{"id":1975,"date":"2024-10-08T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-08T17:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/portalmagazine.ca\/gustafson\/?p=1975"},"modified":"2024-10-13T15:11:39","modified_gmt":"2024-10-13T22:11:39","slug":"upcoming-lecture-october-2024","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/portalmagazine.ca\/gustafson\/upcoming-lecture-october-2024\/","title":{"rendered":"Lisa Robertson to deliver Fall 2024 Gustafson Lecture October 24th"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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October 24, 2024 | 7:00 pm<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Building 355, Room 203<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Renowned poet Lisa Robertson will deliver the Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet\u2019s 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\u20131:00 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

English and Creative Writing professor Dr. Neil Surkan will introduce Robertson at the lecture and comments: \u201cLisa Robertson\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robertson\u2019s talk, entitled \u201cNotes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime,\u201d will engage with the form, practice, and history of keeping a notebook as it relates directly to her long poem Boat<\/em>, 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\u2014one each decade since her chapbook Rousseau’s Boat<\/em> was published in 2004. She hopes to repeat the process in seven years, when she’ll be 70. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u201camusing, to discover in late middle age [that she has] been working on a long poem for half [her] life.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIf we can imagine that poems are a form of knowledge then Lisa Robertson is always on the cutting edge of research\u2014hypothesizing, experimenting, devising, and revising,\u201d says English professor Dr. Mike Roberson, who introduced Karen Solie as last year\u2019s Gustafson Distinguished Poet. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the upcoming lecture, Robertson will begin the lecture with citations from Coleridge\u2019s 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, \u201cI have become a close re-reader of my own notebooks, which has inspired a broader curiosity about the form. I’ve been reading Coleridge\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Robertson continues: \u201cThis brings me to the related question of annotation\u2014what is it? It\u2019s also a way of working that\u2019s been core to my approach to composing books.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cI’ve been annotating for a long time. So have my grandmothers\u2026. I have in my possession purse-sized notebooks kept by each grandmother, the kind of notebooks kept by very many women of my upbringing, filled with common domestic notations\u2014clothing sizes of family members, birthdays, room dimensions, phone numbers, drafts of letters, travel diaries, medical details. I’m not sure what to make of this now, but I would like to find out.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI am also very interested in the notebook page as a material graphic unit,\u201d she adds. \u201cFor me a great deal of the personal pleasure of writing in a notebook has to do with observing the spatial contiguities and graphic accidents that occur willy-nilly across a single spread of two pages.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

English and Creative Writing professor and poet Dr. Sonnet L\u2019Abbe comments: \u201cNo one brings a reader into the astonishment of being, through the astonishment of her language, like Lisa Robertson.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Lisa Robertson <\/span>was born in Toronto, but lived in Vancouver for more than 20 years. She studied at SFU in the 80s and owned Proprioception Books. Through the 90s and early 2000s she was a collective member at the Kootenay School of Writing and a board member at Artspeak Gallery. She is the author of 10 books of poetry to date\u2014The Apothecary<\/em> (1991), XEclogue <\/em>(1993), Debbie<\/em> (1997), The Weather<\/em> (2001), The Men <\/em>(2006), Lisa Robertson\u2019s<\/em> Magenta Soul Whip<\/em> (2009), Rousseau’s Boat<\/em> (2010), Cinema of the Present<\/em> (2014), 3<\/em> Summers <\/em>(2016), and Boat<\/em> (2022). Robertson was also a judge for the 2006 Griffin Poetry Prize and a co-editor of Raddle Moon<\/em> magazine. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

She has also authored two collections of essays, Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture<\/em> (2003) and Nilling<\/em> (2012) as well as a debut novel, The Baudelaire Fractal<\/em> (2020). Her 2021 work Anemones<\/em> introduces, translates, annotates, and archives a 1941 essay by Simone Weil on troubadour culture and the 12th<\/sup>-century poem \u201cLark\u201d by Bernart de Ventadorn.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Robertson has been nominated twice for the Governor General\u2019s Award and the Pat Lowther Memorial Award and once for the Warwick Prize for Writing. She won the C.D. Wright Award for Poetry, The Relit Award, the bpNichol Chapbook Award, and the PIP Gertrude Stein Award for Innovative Poetry in English. Robertson has held residencies and visiting professorships at Cambridge, Princeton, the University of California (Berkeley and San Diego), the California College of the Arts, SFU, University of Chicago, and the University of East Anglia. She has taught at the American University of Paris, the Royal College of Art, Capilano University, Piet Zwart Institute in Rotterdam, Naropa University, and Dartington College of Art. She has an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr University and her literary archive is housed at SFU. Robertson writes about art and publishes in contemporary artists\u2019 exhibition catalogues and monographs as well as lecturing in art colleges. She lives in the Vienne region of France. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Copies of Robertson\u2019s books and a series of limited-edition Gustafson Distinguished Poet\u2019s Lecture chapbooks will be available at the VIU Campus Store and at the reception. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For more information please email Joy Gugeler, Chair of the Gustafson Committee (Sonnet L\u2019Abbe, Mike Roberson, Neil Surkan) at joy.gugeler@viu.ca<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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