Was thinking about Lisa Robertson's "Rousseau's Boat" (Nomodos 2004) tonight in relation to an emerging trend in contemporary writing to witticisms and humour. Writers like David McGimspey and Lynn Crosbie, and many others (especially at the poetry readings I've been going to lately) seem to rely on humour as the heart and soul of their writing. I suppose this is not so unusual -- certainly a large chunk of Margaret Atwood's writing relies on a biting humour, and Al Purdy often used self-deprecating humour in his works.

To be clear, Robertson is not funny. I was thinking about her in relation to that style because there is something about her form that seems perfectly suited to humour -- even if it never really happens. But she is witty and much of the work entails fragmented sentences that just subtley twist familiar expectations:

Someone's history seemed sexy.
Place here a fifty-page description of errors made by the body.
People are flourishing inside all kinds of needs.
Just above a system, the slipping face is flawed and brave for no-one.
It will always be sex for someone who will want it protected as sex.

I know humour is the wrong language to refer to this by, but its one-liner nature, and its observational jouissance have a playfulness that at the least keeps humour in proximity.

Steve Evans has a useful review of the chapbook in Jacket that offers some insight into the Rousseau quote on the back, which informs the title of Robertson's work. Basically, Rousseau used his boat to escape the political world. It was the quiet, the passivity of the boat that gave him pleasure, not the ripping conclusiveness of political theory. Evans makes the nice point that Robertson's text capitalizes on "the drifting, non-purposive and non-accumulative experience" of Rousseau's boat.

It is a useful key to reading the poems as well -- they have the same pacing as the errant thoughts in mind as one is canoeing down an idle river. The first poem "Passivity" could even be read with the pacing of a paddle in hand, remembering painting, performance, and abstracted memories:

Here/ freedom has no referent. It is like/ an emotion.

This is not humour, of course, but it is akin to the amusement of discovering abstracted self-contained thoughts that pull us into their reality and away from the peaceful meanderings of the world.

Later:

At about midnight in autumn
The nightreading girls were thinking by their lamps.
The fleeing was into life.