The Past Scenes of Men: Reviewing Lisa Robertson's The Men

At Literateur, a welcome review of Lisa Robertson's book The Men, originally published by Book Thug in 2006 and recently reprinted by UK press Enitharmon. In "Plurable Vocables," Eleanor Careless writes that "Robertson is feeling the men, phonetically, all over."

Edmund Hardy asks if the project of this poetry is to ‘represent without any solidifying’, citing Hannah Arendt (The Human Condition).[8] In answer stand these shape-shifting prosodic patterns, which also, in defiance of an uncontaminated lyric I, swap their pronouns: ‘They [the men] have only / the reticence of intimacy’ becoming ‘I have only the reticence of intimacy’.[9] Properties are reattributed, but the poem presents itself as palimpsest, so that this ‘I’ takes on the recurring traces of ‘they’, the past scenes of men.

In this recurrence, the lyric speaker wryly locates her own rising tumescence:

In the recurrent subject My cool pleasure expanding coolly To my general puzzlement.[10]

There is a prosthesis here, the speaker inside her ‘recurrent subject’. Similarly, the sounds expand within their words; consonance wraps ‘pleasure’ into ‘puzzlement’, and ‘cool’ becomes ‘coolly’, ‘general’ picking up the languid ‘l’s of all of these. This provides an insight into the idea of the men via the weaving of content with prosodic composition: men is a singular noun composed of a collective plurality. All this pleasurable, phonic expansion occurs within the subject, and is thus constitutive. Thinking with Roland Barthes, in the ‘text of pleasure… everything is plural’.[11]

‘Men’ is the baseline above and around which the adjectives and prepositions place themselves. The reader may become accustomed to skipping over the reiterated subject (‘men auditorily ignored’), but the self-similar iterations persist, inscribing the pervasiveness of the male subject

Any concept of a subject sitting tight behind the text is foxed in this plurality. The men are in the texture or tissue of the text, part of its fabric: ‘my poem’, the speaker tells us, is ‘[a] purple scarf / of men’ (p.10). This ‘poetics of fabric’, to borrow the phrase from Hlibchuk’s essay on Robertson’s Occasional Work and Seven Works of Soft Architecture, also form part of Hardy and Flores-Bórquez’ conversation.[12] The sheer repetitive force of the ‘men’ foregrounds the materiality of this poem’s language, weaving the men phonically into this materiality. While the material to hand is the men’s material, the lining can be turned to show the traces of its own making. Robertson recognises the paucity of men as a lyric subject, remarking that ‘I could write/His poem. He needs no voice.’ However, if Barthes’ text etymologically is fabric, poeisis is fabrication, and The Men practices this fabrication through sidelong and substitutive repetition.[13]

At top: Lucy Hogg's My Little Pony, 2001. "Robertson records The Men’s indebtedness to Lucy Hogg’s reworked paintings of portraits of men by masters such as Velàzquez, Gainsborough, and others, which are reminiscent too of toile de jouy: 'to feel to laugh to ride horses' / 'Is what the men are for'".

Read the full review at Literateur.