a technique for the reconciliation of method and chance

Through a particular texture of physiological bravado, rather than knowledge, I attempted to participate in the world. What is life I thought, other than to succumb profoundly, thoroughly and enduringly. Thus began my career. I sought a technique for the reconciliation of method and chance. This ignited in me a sensation of intelligence, which is to say, I felt the being of my life in relation to a generality. What a voluptuous illusion! I continued. In this way it seemed that I began to understand history.

But I was also aware, in the last instants before sleep, that I was the one who was about to swindle myself. This was my vanity: that I did not pause long enough to imagine that each being harbours the same suspicion.

- Lisa Robertson, from her "Essay on Origins", over at The Rusty Toque. You can read the whole thing here.

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.

i describe and embellish

rob mclennan: What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

Lisa Robertson: I don’t answer questions—I seek them out, then I describe and embellish them.

- from Lisa's 12 or 20 Questions. View archives of 12 or 20s here and here.