Celebrated Canadian poet Lisa Robertson to give VIU Gustafson lecture

Robertson’s lecture is October 24 from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus.

Renowned poet Lisa Robertson is Vancouver Island University’s (VIU’s) Ralph Gustafson Distinguished Poet for 2024-25.

“Lisa Robertson’s exhilarating and endlessly refreshing oeuvre has multiplied the possibilities of expression. Her poems inspire us to be attentive and daring for the sake of deeper connection,” said English and Creative Writing Professor Dr. Neil Surkan.

Robertson’s talk, Notes, Murmurations: The Notebook as Form of Rime, will engage with the form, practice and history of keeping a notebook as it relates directly to Boat, which contains long poems composed from her accrued life of notebooks. It has been published in expanding increments twice so far, one each decade since her chapbook Rousseau's Boat was published in 2004. She hopes to repeat the process in seven years, when she'll be 70. 

To do this, Robertson rereads the entire sum of notebooks with a single keyword or concept directing the process, then writes down these findings and recomposes them. She finds it “amusing, to discover in late middle age [that she has] been working on a long poem for half her life.”

“If we can imagine that poems are a form of knowledge then Lisa Robertson is always on the cutting edge of research – hypothesizing, experimenting, devising and revising,” said English Professor Dr. Mike Roberson, who introduced Karen Solie as last year’s Gustafson Distinguished Poet. 

Robertson’s lecture includes citations from Coleridge’s notebooks in which he describes starling murmurations, an image Robertson will use to discuss composition, temporality, pattern, practise and formal invention as durational observation. She will also explore annotation and “the spatial contiguities and graphic accidents that occur willy-nilly across a single spread of two pages.”

“No one brings a reader into the astonishment of being, through the astonishment of her language, like Lisa Robertson,” said poet and English and Creative Writing Professor Dr. Sonnet L’Abbe.

Robertson was born in Toronto but lived in Vancouver for more than 20 years. She studied at Simon Fraser University (SFU) with the Kootenay School of Writing, was a board member at ArtSpeak Gallery and ran Proprioception Books. She has also written 10 books of poetry, two essay collections and the novel The Baudelaire Fractal. She was nominated for the Governor General’s and Pat Lowther Awards and won the C.D.Wright, Relit, bpNichol Chapbook, and PIP Gertrude Stein Awards. She has an honorary doctorate from Emily Carr and her literary archive is at SFU. Robertson lives in France. 

Robertson’s lecture is October 24 from 7 to 8:30 pm on the Nanaimo campus in Building 355, Room 203. It is free to attend and will be followed by a catered reception, cash bar and book signing in Room 211. Surkan will introduce Robertson at the lecture. 

Robertson’s books and limited-edition Gustafson Distinguished Poet’s Lecture chapbooks are for sale at the VIU Campus Store and the reception. The Gustafson Distinguished Poetry Chair began in 1998 from the estate of Canadian poet Ralph Gustafson and his wife Betty. Contact Joy Gugeler, Chair of the Gustafson Committee (Sonnet L’Abbe, Mike Roberson and Neil Surkan) at Joy.Gugeler@viu.ca for more information.

There will also be a reading and Q&A for students on October 23 from 11:30 am to 1 pm in the Malaspina Theatre lobby, Building 310. Robertson will do a community reading that night at The Green Olive, 155 Skinner St., at 7:30 pm with student Claire Gordon opening for Robertson.

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Media Contact:

Rachel Stern, Communications Officer, Vancouver Island University

C: 250.618.0373 l E: Rachel.Stern@viu.ca | X: @VIUNews

The VIU community acknowledges and thanks the Snuneymuxw, Quw’utsun, Tla’amin, Snaw-naw-as and Qualicum First Nation on whose traditional lands we teach, learn, research, live and share knowledge.