Lisa Robertson to deliver Fall 2024 Gustafson Lecture October 24th

Renowned poet Lisa Robertson will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture October 24th from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. The lecture is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar, and book signing in Room 211. There will also be a reading and Q&A for students on October 23rd from 11:30 am–1:00 pm in Building 310, The Malaspina Theatre lobby. Lisa Robertson will do a community reading that night at The Green Olive, 155 Skinner St, at 7:30 with student Claire Gordon as the opening reader.

English and Creative Writing professor Dr. Neil Surkan will introduce Robertson at the lecture and comments: “Lisa Robertson’s exhilarating and endlessly refreshing oeuvre has multiplied the possibilities of expression: her poems inspire us to be attentive and daring for the sake of deeper connection.”

Robertson’s talk, entitled “Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime,” will engage with the form, practice, and history of keeping a notebook as it relates directly to her long poem Boat, composed from her accrued life of notebooks. It has been published in expanding increments twice so far, first by the University of California and then by Coach House—one each decade since her chapbook Rousseau’s Boat was published in 2004. She hopes to repeat the process in seven years, when she’ll be 70. 

To do this, Robertson rereads the entire sum of notebooks with a single keyword or concept directing the process, then writes down these findings and recomposes them. She says she finds it “amusing, to discover in late middle age [that she has] been working on a long poem for half [her] life.”

“If we can imagine that poems are a form of knowledge then Lisa Robertson is always on the cutting edge of research—hypothesizing, experimenting, devising, and revising,” says English professor Dr. Mike Roberson, who introduced Karen Solie as last year’s Gustafson Distinguished Poet. 

In the upcoming lecture, Robertson will begin the lecture with citations from Coleridge’s notebooks in which he describes starling murmurations, then use this as an organizing image for thoughts about composition, temporality, pattern, practice, and formal invention as durational observation. She writes, “I have become a close re-reader of my own notebooks, which has inspired a broader curiosity about the form. I’ve been reading Coleridge’s notebooks, for example, with a strong interest in the work of their editor, Kathleen Coburn, who transcribed and annotated all of them, taking a big part of the 20th century to do it.”