Lisa Robertson is the formerly Vancouver-based poet responsible for XEclogue, Debbie: An Epic, The Weather, among others. Though she garnered a Governor-General’s award nomination in 1998 for Debbie, Robertson is, really, the underground Queen of Canadian letters. The small presses that have published her poems are a who’s-who of unknown imprints: Tsunami, Sprang Texts, Meow, DARD, The Berkley Horse, Nomados. Even after achieving mainstream recognition for Debbie, Robertson turned to Astoria, Oregon-based Clear Cut Press for the first, American release of Occasional Work and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture in 2003 (and re-published by Coach House Books in 2006).

Interview by Jay Smith: Winter 2007.

The interview begins late and Robertson is surprised that Jay Smith is female. Expecting a male, she thought that the voice of a Canadian female on the telephone was calling about Public Lending Rights with the Canada Council. Not so.

Lisa Robertson: Right, no. I’m used to that now. It used to take me at least half a day to muster an international phone call.

LR: Ah, yeah. Now Google tells you anything.

LR: Yeh. I don’t know what I did before Google…. Well, I tell you, one thing I didn’t do was spend half a day eBaying designer clothes.

LR: It’s in Singapore.

LR: Yeah, I just found this amazing thing, but too late. I’ve been looking for a bicycle. I’ve had this fetish about old women’s Dutch bicycles. I’ve never had an account with eBay—I just ogle things. And I found one, one village away from where I live. But I was too late. The bidding was closing in ten minutes, but it took longer than that to register.

LR: Someone had. It was a really good price. These are just classic vehicles… They still make them, but they’ve looked pretty much the same since the twenties or something. They’re just big black chunky bikes that look sort of old fashioned, are incredibly solid and well machined. … Now you can start to Google them.

…

LR: That’s okay…. I don’t bite.

LR: I understand. I still can hardly speak to anybody I really admire.

(Laughter.)

…

LR: So you’re supposed to be talking about The Men and the re-release of The Office for Soft Architecture.

LR: It’s kind of the least premeditated of my published work in that I didn’t have any specific critical framework that I set out to explore or address. I just, one day, found myself writing these poems in my notebook when I was supposed to be doing other things. It was when The Weather was in production. Like, I finished writing it and it was being edited and typeset and stuff. And I was really busy writing the essays for Soft Architecture… they were all coming out as catalogue essays first. So I was in this period where I was getting lots and lots of work writing catalogue essays. It was just a really rapid turn over: researching, writing, next. As well as that, I was doing of magazine writing, like I was totally making my living freelancing. So I was really, really busy doing freelance work and it was just before I turned forty, and I was feeling kind of odd about that. And I just found myself writing poems in my notebooks when I was procrastinating.

I wrote the first section of that book very quickly, like within a couple weeks maybe, the first twenty odd pages. I gave it to a friend to read, Erin O’Brien, who the book is dedicated to. She really liked it and so I just decided to keep on going with it. But it wasn’t planned. I wrote lots and lots and lots of those poems before I even imagined it being a book, but then I couldn’t imagine it being a book because it was just so unlike the other poems I had written. I put the whole stack of papers away for a good five years before I started shaping it as a book. So it was kind of an accidental book.

LR: My hide tends to go up when I hear the word "accessible." Tell me what you mean by that.

LR: Well, it’s got a simpler vocabulary, I think. One comment I tend to get from my books is that people have to use a dictionary. Oftentimes, that’s mentioned in a tone of disappointment or dismay. It’s true that there’s often a lot of archaic language in my projects, or technical language, or scholarly language. And that’s not so much the case in The Men.

But it’s not an unmediated first person. I say that I just wrote it in my notebook, but what I was reading at the time was Petrarch’s sonnets. So within that renaissance sonnet tradition, there’s a suppleness to the voice, there’s an effect of simplicity. That’s what was pleasing me in reading Petrarch. So that’s what I was trying for in my poems.

That whole thing about the sonnet and the lyric tradition is that it’s song based: that sort of lends a simple line of melody that could make a poem seem more accessible on first reading to a reader. That simple melodic voice line was not a goal or criteria in my other work. In fact, in The Weather I was trying to make a sort of polyphonic, multiply voiced layered text, where the effect would be many voices overlapping.

LR: Well, the first text that I wrote for that project was the Soft Architecture manifesto and that was something I wrote as a catalogue essay. You know, I had no idea it would become a whole series of texts. … I had a freelance job then writing a column for this art magazine in Toronto called Mix, the column was called "Beneath the Pavilion." They wanted a regular column on the art scene in Vancouver. At that point, I was already becoming interested in Vancouver as an architectural site. And without really telling them that I was changing the assignment, I turned it into a column about the relation between art and architecture in the city.

I tried basically to teach myself how to describe what I observed in the city in a way that had some velocity, some density to it. At the time that I wrote the Soft Architecture manifesto, I had already been writing my column for Mix for a year or so. And then those two things both ended. The manifesto was published as a little catalogue and my job at Mix ended. I went away from Vancouver for a residency in England.

It was when I was away from Vancouver and thinking about what I wanted to do next that I kind of realised that the ideas that I had set out, established, in the Soft Architecture manifesto were, to my mind, kind of complicated and opening up [in a way] that I could continue with those ideas for some time. So I made a decision to continue writing in that vein. … They were published under the name of the office after that point.

[My] decision to form a fictional architectural office, [was based on the fact] most architectural firms don’t actually get any built work to do, [at first] they’re just writing proposals. So their practise is actually a language-based rhetorical practise, describing architecture that doesn’t actually exist. They’re just proposing built sites that they would like to exist.

So I figured that I could do that as well as an architect, and be a sort of virtual architect.

LR: So it just got started that way.

When I got back from Cambridge I continued to make my living as a freelance writer, mainly writing catalogue essays. When someone commissioned a catalogue essay or a magazine article from me, I would try to convince them to let me write it as the Office for Soft Architecture and for them to publish under that pseudonym.

At first people thought it was pretty odd, but I managed to convince them and then it sort of became a thing. Then they started asking for Office for Soft Architecture pieces for their catalogues.

LR: The seven walks were also published under the Office. Not all of the walks were published before the book came out. The first three were commissioned by Front Magazine, the Western Front Gallery’s magazine.

LR: Could’ve been. The editor was, and I think still is, Andreas Carr. And he thought it was a fun idea. And that’s what I started writing for—a series of pieces. And he did lay-out and took photographs for them. The walks had a bit different tone and approach but were parallel to the more research-based pieces.

LR: They approached me. They asked me. Basically I go where I’m invited… Because I’m too chicken to make cold calls. (Laughs.)

It was two men running Clear Cut, who were starting it up: Rich Jensen and Matthew Stadler. Rich was the publisher and Matthew was the editor.

And I had worked with Matthew as my editor for years. I started working with him when he was the literary editor for… oh, what’s that entertainment weekly out of Seattle. I forget what’s called… Anyway, it’s like The Georgia Strait [Vancouver’s free weekly] but in Seattle. And he got me writing reviews and essays for him & I really liked working with him. When he moved on from that newspaper, he started working for a New York-based design magazine called Nest & he was the literary editor for that.

So I worked for Nest for years and I had a regular column in Nest magazine as well, also under pseudonym, called "The Decorator’s Horoscope." (Laughter.)

So I worked a lot with Matthew. And he was a really exacting and precise editor and he really helped me to learn how to write strong prose. So when he and Rich decided to form this publishing house, Clear Cut Press, I was completely keen to work with him. I completely trust and respect his projects. I liked the texture of communication that goes on between us, between me as writer and him as editor. He’s also a really really fabulous writer and a novelist, as well. And I just wanted to work with him.

Also, they had this really interesting sort of utopian notion of Cascadia, this northwest coast nation, geographical region. They were coming up to Vancouver all the time meeting writers and artists all the time and we were travelling down to Seattle and Astoria, where Matthew bought a house. There was all this movement between Vancouver and the American northwest. They just had this idea of openness and I appreciated that whole idea that borders are there just to be dissolved.

JS: And then it was picked up by JS: And then it was picked up by Coach House?