Walking Seven Walks : solitaries, spirit-mediums and matrilineal influence in Lisa Robertson's poetics of soft architecture

Abstract

"Walking Seven Walks" comprises a full-length manuscript of poems and an exegesis on Canadian poet Lisa Robertson's poetics of soft architecture and her millennial poem Seven Walks. Entitled Song of the Year, my creative manuscript presents chronologically the results of a daily urban walking practice undertaken between 2017 and 2022. Informed by Robertson's poetics of soft architecture, a counter-discipline that recomposes space via a feminist lens, my poems reconsider Charles Olson's "composition by field" (1950), investigate open-form possibilities for reading poems, and pursue the lyric mode's capacity for realising the temporary and everchanging constitutions of material space. My exegesis makes a literary-historical argument for Lisa Robertson's Seven Walks as modelling a collective, feminist practice of urban walking that converses with the hidden labours of previous generations of women and confers prophetic possibilities for world- building. I argue Seven Walks, published between 1999 and 2003, represents what I call the "climate fin de si+¿cle" in Robertson's deployment of baroque aesthetics and the poem's registration of late-industrial crises. Chapter One positions Robertson in a Romantic context, arguing that her figuration of the soft architect and guide as plural and gender-fluid walkers ironises Rousseau's model of the "solitary walker" as depicted in Reveries of a Solitary Walker (1782). I demonstrate that an alternative and collaborative matrilineal genealogy, via the works of Mary Wollstonecraft and Dorothy Wordsworth, informs Robertson's walking strategy, which registers and reflects on the effects of late-industrial capitalism, including accelerating financial economies and environmental destruction. Chapter Two argues that spirit-medium discourse is a significant line of matrilineal influence in Seven Walks. I analyse two key mediumistic tropes at work in Seven Walks: the figure of the guide and the spatial unit of the room. I argue that the guide opens the text to modes of more-than-human relating. I also argue that Robertson's use of the room channels the spirit and influence of Virginia Woolf in "A Room of One's Own" (1929) and beyond.

Date of Award	2022
Original language	English