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.
