Also Known As

admin — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Being a writer is often a difficult endeavor. It’s not the desire nor the passion that is constraining but more often the discipline, the dedication. Sometimes what writers struggle most with is the publicity of the written word. Once something is printed, with your name next to it–there is no going back. It may be one of the reasons so many authors choose to publish under a pseudonym, a fictional name created to hide the identity of the author in order to create a truly private space where creativity can thrive.

Elizabeth Robinson has taken this practice one step further. In her latest book of poetry, Also Known As, Robinson “interacts” with the work of Portuguese poet Fernando Passoa in an effort to “explore the opportunities and limitations of persona(e).” What is interesting and challenging about this task is that Passoa wrote most if his work under “heteronyms,” alter-egos with distinct personalities and unique poetic voices. As introduction, Robinson opens with a poem by Richard Reis, one of Passoa’s most well known and prolific identities.

Robinson doesn’t merely rely on the inspiration of Passoa’s work, but rather invokes an exploration of identity that is both darkly ambiguous and yet deeply personal. By refraining from use of gender based descriptors and pronouns, Robinson relies on the collective consciousness of anyone who seeks to be identified. Her work is simultaneously brave yet cowers to self-consciousness – I, who loved to fondle the antonyms, was caught red-handed. – “Intermediary”

Poetry is a form of literature that many people shy away from, out of fear of not understanding or lack of connection to the material, often because of the way it’s presented. Robinson balances gracefully on this tightrope, and offers a collection of work that is both intellectual and accessible. On the power of poetry, I must agree with Travis MacDonald who suggests “The cumulative result is a seamless (if eerily disjointed) whole in which the individual edges of authorial identity become indistinguishable from the tangible act of each poem’s performance on the page.”

Written by: Alicia Sowisdral, August 24th 2010

Apostrophe

admin — Sat, 06 Jan 2007 20:15:00 +0000

By Elizabeth Robinson

Apogee Press

Elizabeth Robinson’s new book of poetry, Apostrophe, is startling in a number of respects: more white space than word, more whisper than yawp, poems with one-word titles like “Wind” and “Lost”—and, in fact, titles like “Anemone” repeated twice, as if the author were revising herself or perhaps offering variations on a theme. The language first encountered seems startlingly abstract and enigmatic, although moments of sensational contact invoke Whitman’s advice: “missing me one place, search another,” at the end of “Song of Myself.”

In two epigraphs, the poet signals that the book is, in part, a narrative about grace, coming unpredictably like an a gift of words. Often, here, because of the sparseness of the lines, the silence in the interstices, the words seem more sacrifice than gift, offered almost reluctantly and with great caution. In her revisions, her repeated titles, her quiet musings, she experiments with forms of grace as made manifest in the wind, in the passage of time, in the unfolding of petals.

Perhaps the most extraordinary effect of the work, finally, is a product of the author’s singular talent as a sculptor of bodies: mouths and spines and armpits vivid, bare, resplendent: “My back pressed up against your back, and times’s tensile in between”—time and flesh, object and abstraction nestled up against each other.

Robinson’s title alludes to a poetic convention: the direct address, in this case I think to the reader, rather than to the wind or perhaps some supernatural being as others have done. An apostrophe is also, of course, a punctuation mark of elision or ownership. Read the white space; find what’s omitted, she asks, and there you will find a poet of remarkable control and evocative power.

Written by: Rick Taylor, January 6th 2007