Back when it came out, & should have won the Governor General's Award,
for which it was shortlisted that year (it was given to a much safer
book), I wrote about all the short listed books, & on Debbie as
follows (if anyone is interested):
Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic manages to be both experimental and
highly entertaining. Robertson is a member of The Kootenay School of
Writing, which has strong connections with the language poets in the
United States as well as with an earlier generation of innovative
poets in Canada. She is a strong feminist but her work insists that a
forceful politics best expresses itself through formal exploration and
not through conventional ‘transparent’ writing. Debbie: An Epic, her
third publication, is a funny, hard hitting, highly rhetorical attack
on what she calls ‘styled authority,’[1] inherited from the patriarch,
Virgil, himself. Her prose ‘argument’ at the end of the book contends
that ‘if Virgil has taught me anything, it’s that authority is just a
rhetoric or style which has asserted the phantom permanency of a
context.’ By this time, we know that the ‘context’ in question is
patriarchy itself.
It’s difficult to describe Debbie: An Epic, because it’s
such a complexly designed book. Robertson admits that she was very
lucky to be granted so much input on the design, possibly because it
was the first book of poetry New Star has published. With the
designer, she made full use of computer graphics. The book has half-
tone titles that overlay the actual poems as well as particular words
in different shades and sizes. There are also what she calls ‘the
screens,’ two page spreads with large type, various shades of type,
all of which interrupt the ongoing poem even as they provide a kind of
sly commentary upon it. Wittily, it also numbers the lines, as any
authoritative version of an epic does, and includes footnotes, albeit
as other poems. In other words, it is a delightful text just to gaze
upon.
But, of course, there’s the poem. It’s impossible to give
a sense of this multiplex text with just a few quotes but I want to
register certain aspects of Robertson’s jujitsu encounter with the
epic.[2] What with angry nurses as muses and Debbie herself as a
majorette, Debbie: An Epic clearly dissociates itself from the
tradition even as it reinvents it. Throughout, the text shifts from an
apparent obedience to the rules of the genre to a casual fragmentation
of syntax and symbol. Even when Debbie speaks, she speaks to and of
Lisa Robertson’s fellow poets:
I Debbie with spurred ankles and purple knee-
skin 125
stand free to forget
species anxiety. What happened to the century?
the ship’s planks sing
a lithe keel twins
ears of Catriona,
hair
130
of Kathy, Dan’s fine nape, Christine’s corded
hips, Susan’s sea-scarf
moving with me as philosophes
into felicity and in the midst of elation
the thrones of Erin’s
vowels
135
a liberal dose
or I have not hauled this waxen heart
from the gnarled bole of a great tree
nor fleshed it with portents
and new
sports
140
Playful, yes, and not least in its sly intertextuality, paying devious
homage to, among others, both an aspect of Homer and Ovid (as well as
Virgil) and Pound’s first few Cantos, especially Canto Two. But
there’s also wit, a delight in maintaining a sense of argumentative
movement even as the syntax begins to slip, but never so far as to
wholly undermine sense. Such passages occur throughout. Much later in
the book, as its argument plays toward a statement never to be
completed, the speaker delves into the problem of singular selfhood
and discovers, once again, multiplicity and indeterminacy:
Yes perhaps
I stack these auguries, expedient
as speculative heart in cry: I
am the middle one. I was present
at 565
nothing. I maintained certain memories.
I was both a man. I was fated. I
did not relax. I stay where I always
stay. I am the last to take part. I was
its absentee. I should not know. I
am 570
afraid. I get thankful for sleep. I was
made responsible. I feel certain.
I stayed where I sleep. I was no small
part. I will begin. I fear I have no
place. I fulfill its proper duty.
I 575
I begin. I fear I have no place. I
call your names. I get it to witness. I
both ascend. I will even to forget.
I have made no wall. “Human!” How shall
it call out so that you will pity
me? 580
Good Evening Modernism.
Rhetoric? Most definitely, even if it’s a rhetoric designed to
undermine the very concept at its patriarchal heart. Debbie: An Epic
is a prime example of what Marjorie Perloff calls radical artifice,
and it never loses sight of the art that makes it go, a craft as pure
as Debbie’s baton flinging. The argument insists ‘Slick lyric blocks
history,’ and so it resists the conventional lyric impulse. ‘I follow
this shepherdess because I want her.’ Who speaks here? We can at least
imagine the feminine author grabbing her own authority while also
reifying writerly ‘desire.’ But here the object of desire, Debbie,
gets to talk back, to write back. One woman to another. To another.
This is a deliciously subversive poem.
[1] As Debbie: An Epic is unpaginated, I will not provide page numbers
for quotations from this text.
[2] She had already done something similar to the eclogue in XEclogue,
her highly urbane ‘interminable journal of culture’ which takes on
another conventionally patriarchal genre. However, she admits to
discovering the genre through Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s ‘City
Eclogues,’ and Frank O’Hara’s playful extensions of the form, and only
later going back to Virgil, who seems to be a central figure against
whose influence she can offer formal and ideological resistance.
Doug
On 28-Apr-08, at 3:41 AM, Barry Alpert wrote:
> For further contextualization
Douglas Barbour
[log in to unmask]
http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
There are no wrong notes!
Thelonious Sphere Monk
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