3/18/2010

on camps, caesuras, the King James Bible and the FLQ

Sina Queyras: People assume that Langpo, a camp you are often associated with, knows or cares nothing for line breaks... How much attention do you pay to line breaks?

Lisa Robertson: Sorry, but I don’t see L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as a camp. So I can’t be associated with it. Mine is a different nationality, a different generation, a different politics. I feel more conditioned by the FLQ than by the language poets. I read many of their works and sometimes drink with some of them, but for me, as for those poets themselves I think, poetry is not bound by movements, periodicities and canons. Poetry is a continuity fueled by political passion. The Songs of the King James Bible, the songs of Cheika Rimitti, Donne, Veronica Forrest-Thomson, Denise Riley, Moure, show us the breach as being the active but submerged tradition of a subversion. The caesura, its turn, as Agamben reminds us, is what distinguishes poetry from prose, not the customs of distribution of words on the page. In the time of the caesura a thinking gathers, dissolves, moves.

- Lisa Robertson crams a lot of interesting stuff in there, in discussion with Sina Queyras over at the Harriet blog. Read the whole interview here.

2 comments:

daniela elza said...

I love the thought: "In the time of the caesura a thinking gathers, dissolves, moves."
Isn't Lisa Robertson reading at the Robson Reading Series this month?

Rob Taylor said...

Indeed, on the 25th (next Thursday).