Lisa Robertson's Poetics of Complexity Anonymous College

For a text that so confidently declares itself “an epic,” Lisa Robertson’s Debbie: An Epic demonstrates a peculiar preoccupation with the lyric ‘I.’ Few things at this point could be more tired than to remind us yet again that this ‘I’ is no self-identical fount of authentic experience, that it is performative, scarred by history, etc. Instead, this poem foregrounds the performance itself, its variegated poses, styles, voicings. If authority is merely one of many rhetorics, styles—hardly news in itself—what others might poetry provide us with, what other worlds be suggested by their “conspicuous inutility?” I want to argue that one of the primary stances taken up by the I in Debbie is that of what the poem calls ‘complicity,’ and that in the poem this word describes a certain politics of embodiment. This relationship is everywhere bodily, conditioned by a sense of the materiality of words as they make and remake each other, their speaker, and all of the other bodies that populate this text.

Even on the title page the estranging, decorative typography works to foreground the material qualities of both words and the book form. But it also, significantly, declines to place author and text into the kind of relation we’re accustomed...