Elena Betros López Interviews Lisa Robertson for Cordite Review

In the new, packed issue of Cordite Review, Elena Betros López interviews Lisa Robertson. "The time which separated our initial contact and my first written reflections and then eventually, her responses, was radically re-negotiated by the outbreak of the COVID-19 virus," writes López. But they worked it out, with Robertson continuing to correspond from her home in France. "As a result of these shifting circumstances, and our email exchanges about our own changes in space and time – we have decided to date each portion of our writing as they have been added to or cut into the existing body of the text." From their conversation:

EBL (5 April 2020): …I have experienced how the state is limiting any possibility of maintaining proximity with kin outside of certain heteronormative models: the couple, the nuclear family, the ‘happy’ home. Here, new legislation allows romantic partners to visit one another in their homes, regardless of living arrangements. Yet if living alone one can incur a fine of $1,652 (how they arrived at this eccentric pricing is bizarre) for visiting or hosting a non-‘romantic’ other, a best friend for example. These new prohibitions place hierarchical values on relationships of intimacy by prohibiting proximate/embodied time with seemingly unconventional kin. What I’m working towards is really a question I’m asking myself yet, folding out towards you: how to be queer in/at this time?

LR (6 April 2020): I wish I could imagine an adequate answer to this question. There will undoubtedly be a great deal of suffering in this confinement. Clearly the violence underpinning heteronormative sociality has already become sickeningly clearer. Enforced confinement is revealing even more strongly how many traditional forms of confinement already destroy people. The family, the prison, the police. We will learn more about power. How not to suffer? How to help others suffer less? Are these queer questions? How can we diversify and deepen the terms and sites of our resistance, when for some, resistance is a matter of survival? I don’t think my abilities as a poet give me any special insight into this problem, other than the recognition that I must try to practice the ongoing deferral of closure, alongside the welcoming of previously unrecognisable forms of relationship. I feel that I want to understand resistance not only as a reactive response to injustice, but a gradual cognitive discernment. Resistance is also an inner event, a texture in thinking. We can learn to make entirely new kinds of distinctions. I notice many of my friends are reading the philosopher and theologian Simone Weil right now. In her discussion of medieval troubadour culture, she said ‘love is the opposite of force’. Our queer work might be to learn together how to continuously abandon force, including the force of habit in our own thinking and relationships.

Read more of this interview at Cordite Review.