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.
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