For years, people have been telling me what a wonderful poet Lisa Robertson is. Tho I thought her work was competent & smart, I never really got it – really, seriously got it – until I read Rousseau’s Boat, a transcendent chapbook published by Meredith Quartermain’s Nomados press sometime last year. Rousseau’s Boat won the 2004 bp Nichol chapbook award, or so the Nomados website informs us, and the book certainly deserves every hurrah it receives.
Rousseau’s Boat consists of four works that fit together so well that it seems pointless to think of them as separate pieces. Two of these, the first and last, are quite short, just one page apiece, as those framing the two longer poems, functioning almost as introduction & epilog. Tonally, they work that way as well & the final poem, “This is the beginning of Utopia / Its material is time.” – yes, a two-line title (complete with quirky punctuation), not as extreme perhaps as Geraldine Kim’s “real” title for her Povel, which runs on for pages, but another sign that titles are starting to move out on their own as formal (& formally constituted) elements of the poem – is brilliant in & of itself, so that the reader, already riding the high induced by the previous pieces, leaves the book on the most intense terms possible.
But the core of Rousseau’s Boat is the two longer central (or inner) texts, “Face/” and “Utopia/” – in both instances I read those slashes as indicating a linebreak with no second line (anticipating, if you will, the second line of the last poem’s title). Or perhaps extending the use of slashes from the first poem, “Passivity,” a text that otherwise appears to be a block of prose, e.g.,
Let’s be sparkling for them. Let’s fluff up our/ pigments. Let’s know fibres. Let’s be a dog./ I wanted to talk about necessity/ and ambience. I wanted to know about/ change.
There are 27 such slashes or breaks in “Passivity,” the final one the last character of its text. The ambiguity this poses to the idea of the line is raised again in the two longer poems, where longer lines are treated like prose paragraphs, running flush left over onto a second or even third line. This sounds ordinary enough, but visually the one-sentence/one-paragraph equation feels quite disturbing – destabilizing any residual sense of the line’s metric or quantitative or logical fixity. Across the ten pages of “Face/” and sixteen of “Utopia/,” the effect accumulates, so that the relatively traditional lines of the final poem (asserted by nothing more than a capital at the left margin) hits with full force.
The idea that a title or text could end on a linebreak graphically demonstrates what couldn’t be seen by one ending with a blank space – that our written language is actually structured so as to prohibit this from happening – the space at the line’s end simply doesn’t “exist.” To call it into being as Robertson does here with the linebreak is to open being itself up to investigation. Which is, as I read it, precisely the intent of her texts & the obsession with time & utopia.
The first two texts here make great use of the word “I.” Of the 36 sentences in “Passivity,” 12 begin with the first person singular and it appears in three others.¹ It appears so often at the start of a sentence in “Face/” that it reminds me of my own “Berkeley” & all the other – mostly later – poems that begin every line with “I.”² Unless one gets hung up with sentence/paragraph distinctions, “Face/” will be read – as I think it should be – as a single ten-page stanza, every other sentence of which appears in italics (precisely, I think, to foreground the formal sentence/line structure).
A man’s muteness runs through this riot that is my sentence.
I am concerned here with the face and hands and snout.
All surfaces strum dark circumstance of utterance.
What can I escape?
Am I also trying to return?
Not the private bucket, not the 7000 griefs in the bucket of
each cold clammy word.
But just as strongly I willed myself toward this neutrality.
I have not loved enough or worked.
What I want do to here is infiltrate sincerity.
I must only speak of what actually happens.
If this book has a topic sentence, that first line above is it. It throws open any number of structural oppositions: self/other, male/female, silence/noise, stillness/turmoil, language/(?). The intensity of “I” here underscores the sense of text’s final line –
I do feel some urgency.
– but it hardly prepares one for its withdrawal from “Utopia/,” where it occurs just 52 times in some 370 “lines,”³ including contracted forms – I’m, I’ve – and one sentence that deploys it thrice. Thus when this text says – as it does twice within 16 sentences (17 “lines”) on p. 31 – “It is me,” the reader sits up & notices.
I’m not going to venture a close or thematic reading here – the text is too rich, it would be easy to slip into something the length of a dissertation & still only crack there surface here. Rousseau’s Boat, suffice it to say, is an intense, complex, emotionally & intellectually exhausting experience. True or not – it’s at least theoretically feasible that this could have been done with a fictive “I” – the reader comes away with a sense of having gotten to know the author on the deepest, most intimate levels. Either way, Rousseau’s Boat is one great book.
¹ I’m aware of course that 27, 36, 12 & 3 are all divisible by three – there’s a lot of formal inbuilding in this otherwise “spontaneous” & free-form seeming text.
² The earliest of which I’m aware is Jack Collom’s “Brag,” which I believe dates from 1967, predating ”
³ One becomes conscious that it is not possible to tell if there is a blank space at the end – and perhaps even the start – of any single page in the text.
