Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip Quotes

“Essay on Lust Identity can’t be concise. It’s knit from sequins and lust and scatters. Mostly everyone was fucking the seven arts with a willed difficulty. Then for one day there was the collective sensation that we carried our lovely voices as if in baskets, piled up in clear tones like grapes. Each voice had achieved its particular mass. From an interior space we heard the word sequin repeating in relation to leaves and the image was yellow-gold leaves moving on dark water. We had undergone an influence of death which was itself imprinted on such a moving sequin: the breath sequins, the heartbeat sequins, the organs and their slowing articulation sequins which drifting from the foreground appear to dim since they gradually go out to illuminate some event so distant we will never own the moment of its perception. But all this gives the illusion of peacefulness which is inert or at least passive when breaths burst smashing into sobbed words some urgent errand trapped in these letters as labour of light diminishing rhythm and if we fiercely decide to clear the stupid human stuff stop waiting for something to come to the father-studded earth shouldn’t this impatience release itself as a tongue so new weeping stops. In young women enamoured of their own intensities the Latin element wells up and knits from lust the pelt on the wall that’s ocelot or shadepelt or the imagination of matter. Nothing’s frugal. As for us, we want to give the city what lust has never ceased to put together. Young women or other women carrying their lovely voices as if on platters, their ten voices or nine voices in urgent errand dictating the imagination of matter. It is not our purpose to obscure the song of no-knowledge.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“I am the first suckling among multa, your artifice, your animal, gaudy with cries, gaudy with hunger and lovely with hunger and hunger.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“Can we awake from the century already
'or only cast over it
'propositions about the political
'as if to rescue ourselves?”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“To turn from this institution
'in the position of not-believing:
'This would be the utopian turn.
'I can't do it.
'So I pierce utopia
'with divine boredom.
And then the dog - for it was a dog who spoke'
gently ambled off
betwixt black trunks of trees
and I am going to tell you that this dog glanced back in simple sadness
said

'Soon there will be only society'.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“One animal says to another animal it is not safe you must not return I love you. Another says to her sister animal when you go you will never return then she dies in a camp. Another is a child and she stops living because of deceit. The animals in their velvety dressing gowns have thought bubbles. They break the incest taboo during a long cruel close-up and you can’t help but watch.”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip

“Generosity of the dead. This states The big problem of poetry. Who could Speak for the buildings, for the future of the dead The dead who are implicated in all I can say? On this very beautiful surface Where I want to live”
― Lisa Robertson, Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip