9.10.14

I wanted to talk about a chapbook I've had for a while but never really explored. I bought it for a poetry course in college and I know I read it at least cursorily because there are some annotations, but I didn't remember doing so. The text is called The Weather by Lisa Robertson. It has an introduction leaflet put in after the fact, and it almost seemed like part of the work rather than explaining it, so I'll omit that, but I did like the introductory quote:

"Architecture, fashion--yes, even the weather-- are, in the interior of the collective, what the sensoria of organs, the feeling of sickness or health, are in the individual ---They stand in the cycle of eternally selfsame, until the collective seizes upon them in politics and history emerges" --Walter Benjamin

The weather is a background to a lot of other things, but ranks among the unchanging, despite its many moods. Think about that old saying when you meet someone, that you should talk about your health and the weather to avoid being controversial/too personal. So that platform was something I was looking for as I read.

The chapbook is a concept, rather than a collection, with an entry for each day of a week. Each day opens with a prose poem-type of text, with very clipped phrases and heavy verbal and structural repetition that seeks to set a pattern or mood. I didn't quite know what to do with these segments, since I have so little experience with this type of verse. After the blockier prose segments there were some more structurally-familiar poems. Here's one:


Give me hackneyed words because
they are good. Brocade me the whole body
of terrestrial air. Say spongy ground
with its soft weeds. Say self because it can.
Say arts of happiness. Say you have just died.
Say sequin because the word just
appeared. Say weather take this adult
from its box. Memorize being sequined
to something, water. Everything you forget
inserts love into the silent money.
memorize huge things of girders greased. Say
the water parting about the particular
animal. Say what happens to the face
as it gala tings my simple cut
vicious this afternoon the beautiful
light on the cash is human to guzzle
with--go away wild feelings, there you go
as the robin as the songsparrow go
the system shines with uninterrupted
light. It's petal caked. Leaves shoot up. Each
leaf's a runnel. Far into the night a
sweetness. Marvelous. Spectacular. Brilliant.
Clouded towards the south. It translates
Lucretius. Say cup of your heart rush
sluice is yellow sluice Kate Moss is Rosseau
have my arms. Say impasto of
atmosphere for her fur. Halo open
her face. Misplace the death. All the truth
under the tree has two pinky oozy
names. Say trying to possess or not. Say
if you thought love was ironical. If
pleasure emancipiates, why aren't you some-
where. Sincerity.


The sense of this at first is very blocky as well, and its tempting to receive each little fragment as a separate thing, which is too many little things all at once at equal value. I do like that the repetition of "say" makes some passive phrases more active, or changes the activity that is going on. Here's another:


Sometimes I want a corset like
to harden me or garnish. I
think of this stricture--rain
language, building--as a corset: an
outer ideal mould, I feel
the ideal moulding me the ideal
is now my surface just so very
perfect I know where to buy it and I
take it off. I take it off. If all things fall
and we are just emperors, serious
and accurate and fugitive
in such dormant lines of gorgeousness
the day is a locksmith
dew lies long on the grass
and I a rustic ask: what is
a surface--and respond
only omniscience, the crumpling face
as the domestic emotions elucidate
themselves a sea of mist
exists so strangely side by side
the potent mould of anarchy and scorn.

This one returns me to the introductory quote, finding a base point in something, and basing a structure around it. The very real constriction of a corset helps, and consequently the idea that it can make or unmake what it touches/relates to. The repetition of that and "mould" literally shape things (I also like that mould could have two different noun meanings and one verb in this piece).

In the notes in the end of the book, Robertson offers some context for the work, saying it was an "intense yet eccentric research in the rhetorical structure of English meteorological description" during a 6-month stay in Cambridge.

Something I like about doing this exercise is that I am exposed to things that I don't normally seek out, and I'm learning a ton as a result. This is not a book I would say is a favorite, but it is good mental exercise.