Spotlight #2: Elizabeth Robinson
Curated by Canadian writer, editor and publisher rob mclennan, the “spotlight” series appears the first Monday of every month.
Author Statement
What writing is changes all the time. I think often of Bernadette Mayer’s statement that “Writing is a necessity, and, when there is time, a luxury.”
But there is no time. So writing is a necessity of the interstices. A mortar that would will in the gaps, and then crumble away.
In that sense, poems become the mortar that glues together the structures we imagine, those that don’t quite exist. Speculative and evanescent cement.
Sans time, I want space. I want durable space, a place to live, a home. The poem refuses that.
The poem refuses what it can imagine. What it refuses it alters. What it imagines, by virtue of the act of imagination, changes.
I feel the language changing beneath and through me. I imagine time in the poem that could bring back the lives of C.D. Wright and Beth Murray and Colleen Lookingbill. I imagine space in the poem that houses the unhoused people with whom I work each day.
The poem is inevitable transit: from transit to transitory. If we see what is fleeting as a betrayal, the poem refuses to do so.
To do away with things
Does
darkness initiate love —
as some lovers
turn out the light — what does
the beloved thing
do in its darkness, which
is to ask is darkness
a thing, is the act
of bodies conjoining
a thing, a verb a thing?
Things, they beset themselves
and must be given away, giving
away the punchline of
a wistful joke, bequeathing
memory to silence, tossing the clothes
to the floor.
Things are ambivalence, always
they practice themselves before
they run out of themselves. The
dissolution of presence being
presence’s surest marker. One
who loves it
removes it: yes,
the house, the garden,
the fruit trees, the quest,
the music of it, the image
of it, the
making of the made thing.
The less-visible
world is still visible
in its own darkness. It is not
the bird in the cage who
hovers near the mirror.
But it may turn away from meeting its own gaze.
A thing persevering
is indiscriminate of, or
to, itself, whether the
thing is an act, a seashell,
an object hidden at the base
of a tree, the thing professing
its attention to itself despite
all disappearance.
Eros and all disappearance
being their own stubborn
blessing.
Whatever that darkness, one wanders in it.
Stealthy
to what it wants, to whom it
speaks when it speaks, not
lost but absorbed in the
darkness and given away
by it.
Elizabeth Robinson is the author of many books of poetry, most recently Three Novels (Omnidawn), Counterpart (Ahsahta) and Blue Heron (Center for Literary Publishing), as well as the chapbook Simplified Holy Passage (above/ground press). Her mixed genre book On Ghosts was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. She is the recipient of a 2016 Dora Maar House/Brown Foundation Fellowship.
