Lisa Robertson: Prosody of the Polis

Abstract

Lisa Robertson engages with a view of the polis as a communicative space in which speech is political because it is the enactment of agency by citizens. At the same time, her work is grounded in the materiality of particular places, forms of architecture and embodied experience of urban space, reflecting the earlier interests of Walter Benjamin and the Parisian situationists. Her poetics addresses both rhetoric and the architectural space of the city in such a way that the two become part of the same investigation of material histories and potential futures. Through poetry and prose, her examination of the city makes links with wide-ranging historical perspectives on collective living and the built environment. The first of Robertson’s works that I will discuss, Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003b) responds both to the materiality of built and inhabited spaces and to the language structures with which they are enmeshed. Her earlier work The Weather (2005) seems at first, as a ‘site-specific’ text written in Cambridge, to promise an embodied response to an urban environment, but in fact it uses textual sources to interrogate the linguistic assumptions on which the concept of the city is based. A recent essay, ‘Disquiet’, with accompanying online sound recordings, diverges from poetry in order to reveal the city’s prosody (2012). These texts span three different cities: Vancouver, where Robertson lived for many years; Cambridge, where she spent a period as a Fellow, and Paris.