D E B B I E

Excerpts from Lisa Robertson's statement in The New Long Poem Anthology Second Edition edited by Sharon Thesen.

Writing Debbie, I researched the linguistic pressures of epic genre on the internal structures of subjectivity, gender, history, and memory.

[…]

In Debbie, the narrative itself is structured as dispersal and digression; this tendency is decorated with poems practising a provisional lyric closure, with typographical dexterities, and also with the construction of a persona, "Debbie" who might lightly embody the renewed, political potential of a lyricism which can embrace notions as disparate, yet necessary, as justice, desire, and collectivity.

There is something intriguing in that order — the hint of a syntagm — justice, desire, collectivity.

And so for day 1788
05.11.2011