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Lisa Robertson | 365 about surface Lisa Robertson’s Poetics of Elegance Sina Queyras Let us free architecture of the responsibilities that it can no longer assume and let us aggressively explore this newly realized freedom . . . —rem koolhaas I’m really a gentleman collector of sentences. I display them in cabinets. —lisa robertson In a recent issue of Architectural Digest, Patrik Schumacher of Zaha Hadid Architects argues for elegance as the new watchword guiding the next stage of avant-garde architecture.1 This new, capital “E” Elegance, he argues, riffs on aspects of minimalism while refusing its simplicity (or surface simplicity), opting instead for design that is both descriptive and argumentative, an effortless display of sophistication, a composition of complication in all dimensions. Schumacher’s architecture presents a “visual reduction of an underlying complexity that is thereby sublated rather than eliminated,” an architecture that casts itself onto the structural and social, making itself as apparent as it is beautiful, as elegant as it is functional (Elegance, 30). “Elegance,” Schumacher argues, may be part of an agenda to push avant-garde values into the mainstream. In this sense, it “constitutes a provocation” (30). Schumacher could be describing the poetry of Lisa Robertson. Like the architectures of the avant-garde, her texts are spacious and temporal structures, elegantly complex and pleasurable to inhabit. They also constitute a provocation. The Kootenay School of Writing, one of Canada’s most dynamic and innovative literary organizations, and one that Robertson has long been associated with, embraces tag lines such as “we will not be understood.”2 Members and fans of the KSW are quick to point out that the collective morphs in relation to membership and engagements over time; nonetheless, the tag line reflects an ongoing commitment to the creation of an alternative thinking, reading, and writing community, a stance that suggests readers come to texts rather than texts to readers. It may be read as “we will be understood on our own terms,” or,“we will invert your terms.” In other words, the KSW is more apt to critique nationalism, capitalism, simplicity, and the extreme nature of cultural, economic, physical and architectural 366 | Eleven More American Women Poets in the 21st Century changes in the city it calls home, than to embrace, or court, either accessibility or mainstream validity. Robertson, in keeping with those values, rejects labels and toeholds. However, as much as the work resists values of consumption, it flaunts its appetite for beauty and ornamentation. Like Schumacher’s elegance, Robertson ’s work offers heady “orientation within complex organizations” (30): an orientation that brings wild combinations of thinking to new audiences . To achieve this Robertson integrates contemporary and classical tropes and genres, makes firm structural choices, and, particularly in the texts this essay will look at, makes a tightrope of the sentence—her compositional unit of choice. Together these tactics conceive of the poem as a collaborative and inhabitable public space, one that reveals much about the structural integrity of language and rhetoric while reflecting the actual experience of navigating contemporary urban cultures and infrastructures. For this reason alone one could argue that Robertson offers a new model of feminist poetics. I will elaborate on these aspects of Robertson’s work, focusing largely on The Weather, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture, and Rousseau’s Boat.3 It’s All About the Surface. Or, the Surface Is Not What It Appears to Be Consider the value of surface (after all, every inch of it, even the sky has been commodified). Then consider the value of interrogating surface. Then consider the value of a gendered interrogation of surface.Visually the prose poems of The Weather scroll down a justified page; the lines of Debbie: An Epic project like a Barbara Kruger installation, announcing its sculptural qualities in bold fonts, banners, and shields; and the pages in Seven Walks and Occasional Work defer to the prose block, collaborating with visual images. Robertson revels in the surface (literally in some cases, and figuratively ), continually opening the text, moving laterally or rhizomatically. The end of The Weather, for example, offers us the line: “I’ve never done anything / but begin” (78). This is not to suggest that Robertson doesn’t delve deeply; she does, but the emphasis here is not on closure or even the rejection of it, but rather on the sense of openness, rippling across the surface but not remaining there, or perhaps allowing that downward movement , the connective response, to...

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