A Report From Lisa Robertson's Troubadour Poetics Workshop in Vancouver

“On the Sunday of Lisa Robertson’s workshop the twenty-two of us crowded into TCR” shared space gradually fell quiet, captivated but confused by a series of trills and melodic whistles," writes Judith Penner in a review of a workshop on troubadour poetics for the new issue of The Capilano Review. “None of us knew what birds we were hearing in the heart of semi-industrial Vancouver, or that it was a recording made by Jean-Philippe Antoine of nightingales in Lisa Robertson’s garden in the South of France.” More about Lisa Robertson's recent teaching in Canada:

Such birdsong is increasingly rare, even if you live as Lisa does, near Poitiers, a relatively undeveloped part of France where nightingales still sometimes perch on the roof for a month during nesting season and sing all night long. But nightingales were common enough in lyric poetry of the past. Listening to them she thought about the medieval poets inspired by the same sounds, how these birds in her garden collapsed the distance of time.

Robertson told us what led her from the private pleasure of birdsong in her garden to the history of troubadours, especially those who composed and sang in Old Occitan during the 12th and 13th centuries, in the region where she lives now. She spoke of joglars, the singers; trobairitz, the female troubadours; the vernacular; the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229) that in two generations almost obliterated the Cathar culture, of which many troubadours may have been a part (we don’t really know). Threaded through her account were ideas from other readings: Dante’s defense and study of the Romance vernaculars in “de vulgari eloquentia”; Ivan Illich on the standardization of the vernacular into a more manageable mother tongue that benefited those in power; Benedict Anderson on the invention of national languages; Mariá Rosa Menocal, whose scholarship on medieval society shines a light on a culture we cannot quite capture. In examples of troubadour poetry as translated and re-imagined in Paul Blackburn’s life work, Proensa: An Anthology of Troubadour Poetry (NY 1978/2016) we found less the “courtly love” as stereotyped in high school literature courses and more earthy descriptions of lust imagined and real, disdained and satisfied. The rubbing together of trobar and amor, to sing and to love, suggests something more. The beloved might be the excuse for the successful vers or cantos, the inspiration for the composition and performance, not the point. Love might also refer to something larger than lust or love for an individual, to a community alive with many voices.  

Read more of this piece at TCR.