I began writing this essay mid-September on a train from Montreal–Toronto–Guelph. My intention had been, as my intentions so often are, to begin earlier. It was in early August that I reached out to rob mclennan to propose I write a short essay about Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic (1997) in response to periodicities’ recent call for work “on a particular older book by another poet.” I thought I would complete the proposed short text before the final summer-month’s end, and that I could use it as the springboard for an academic conference paper. September and the new academic semester were as of yet distant futures. Presently, I am finally back at the beginning and re-writing this essay mid-October on a bus from Lennoxville–Sherbrooke–Montreal.
Truthfully, this essay actually has its beginning in 2009 or 2010 when, as a student in Sina Queyras’s feminist poetics workshop at Concordia University, I was first tasked with reading and responding to Robertson’s writing. That response became my first literary publication, appearing on Lemonhound in April 2011. Queyras’s workshop navigated the possibilities of making sense of the world (or non-sense, in the mode of Nicole Brossard) through poetry with the anthology Prismatic Publics: Innovative Canadian Women’s Poetry and Poetics (2009), edited by Kate Eichhorn and Heather Milne. The feminist voices collected within that book have since accompanied me through my completion of a MA in Creative Writing (Concordia), a PhD in English studies (Université de Montréal), and these early years as a precariously employed college and university instructor.
It was as part of a radically dissimilar collective that Robertson’s poetry was first introduced to me. In the pages of Prismatic Publics, I would not yet encounter the ferocious dog on the cover of Debbie, nor the significant visual “screens” (a word borrowed from Stephen Collis to explain the artful obstructions) within the book. Instead, I had just a few excerpts of the epic to contend with. Importantly, these excerpts were contextualized by selections from other texts throughout Robertson’s career, as well as an interview with the poet. In Queyras’s workshop, we speculated on the statement of poetics one could discern from the interviews with each of the anthology’s poets. My copy of the anthology still bears my early handwritten notes in response to these heady statements. I am not exaggerating when I say I had never encountered anything like this before. My poetry had already been resisting the accumulation of rivers and stones and birds of representational nature writing, a genre driven into me by my undergraduate creative writing classes in Fredericton, New Brunswick, but I had not yet clarified what new territories that resistance, in its pushing away, sought to push into. At one point in her interview with Eichhorn, Robertson says:
When I think of the variations of what gets termed innovative writing in Canada — if you think of the span from Rita Wong to Nathalie Stephens to Gail Scott to Dionne Brand — that’s very, very broad. What each of these people is doing is bringing their politics into writing directly. They’re investigating ways to innovate in language that reflects and analyzes their political experience. (368)
As a Master’s student, twenty-two or twenty-three years old and newly arrived in the exciting multilingual metropolis of Montréal, Québec, I underlined this passage with vigour. More than a decade separates that act (my first reading of Robertson, my act of underlining the passage) from this one (my continued reading of Robertson, my return to those early handwritten notes). A decade is not so long and I hope to return again many decades from now to accomplish this same feat: that is, to make a fool of my younger self.
The reasons I would underline that passage today (i.e., as relevant to my own poetic and academic practice, as representative of my own desire to forge a connection between language and politics) are greatly divorced from my original reasons. Beside this passage, I wrote: “My investigation is not ‘political,’ but ‘personal.’” In my undergraduate education, I had encountered the lessons of second-wave feminism and knew better than to separate these two spheres (the personal is political after all) — but I nevertheless seemed to feel, at that moment in time, that what was personal to me was somehow above politics. The bitter irony is that what was “personal” to me was the experience of gendered violence, the very stuff of “politics.”
Queyras’s workshop was quintessential in disabusing me of the notion that the political was ever simply impersonal static messaging. Robertson’s poetry opened me up to new aesthetic and political possibilities, even as those first poems from Debbie: An Epic grappled with a genre from the ancient past — that of the epic. In the academic conference I attended in Guelph, Ontario this past September (Where From Here), I proposed to explore the contemporary feminist anti- or ante-epic, in the mode of the antenarrative. Fred Moten uses the term “antenarrative” to define the experimental work of M. NourbeSe Philip, another poet I first encountered in Queyras’s workshop. The “ante” prefix signals what precedes the starting position, what might start in media res, and what is non-linear. Recently, as a limited term professor at Concordia University, in two sessions of an advanced studies class on “The Contemporary Feminist Epic in Canadian Poetry,” students and I explored the subversion of the epic by reading texts from Robertson, as well as Philip, Anne Carson, Daphne Marlatt, Dionne Brand, Rachel Zolf, and Canisia Lubrin. (The first class was interrupted by the pandemic, but the student responses to the poetry still proved essential to my further understanding of their poetic possibility. The second class was one of the final classes I taught at Concordia, and it is an experience I will forever cherish. Both groups of those fiercely intelligent students have my immense thanks.)
What the reader discovers when they encounter the poems of Debbie: An Epic as a book, rather than as excerpts in an anthology, is that the whole is more than a poetry collection: it is part art book, part parody, and part manifesto. In the years since my first reading, I have come to think of Robertson’s work as demonstrative of what Lauren Berlant terms “genre flailing”: a gesture in writing to what is hybrid, incomplete, ongoing. In Debbie: An Epic, the flail is the act whereby our protagonist, the giantess — or the bitch, as illustrated in the female rage of the dog’s mid-bark or -bite on the cover— re-appropriates the masculinist genre (i.e., the epic) of the title. The book’s many visual irruptions or impasses are the material evidence of the destruction that has been wrought on the original text — or the original map of the nation — by the enormous body of Debbie: “her hearty hands bear / the bruised sea” (Debbie: An Epic). Debbie is not woman: “Yes I am a man.” Debbie is not entirely human: “her sense of her body includes both dog and owning state’s daft glamour.” What we see jostling on the surface of the epic or anti-epic poem is the interplay of past and present in the postmodernist text. Collis reads these gestures as poetic architecture: “imagining, and thinking, poetry’s impossible, its enunciation of public space, its verbal creation, of polis.” The question we must pose of the revisionary text, in the words of the classics scholar Ann Bergren, is this: “What form of city will a woman build, if left to her own devices?”
For Robertson, genre (flailing) is a “classically styled folly” used to “decorate” (Debbie: An Epic) — and therefore re-vision — the poet and reader’s concept of the epic and its relationship to history, knowledge, and selfhood. It is through this ornamentation, the accumulation of visual excess, that our ideas of who or what constitutes the epic changes. Rather than on the global stage of warfare, it is within the domestic interior of the private home, and upon its intimate piles of heaped textiles, that Robertson’s feminist re-visioning takes place. In a recent essay on Robertson appearing in the London Review of Books (4 August 2022), Andrea Brady remarks that an obsession with textiles is characteristic of Robertson’s oeuvre: “[C]lothes are experiments in subjectivity. The thrift shop is a gallery of obsolescence. Inhabiting used garments, which carry the smells, oils and gestures of other bodies, we experiment with occupying other selves.” In Debbie: An Epic, the textiles provide a mutable screen on which one version of a feminist city (not in the model of the utopia, but the jargoning agora) is projected.
Debbie: An Epic is just one in a trilogy of texts that re-vision Virgil. Robertson begins in 1993 with XEclogue, which Brady describes as “a book of pastoral featuring the ‘roaring boys,’ Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Nancy the shepherdess, and ‘a pink prosthesis hidden in the forest,’” and ends in 2001 with The Weather “in which,” Brady writes “‘everything is lifted’ from 18th and 19th-century works of natural history such as Luke Howard’s 1803 typology of clouds.” Robertson herself attributes this re-visionary tactic to an interest in complicity: “I needed a genre to gloss my ancestress’ complicity with a socially expedient code; to invade my own illusions of historical innocence” (“How Pastoral”). This is the basis of a recurring question in Debbie: An Epic: with which here and now are we complicit? Robertson’s epic places this self-accusatory question in the mouths of the heiresses of the epic tradition. In “Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing,” Robertson writes: “Good companions: maybe even this dress shall some day / be a joy to repair. But now our memories are / complicit with the walls of father’s doubt.” This is, in part, a gesture forward to the textile to come: the screen on which the mending is re-produced and in which paternal memory becomes a second-hand dress. “Maybe even this dress shall some day be a joy to repair” becomes a screen in the text: an instance of visual poetry in which font size and colour signal the importance of the material of the book (page, line, and syllable). Collis explains: “This screen’s masked quotation is of Virgil’s Aeneid: ‘Some day, perhaps, remembering even this / Will be a pleasure.’ It is the heroic speech of Aeneas ‘feminized’ by the insertion of ‘dress’ mending.” Insistently, however, Robertson’s re-visioning does not happen on the level of creative citation alone. The short phrase occupies a single page, each word blown up to such a size that it occupies a single line. The vertical text is overlapping and alternate words are weighted differently in black, gray, and light gray. These overlaid textures make visible and make felt the necessary border-crossing of flailing hero: pricking a finger on the sewing needle and decorating the page with the blood of a bastard daughter.
In “Virgil’s Bastard Daughters Sing,” wherein this line first appears, the chorus wears doubt and enters the historical record. What did their father, Daddy Virgil, doubt? As a representative of filial lineage, we may assume he doubted the power of his (bastard) daughters to sing. To be complicit in this doubt as the daughters is to make the flail manifest as the speaking voice (or voices) of the poem; yet, it is this excessive gesture (i.e., flailing in Daddy Virgil’s flunking filial line) that makes the voice(s) possible. The uncomfortable entanglements of the bastard daughters in the empire begin with the book’s variant opening, appearing as a footnote to the first poem “Party Scene”:
When this was
nature, language felt
moveable, per
sonal. Now complicity
resists trusting
something
The present condition of complicity is outside nature, in an artificial surrounding where language feels fixed; the personal has been overtaken by a flailing collective, for individual matters appear suddenly meaningless. What — if any — is the “historical catastrophe” with which Virgil’s bastard daughters are complicit? The daughters themselves, figured as a chorus, are the entanglement from which Debbie emerges as an individual. Debbie, as a lone and giant figure, is inseparable from this excessive female body. In her inhuman and “half-made” form, Debbie is also the embodiment of human entanglement, steeped as she is in “desire and /stupidity.”
Why re-vision the epic, or construct a poetry collection around “the frayed trope / of rome”? Perhaps because it is fun — an affect and effect that seldom enters serious literary study — for fun was a key component of Roman life, as documented by Virgil in his epic, and asserted by Frank O’Hara, in an epigraph appearing at the beginning of Robertson’s “episode: majorettes.” In the poem “For Girls, Grapes and Snow,” Debbie’s body is “both dog and owning state’s daft / glamour.” The majorettes and their heroine are marching across the “Adanac” (Canada spelt backwards) and cataloguing their war spoils. In a moment akin to the epic poet invoking the muse, Debbie invokes Frank and asks for “opulence and / majesty.” Frank appears not to be in a giving mood, for what is acquired in the following lines are only a series of negations: “No Bees no Honey. No Ambition no / Money. No Master no Metre. No Soul / no Rigour. NO Adage no Axis.” What such a stripping away further reveals is the complicity of Debbie with the filial faults — to gesture to the miniscule lines “filius / flunks,” printed in small text and surrounded by white space, of a following page — of her Roman father: “I’ll bite into complicity’s / proper structural pinkness.” As Debbie participates in the orgy of empire, the march is coming to its end. Are we still having fun?
Of course, neither O’Hara nor Robertson are quite satisfied with fun; for O’Hara, the justifications for artistic creation “must be found elsewhere.” One has fun as an isolated individual in thrall of one’s own “acquisitive spirit.” The artist, however, must not be isolated — or, in Theordor Adorno’s terms, whose words on complicity provide the epigraph to the book’s “interlude,” the artist must recognize “there is no way out of entanglement.” “So,” O’Hara writes, “out of this populated cavern of self comes brilliant, uncomfortable works, works that don’t reflect you or your life, though you can know them. Art is not your life, it is someone else’s. Something very difficult for the acquisitive spirit to understand […]. But it’s there.” Like the female flâneur (or flâneuse) — an impossible female subject, according to the history of modernity — Debbie must step out of the bounds of mere acquisition. No longer is the female subject heading out into the street in search of an object (like Virginia Woolf’s street walker and her pencil in “Street Haunting”); no, she is caught adrift. The Debbie that speaks in this poem sets out on a dérive. This is not a limitless drift, however, for she recognizes the “necessary contradiction,” according to Guy Debord, of dropping one’s relations and “letting go.” When one attempts to drift freely one only becomes more entangled in “the absolute or relative character of fissures in the urban network […] and above all of the dominating action of centers of attraction.” Even while marching backwards, “the moody ranks” (500) of “Adanac” reveal themselves to be — where else? — in Canada here and now.
