Celebrated Canadian Poet Lisa Robertson to Read at VIU October 23rd and 24th, 2024
Renowned poet Lisa Robertson will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture October 24th from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. It is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar, and book signing in Room 211. There will also be a reading and Q&A for students on October 23rd from 11:30 am – 1:00 pm in Building 310, The Malaspina Theatre lobby. Lisa Robertson will do a community reading that night at The Green Olive, 155 Skinner St, at 7:30 with student Claire Gordon opening for Robertson.
English and Creative Writing professor Dr. Neil Surkan will introduce Robertson at the lecture and comments: “Lisa Robertson’s exhilarating and endlessly refreshing oeuvre has multiplied the possibilities of expression: her poems inspire us to be attentive and daring for the sake of deeper connection.”
Robertson’s talk, entitled “Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime,” will engage with the form, practice, and history of keeping a notebook as it relates directly to her long poem Boat, which contains long poems composed from her accrued life of notebooks. It has been published in expanding increments twice so far, first by the University of California and then by Coach House, one each decade since her chapbook Rousseau's Boat was published in 2004. She hopes to repeat the process in seven years, when she'll be 70.
To do this, Robertson rereads the entire sum of notebooks with a single keyword or concept directing the process, then writes down these findings and recomposes them. She says she finds it “amusing, to discover in late middle age [that she has] been working on a long poem for half her life.”
“If we can imagine that poems are a form of knowledge then Lisa Robertson is always on the cutting edge of research—hypothesizing, experimenting, devising, and revising,” says English professor Dr. Mike Roberson, who introduced Karen Solie as last year’s Gustafson Distinguished Poet.
In the upcoming lecture, Robertson will begin the lecture with citations from Coleridge’s notebooks in which he describes starling murmurations, then use this as an organising image for thoughts about composition, temporality, pattern, practise, and formal invention as durational observation. She writes, “I have become a close re-reader of my own notebooks, which has inspired a broader curiosity about the form. I've been reading Coleridge’s notebooks, for example, with a strong interest in the work of their editor, Kathleen Coburn, who transcribed and annotated all of them, taking a big part of the 20th century to do it.”
Robertson continues: “This brings me to the related question of annotation -- what is it? It’s also a way of working that’s been core to my approach to composing books…. I've been annotating for a long time. So have my grandmothers…. I have in my possession purse-sized notebooks kept by each grandmother, the kind of notebooks kept by very many women of my upbringing, filled with common domestic notations -- clothing sizes of family members, birthdays, room dimensions, phone numbers, drafts of letters, travel diaries, medical details. I'm not sure what to make of this now, but I would like to find out.”
She adds, “I am also very interested in the notebook page as a material graphic unit. For me a great deal of the personal pleasure of writing in a notebook has to do with observing the spatial contiguities and graphic accidents that occur willy-nilly across a single spread of two pages.”
“No one brings a reader into the astonishment of being, through the astonishment of her language, like Lisa Robertson,” says poet and English and Creative Writing professor Dr. Sonnet L’Abbe.
Lisa Robertson was born in Toronto, but lived in Vancouver for more than 20 years. She studied at SFU in the 1980s and owned Proprioception Books. Through the 1990s and early 2000s she was a collective member at the Kootenay School of Writing and a board member at Artspeak Gallery. She is the author of 10 books of poetry – The Apothecary (1991), XEclogue (1993), Debbie: An Epic (1997), The Weather (2001), The Men (2006), Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip (2009), R’s Boat (2010), Cinema of the Present (2014), 3 Summers (2016) and Boat (2022). Robertson was also a judge for the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize and a co-editor of Raddle Moon magazine.
She has also authored two collections of essays, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003) and Nilling (2012), and a debut novel The Baudelaire Fractal (2020). Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (2021) introduces, translates, annotates, and archives a 1941 essay by Simone Weil on troubadour culture and the 12th-century poem “Lark” by Bernart de Ventadorn.
Robertson has been nominated twice for the Governor General’s Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, and once for the Warwick Prize for Writing. She won the C.D.Wright Award for Poetry, The Relit Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and the PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English. Robertson has held residencies and visiting professorships at Cambridge, Princeton, the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego), the California College of the Arts, SFU, University of Chicago, and the University of East Anglia. She has taught at the American University of Paris, the Royal College of Art, Capilano University, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Naropa University, and Dartington College of Art. She has an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University and her literary archive is housed at SFU. Robertson writes about art and publishes in contemporary artists’ exhibition catalogues and monographs as well as lecturing in art colleges. She lives in the Vienne region of France.
Copies of Robertson’s books and a series of limited-edition Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture chapbooks will be available at the VIU bookstore and at the reception. The Gustafson Distinguished Poetry Chair was established in 1998 from the estate of the late, preeminent Canadian poet Ralph Gustafson and his wife Betty. For more information please email Joy Gugeler, Chair of the Gustafson Committee (Sonnet L’Abbe, Mike Roberson, Neil Surkan) at Joy.Gugeler@viu.ca.