Lisa Robertson
Lisa Robertson
Dans une chambre d'hôtel, Hazel Brown découvre au réveil qu'elle a écrit l'oeuvre entier de Baudelaire. Sous le choc de cette révélation, elle replonge dans sa mémoire de fille et raconte l'époque où, poète sans le sou, elle vivait en dandy dans le Paris des années 1980 : les chambres miteuses et les garçons maigres, les gages de domestique et les fripes griffées. Si elle est sûre de sa vocation, la jeune Hazel se débat avec ses désirs. Comment incarner une autre féminité que celle, réifiée, que lui renvoient ses amants et ses employeurs, comme la littérature elle-même ? La fractale Baudelaire est un roman d'apprentissage et un art poétique, autant qu'un voyage dans les méandres du souvenir et une somptueuse méditation sur les vête-ments, la ville, la peinture et la figure de la jeune fille.
Et si le cinéma du présent était une bande de Möbius de langage, où questions et affirmations s’entrelacent pour révéler une nouvelle sensibilité du « vous » ?
Entre poésie, essai et utopie, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip redéfinit les frontières de l'écriture contemporaine.
Nilling is a sequence of 6 loosely linked prose essays about noise, pornography, the codex, melancholy, Lucretius, folds, cities and related aporias: in short, these are essays on reading. Lisa Robertson applies an acute eye to the subject of reading and writing—two elemental forces that, she suggests, cannot be separated. For Robertson, a book is an intimacy, and with keen and insightful language, Nilling's essays builds into a lively yet close conversation with Robertson's "masters": past writers, philosophers, and idealists who have guided her reading (and writing) practice to this point. If "a reader is a beginner," then even regular readers of Robertson's kind of deep thinking will delight in the infinite folding together of concepts—the codex, pornography, melancholy, cities—that on their own may seem banal, but in their twisting intertextuality, make for a scintillating study of reading as a deep engagement.
Inspired by Flaubert's Three Tales and Stein's Three Lives, a grappling with time, form and embodiment. Recite your poem to your aunt. I threw myself to the ground. Where were you in the night? In a school among the pines. What was the meaning of the dream? Organs, hormones, toxins, lesions: what is a body? In 3 Summers, Lisa Robertson takes up her earlier concerns with form and literary precedent, and turns toward the timeliness of embodiment. What is form's time? Here the form of life called a poem speaks with the body's mortality, its thickness, its play. The ten poem-sequences in 3 Summers inflect a history of textual voices - Lucretius, Marx, Aby Warburg, Deleuze, the Sogdian Sutras - in a lyricism that insists on analysis and revolt, as well as the pleasures of description. The poet explores the mysterious oddness of the body, its languor and persistence, to test how it shapes the materiality of thinking, which includes rivers and forests. But in these poems' landscapes, the time of nature is inherently political. Now only time is wild, and only time - embodied here in Lisa Robertson's forceful cadences - can tell. `Robertson proves hard to explain but easy to enjoy ... Dauntlessly and resourcefully intellectual, Robertson can also be playful or blunt ... She wields language expertly, even beautifully.' -The New York Times `Robertson makes intellect seductive; only her poetry could turn swooning into a critical gesture.' -The Village Voice