Have you yet read Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip? I haven’t, fully, due to the previously mentioned feelings of deep inadequacy my first foray brought up. I picked it up and read umpteen pages, and then skimmed the rest, flipping it like a flip book to see how the texture of the language makes an image rise up, holographically from the pages. I AM going to read it, for real, soon, O reading, posture of stillness and the eyes darting, and the experience of reading it will be much bigger-better-faster-quieter than the experience of talking about it–not so different from theater, really, Joel, I think: to some extent, you have to be there. And maybe there’s the dynamic and distinguished difference between poetry and criticism/response to poetry. Not to say that poetics or writing about poetry or thinking and feeling about poetry is necessarily not describable as poetry, but maybe at least for me there is somehow a qualitative difference in the experience of reading it. Or maybe that’s bull-hockey and all letters in arrangement on the page are permissive in all the same way. Or maybe it’s totally true, quantitatively, and a team of neuroaesthetes have measured synaptic charge during reading experiences and thusly determined what qualifies as poetry.
There’s a few (two, really, with a changeable dozen others) poets whose work has enduringly done this for me, and I’ve always felt safe mentioning them when anyone asks me who I particularly like to read: Marjorie Welish; Clark Coolidge. In reverse order, chronologically; The Crystal Text was my high-school discovery, at the Barnes & Noble on 17th Street and Fifth Avenue in New York City, which I believe has the dubious honor of being the very first Barnes & Noble EVER, while Marjorie W’s colossal abstraction was inhaled, perhaps an anodyne, along with the agri-businesslike sickness of the air at the Iowa Writers Workshop in the early 1990s. I’m really talking about agriculture, here, you know. I wonder which workshop leader at the moment was hot on that beautiful book The Windows Flew Open.
And, I confess, I’ve read none of Lisa Robertson’s previous several books, all of which have been heavily recommended to me. This is kind of a common situation for me as a reader of poetry: I think something like “I know it must be really good and it will wait for me; I’ll get to it later than everyone else. If people stop talking about it or recommending it to me then I’ll know it wasn’t really that good and I didn’t need to waste time seeking it out, forming an opinion of it, etc.”
I’ve long been excited by the blandness of her name, though: Lisa Robertson! It’s so white, generic, suburban, so Simpson-esque/Cleaver-esque, though she be not American but Canadian. While the language and affect is declamatory and incantatory and synthetic and ultra-civilization (yes, that’s an adjective. “The Dogs of Dirk Bogarde” is the name of one poem. Fag-hag hag in me perks up.). For my last trick, off-stage I will divine the agenda or ideology governing the language or at least dictating who mostly reads it. Let’s go read this book all together now:
Great Tallis article. I like also your tentative exploration of the social field in which certain books and authors — the popular kids — are more heavily recommended than others. I can’t be the only one to want to read your insights into how that field works.
Wanted to second Jordan – yes, thanks for link to Tallis article! More needs to be said about the determinism of the brain-explainers.
Intrigued by your comments about Robertson’s book, Rebecca, I’ve looked up what I could of it online… I wonder if you’d be willing to identify and say more about the images in the text that seem to rise holographically from the page.
I’m interested in the capacity of words to pull off this kind of feat (one of the reasons I love Elaine Scarry’s Dreaming by the Book, a great work of literary criticism that examines how powerful images are created in language), but I didn’t see a lot of this in Robertson’s work–what I saw was more language delivered with a very (even, dare I say it?, intentionally) flat affect, a la Michael Palmer.
I’m afraid this is my hallucination, not yours, and cannot be further explicated, except perhaps to say that the phenomenon I experience is probably more akin to Emily Dickinson’s I think famous declaration that she sees auras around words? auras around words in combination? I can’t find this anywhere on the internet which may mean that I actually hallucinated it myself. Here’s a poem of mine, since we seem to be sharing poems in this venue, in which I at the very least refer to it:
Exalted
on the rainy
road to daily
January’s
exception
Returned at last
mid-valley
to an elevation
from which inflation
(Words as visions)
mountain
bowl
windproofing
offers a reprieve from
the “community.”
Do those words seem special to you?
In light of Emily Dickinson’s aura
and the room in which she labored.
OMG you have to read her previous books, esp. Occasional and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture & Debbie: An Epic. Um, & The Men.
Btw, the title of Robertson’s book is actually (awesomely) Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip.
If you put that book next to Tan Lin’s Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe, what happens?
you look for a mop.
I can’t believe I didn’t register that. It adds a frisson of ultra-cheesiness.
Rebecca, let’s split up. You read The Weather (I urge you), I read The King, and we meet back up again in a fortnight.
Sounds like a date. I’ll bring the bitter radicchio, you bring the sour vinaigrette. Chewing makes things sweeter.
That sounded like it was meant to be really heavily metaphorically laden, but really it was total nonsense. What I meant to say was: If you’re reading The King, shouldn’t I be reading Clay Banes’s hidden or not-so manuscript? How does that date work otherwise.