Chapter 11 - Soft Architecture

Summary

Lisa Robertson’s feminist poetics engage with the histories of sexualised domination, and indulge erotic pleasures while committing to ‘return to the sex of my thinking’. Robertson’s poetry seeks to free feminised subjects from the constraints of poetic patriarchy, embodied by Virgil, Lucretius, Petrarch and Rousseau. Conflating Lucretius with the Story of O, she proposes a theory of reading as sensual pleasure and domination. But she explicitly rejects the imperial militancy of the Ovidian tradition, and inverts the gendered relations of domination and subjection associated with Petrarchanism in her book The Men. Her poems show how a feminised subject might resist the logic of domination and bondage that inheres in much classical erotic poetry through a ‘soft architecture’ – a term she borrows from Gottfried Semper. Robertson’s aesthetics of precarity (the shack, the blackberry) incorporates feminised embodiment into the patriarchal city (Rome) or the settler one (Vancouver). Through her art-historical and architectural interests in the fold, fashion and textiles, Robertson seeks to translate bondage into ornament, and release the lyric from the constraint of a singular ‘I’ into a more collective and transient impersonality.