Labor, Archive, River and Dissent: An Interview with Lisa Robertson
In this lively, rangy interview with Lisa Robertson she addresses the co-inventive acts of independent bookstores and publishers and the emergent collectivities they foster, processes not unsimilar to the richly fluid co-creation she weaves between reading and writing, between prose, pleasure and its transmission in her second novel Riverwork. Through a lost aunt, through a buried river in Paris where laundresses worked and sang and tanneries poisoned, labor is championed over capital, excess over scarcity. All the while, Robertson both contends with and upends the traditional novel’s concepts of character, image, and the myth of the individual author, replacing them with the unseen, active instability of water, perception, archive, and the expansive nature of female dissent.
Lisa Robertson is a Canadian poet, essayist, and novelist who lives in France. Born in Toronto in 1961, she was a long-time resident of Vancouver. She has published nine books of poetry, most recently Boat (2022), and two books of essays, Nilling (2012), and Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (2003). Her 2021 book Anemones: A Simone Weil Project (If I Can’t Dance, Amsterdam), an annotated translation of Weil’s 1942 essay on the troubadour poets and the Cathar heresy, is the most recent outcome of wide rime, her ongoing study of medieval troubadour culture and poetics. She has been a visiting poet and professor at Princeton University, University of Cambridge, U East Anglia, UC Berkeley, UC San Diego, Piet Zwart Institute, Simon Fraser University, American University of Paris, Naropa, and California Collegeof the Arts. In 2017 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in Letters by Emily Carr University of Art and Design, and in 2018 the Foundation for the Contemporary Arts in New York awarded her the inaugural C. D. Wright Award in Poetry. Her novel The Baudelaire Fractal was shortlisted for the 2021 Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been published in French, Swedish, and Turkish translations. A second novel, Riverwork, is just out from Coach House Books.
Links to purchase Riverwork: chbooks.com/Books/R/Riverwork
Gillian Conoley is a poet, editor, and translator. The author of ten collections of poetry, including Notes from the Passenger (Nightboat, 2023) and A Little More Red Sun on the Human: New and Selected Poems (Nightboat, 2019) Conoley received the Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, and a Fund for Poetry Award. Conoley has taught at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the University of Denver, Vermont College, Tulane, and Sonoma State University. A long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area, she is editor of VOLT magazine. Her translations of three books by Henri Michaux, Thousand Times Broken, appearing in English for the first time, is with City Lights. Conoley has collaborated with installation artist Jenny Holzer, composer Jamie Leigh Sampson, and Butoh dancer Judith Kajuwara.
https://www.gillianconoley.com/
https://nightboat.org/bio/gillian-conoley/
Links to purchase Notes from the Passenger: https://nightboat.org/book/notes-from-the-passenger