of the first-person singular pronoun, when over the transom drops Lisa Robertson’s new volume, R’s Boat. Gentle Reader, this book saves the first-person singular pronoun for contemporary lyric poetry. How, you ask? Why, I say, let me paraphrase T.S. Eliot’s characterization of the Tube commuters in the third part of "Burnt Norton": exhausted from exhaustion by exhaustion.

Which is to say that Robertson renders the “I” without any discernible confessional content by repeating it as the subject of sentence after sentence whose existence seems predicated less on a speaking self than on a sort of emanation from the rules of transformational grammar:

I’m talking about weird morphing catalogues and fugitive glances.
I could have been wrong.
I subsist by these glances.
I desire nothing humble or abridged.
I’m using the words of humans to say what I want to know.
I did not sigh.
I confined my thievery to perishable items.
I do not want to speak partially.
I loosened across landscape.
I doubt that I am original.
I’ve been lucky and I’m thankful.
I dreamt I lied.
I stole butter and I studied love.
(Face/)

Now, some of the interesting work here is done by the simple anaphora; repeating that diphthong over and over at the beginnings of lines makes it just another phoneme rather than the locus of identity or affect. But this is enhanced by the (mostly) paratactic relation among the lines/sentences; absent narrative or logical conjunctions, they could all be spoken by different speakers (the alternation of Roman and italic type suggests at last two), but the notion of “speakers” itself seems not quite right. Instead, the lines might simply show how sentences are formed of subjects and predicates. Our attention is shifted from expectations of confessional revelation or narrative resolution to an almost musical play of “themes” embedded in the predicates’ diction and the ghost of allusion. While the “fugitive glances” are picked up in “these glances,” most of the lines in either typeface lack this kind of linkage. Instead, we can focus on other ways the lines might connect. For example, the italicized sentences here tend towards negation and a lack of efficacy; the Roman lines emphasize positive agency. These themes are developed by the typographically marked “voices” throughout the poem (certain sentences recur from time to time, switching from Roman to italics and back), and, along with the background harmonies of sound repetition, they achieve a disembodied emotional intensity. Or not quite disembodied, because Robertson sneaks the heart in (“Here I make delicate reference to the Italian goddess Cardea who shuts what is open and opens what is shut”). Like the resolution in the tonic after a spirited spell of dissonance, the emotional tension satisfyingly climaxes when the voices synch up:

I made my way to London.
I made my way to London.



Robertson’s practice here reminds us that “text” comes from the craft of weaving. She shows the threads of certain sentences against a variety of other threads, so that small irregularities of weight or color are discernible, so that the different ways a thread can look are displayed and explored. The poem enacts emotion arising from language and the grammatical relation among parts of speech as much as it describes emotion arising from interpersonal drama and the frustration of desire, so when we get to “This is emotional truth. / I’m crying love me more.” our sympathy has been earned by not being asked for. “Such,” Robertson writes at the end of this poem, “is passivity. / I will not remember, only transcribe.” And that’s ambition enough.

Not all the poems in R’s Boat work in exactly the same way. All are longish (they run from six or seven to twelve or so pages), and all explore the construction of self and world in language. Some, though, perform reference and description, suggest narrative and action, more than others do. “A Cuff,” which originally appeared as a chapbook, achieves its effects of estrangement by mingling argumentative and descriptive registers. Here’s an early example of the latter:

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

The last three lines there put as effectively as it can be put the agony of the poem as expression of self and the ecstasy of the poem as experience of language. And here’s a nice bit of the argumentative:

If females lick
Language, death, economy
Cold sky with flat grey stormclouds
The seaport at sunset
Tubes of yellow light
This suture is a form of will
Furthermore the paradise is only ever indexical.

Proper nouns appear from time to time; cities and philosophers and artists are named. A couple of dates and times are given, though they only pretend to locate us in a world outside the text. Logical constructions give way to and then co-exist with details that might, but don't necessarily, point to a space beyond the page . And still, when Robertson writes “Now we run our fingers / Quick and innocuous / In the proper order and sequence and from the beginning,” I hear keyboards of both typewriting and musical kinds and sense, too, something (perhaps simply the lingering notion of reference) being tickled. The grammar of this sentence’s end -- “Because of my body / In the absence of a system / (It is both in ruins and still under construction)” – leaves it productively unclear whether the antecedent of the last line’s pronoun is “body” or “system.” Productively, because it’s good to be reminded, especially to be so hauntingly and musically and provocatively reminded, that even our bodies we know through codes and combinatorics. We come to our senses, or perhaps our senses come to us, through syntax.

Full Irish

The Pill is back from two busy and pleasurable weeks in Ireland and glad to see that you’ve all entertained yourselves and each other in the comments. Truly glad, because it is, I think, a GOOD THING when people vigorously air their disagreements and debate issues of aesthetics, ethics, politics, etc. I especially value some of the substantial comments that take issue with my arguments and analyses; these will send me back to the poems to see whether, in the different light cast by the critiques, the poems themselves look different. For those comments, thank you. This is how the language game of critique is supposed to work, isn’t it? I report on the nature of my experience of the work. Your experience is like or not like mine and you say so and describe your own. Might mine be misguided somehow? Maybe. So I test my experience against your account of yours. And so on. To forcefully articulate a position but to hold the position aware that it is not unassailable is, it seems to me, one of the prerequisites of evaluative criticism. I don’t assume that my judgment (that’s all criticism is) is infallible. This is not, of course, to guarantee that a strong counter-argument will persuade me, any more than I assume that my arguments will change anybody else’s mind. I’ve got some ideas of my own about irony and immanent evidence for tone and the renovation (as opposed to the mere repetition) of cliche, after all. I’m just glad we’re talking about this stuff, and at a pretty high volume (in both senses).


I’ve titled this post “Full Irish” in honor of the breakfast that bears this name, which, for the uninitiated, typically includes egg, bacon, sausage, mushrooms, beans, black and white puddings, whiskey, choice of Hansel or Gretel, grilled tomato, toast, tea, and Pepto Bismol. Herewith, some similarly smorgasbordish thoughts inspired by the trip.

In Dublin’s fair city, I took in some Joyce-related sights and was prompted to recall that moment in “The Dead” when Gabriel Conroy is accosted by Miss Ivors. “You’re G.C.,” she says, “outing” him as the author of a book review he published over his initials. This was a gratifying reminder that to publish a review over one’s initials is neither anonymous nor trollish, but is, in fact, simply adherence to a long-standing convention in reviewing, one dating back to the invention of the review in the new periodicals of the late 18th and early 19th centuries. And then, feeling peckish, your faithful correspondent lunched upon a Gorgonzola sandwich and retired to Davy Byrne’s for a one-eyed pint.

As I was driving westward a few days later, two texts kept repeating in my head. Each, in its way, recalls the Famine that devastated the island, and especially the less fertile western areas, in the 1840s. In “That the Science of Cartography Is Limited,” Eavan Boland frames an image of the Famine’s traumatic presence in Irish history with autobiographical intimacy:

When you and I were first in love we drove
to the borders of Connacht
and entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grass
rough-cast stone had
disappeared into as you told me
in the second winter of their ordeal, in

1847, when the crop had failed twice,
Relief Committees gave
the starving Irish such roads to build.

The juxtaposition of young lovers and the wound in the land works here, I think, because it’s in the service of exploring the ineffable. Our representational schemes simply don’t enable us to capture or render certain realities. While it’s not the poem’s primary focus, an important reality it registers is the way love is constructed in part by the shared witness of historical suffering (it’s a weird, but apt, kind of courting that the poem recounts but also subtly suggests tends to be missing from our accounts). In Lucky’s amazing speech in Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett literalizes and inverts Hegel’s master and slave relationship as if to ask what love’s got to do with it and to emphasize a starkly chilling and historically resonant memento mori:

. . . I resume the skull fading fading fading and concurrently simultaneously what is more for reasons unknown in spite of the tennis on on the beard the flames the tears the stones so blue so calm alas alas on on the skull the skull the skull the skull in Connemara in spite of the tennis the labors abandoned left unfinished graver still abode of stones in a word I resume alas alas abandoned unfinished the skull the skull in Connemara . . .

Wildly different, not least in their original languages, these passages share not only the Famine as a reference point but also evidence of rigorous thought about the ways that event’s significance figures in the presents of Ireland in the 1990s and Paris in the first postwar decade.

I’ve had good times in Galway in the past, standing in a crowded pub, sipping a pint, listening to a half-dozen musicians playing trad in the corner. What’s most impressive about some of those performances is that the musicians don’t seem to care whether anyone’s listening (and not everyone is). Their attention is on the music, and they seem to be moved by a sense of responsibility to it rather than to the pub full of people. They’ll test each other’s knowledge and, sometimes, the punters’ patience, with esoteric choices and unexpected juxtapositions. This time, though, the center of the city seemed like a sort of Disneyland Ireland, and it was packed with tourists whose guidebooks had clearly told them they should seek out music pubs for some good, old-fashioned craic, and the pubs had drawn musicians happy to turn their backs to the tradition and mug for the crowd. The tourists ate this stuff up, of course. Maybe the musicians went home and congratulated themselves on the way they ironically riffed on the tourists’ desires for accessibly happy or sappy songs performed in broad stage-Paddy stylings. I’d like to think so. But whether they did or not, the experience of watching and hearing them seem simply to perform accessibly happy and sappy songs in broad stage-Paddy stylings left this listener, who loves and values the carefully crafted, expertly innovated, real thing, disappointed.