Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip

Lucretius the Roman poet-philosopher is layered into the pages of Lisa Robertson’s latest book of poetry, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip. He’s mentioned, quoted, revered, and interrogated, as are some of his contemporaries—Pliny, who wrote of the fall of Pompeii—and other slightly less long-gone writers like Baudelaire. Indeed, in this meaty collection of works written between 1995 and 2007, Robertson covers almost as much territory as the writers she references. At first glance to a reader unseasoned in the classics (as I am), Magenta Soul Whip might be intimidating, but it soon becomes clear that Robertson is no impenetrable tower of classicism. She is a very contemporary poet whose work, though experimental, is in fact quite readable. Robertson’s sharp sense of humor runs just under the surface of even the most highbrow of literary references; her poetic form, while varying throughout the book, tends to favor sentence-style lines.

Robertson has approached some of this territory before in the other two of her books that I’ve read and really liked—Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office of Soft Architecture and The Men. In these works, as in Magenta Soul Whip, the notions and nature of humanity and relationships are written into structures like pronouns and enjambment as much as they are embedded in the layouts of the architectural objects humans always end up constructing. Indeed even the object of the book itself–with thick fine-paper pages and foil-stamped covers and mustardly yellow jacket–drips with Robertson’s playful, yet concentrated, way of examining the structural artifacts of people through our language.

Robertson makes it clear throughout Magenta Soul Whip that this collection of poems from different projects and times in the past decade or so is an investigation, a search: the writer as read on these pages is struggling along with the reader. We are both perhaps a bit insecure, definitely defiantly smart, and not entirely sure that epic precedents of history-as-it-has-been-remembered (and told) really can reveal the “nature” of things. This questioning is there on the page for the reader to discover–here, in the cold-cock of a personal breakup that becomes embodied in urban architecture in the couplets of “Wooden Houses”:

Because it is a known fact
The wounded fall towards the point

Because of mute desire
You are the teak pavilion.

Robertson’s awareness of her own experimentalism as a process by which to investigate these questions is also vividly clear in the process-as-product, ping-ponging lines of “Draft of a Voice-Over for a Split-Screen Video Loop”:

‘She spirals wildly away’
‘She writes against those who know how to read.’

Robertson is also concerned with a more literal literary evocation of “nature” – animals, elements, roots, honey, and ‘the body’ all circle into and out of these works despite the different voices and forms of the different sections.

“About 1836 (an essay on boredom)” uses single quotations marks that may conjure in the reader associations with Alice Notley’s The Descent of Allette. The comparison is not unwarranted—here Robertson too is using the cumulative rhythms of clipped phrases to dive below the surface of cities, myth, gender, animalia, and mortal messiness. With Robertson’s use of quotations to pace or mark text units, however, quotation marks are rooted in a biological speaker. In this case, that speaker is a dog:

He was the dog of Latinity
and non-knowledge.
Tacit dog I said
tell me about boredom. The dog replied:
‘At the edges of the villages of Europe
‘there is boredom.
‘The villages of Europe
‘don’t want your thinking.

At which the animal then continues to spout several pages of clipped verse denoting the passage of history, time, nature, “this institution,” complete with a quoted footnote. The dog of Latinity leaves the speaker with one ominous warning, perhaps a reminder to those who seek to find too much of their souls within the institutions of philosophy or history or even nature. Perhaps a call for help for humanity: ‘Soon there will only be society.’ And perhaps, taken in this context, the 48-point foil-stamped salvo on the back cover of Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip may serve as a potential epitaph of such a society, of those who have not searched for our own nature, our own form:

MY

FIDELITY

IS

MY

OWN

DISASTER