Lisa Robertson. The Men. Book Thug, 2006.

Review by Michael Flatt

Lisa Robertson seems to have no grammatical subjects in her writing. One finds oneself in her poetry only when one finds oneself lost, reading back up the page for the pronoun's referent. Her choice, then, to focus on the form of the lyric in The Men: A Lyric Book is intriguing since the subject-object relationship is indelible to the form. She is also a poet with strong feminist tendencies, as her 1993 book XEclogue (read: 10 Eclogue) would illustrate, so her choice of "men" as her object of study should be construed as a subversive gesture. It turns out to be an effective one, since there are so few examples of women placing men on the pedestal of the lyric.

In the past, Robertson's poetry has tended toward the prose block, most notably in her fascinating 2001 book The Weather, wherein one is lost in a low-creeping fog of image-free sentence fragments. The most identifiable quality in her writing has been her use of repetition. She tends to repeat a word or phrase in a series of sentences to establish a familiarity that emphasizes what is repeated, what is not. Her leap-frogging anaphora serves her again in The Men, from the opening stanza.

Men deft men mental men of loving men all men

Vile men virtuous men same men from which men

Sweet and men of mercy men such making men said

Has each man that sees it

Cry as men to the men sensate

Conceptual recognition the men

And their poverty speaking to the men

Is about timeliness men is about

Previous palpability from which

The problematic politics adorable

And humble especially

Young men of sheepish privilege becoming

Sweet new style

Here, Robertson sets up the multifarious examination of her object. She also lets the reader know how she will and will not be working within the contemporary conception of the lyric. Unlike the traditional lyric, these poems are not imagistic and do not make heavy use of metaphors and conceits. She is focused on something "conceptual" rather than "sensate" to borrow from the above passage. However, as we might expect from a lyric, the poems are also focused on sound elements within their polysyllabic abstractions. "As for the men, we did toss our declinations and conjugations to and fro as they do who by way of a certain game / Of men / Conjugate men." The rhyme of "declination" and "conjugation" has lead the speaker here to assert that in speaking and opining, men conjugate themselves, that is, they demonstrate their multiple inflections. So in this way, sound informs content, but in a conceptual way, rather than a tonal one.

The Men is a challenge, as is each of Robertson's books, but along with what she demands of the reader, she offers plenty to enjoy, to laugh about. Two examples: "The / Men are enjambed;" "My cool pleasure expanding coolly / To my general puzzlement." While one may conclude that the prose block is a more suitable form to Robertson's mellifluous style, as it encourages to the reader to let go, be swept along with the current of her logic, Robertson gives many great examples of the purposeful line break, with many purposes in mind.

As Robertson is re-examining her chosen poetic form, she is doing the same with her object. In her descriptions of men, she acknowledges and at times embellishes stereotypes parodically, with lines like "Judging soundly like a man." The Men indulges and thereby questions the notion of the geometric man, who thinks and acts in perfect angles. In another example, she writes, "Let the thought here be planted / That the men want to float / Just the pink tip of their / Thing touching the firmament." The thought long ago sprouted and bloomed that men's ambitions are guided by their "things," so we must view this as an absurd portrait, a joke on our conception of men rather than a critique of men.

This book should make men feel the poet's ambivalence concerning them. The two major sentiments the speaker expresses are lustful fascination and condescension, which meet gracefully in the maternal gesture of breast-feeding. "To consider the power and domination these bodies have, I suckle them." The men here become powerless and dominated, sexually and otherwise since suckling a grown man can be sexual, but is not necessarily so (a la The Grapes of Wrath).

She says in the book's parenthetical conclusion that her goal was to "sing...the men from a perspective." What separates this book from other lyrics is that the object is not a man, or any group of men, or even the speaker's summaritive impression of men. The object is the idea of "the men." The definite article in the book's title reinforces the point that the men are an idea. This is clearest when Robinson views the men fully nude. They are the book's rare imagistic moments, in which men point with their genitals to the sky or the sea. The dreamlike quality the poet lends to these passages almost makes "the men" seem truly ineffable. In a particularly insightful moment, Robertson reminds the reader of Judith Butler's theory that gender is a mask worn by its subject. Robertson writes, "The men become what they are like rather than what they are --" This is where Robertson best accomplishes her task of undermining the rickety architecture of gender paradigms that have long been reinforced in the form of the lyric.