Lisa Robertson, _The Men_

THE MOST INTRIGUING book of poetry I've read in a while, I'd say.  Is it a long poem, The Men, in five sections ("Men Deft Men," "Evening Lit the Gnat," "A Record," "Of the Vocable," and "True Speech") or a collection titled The Men, containing five poems? I incline to the former view, both because of a variety of internal unities and because I am a man, and as a man I like large projects with many distinct parts, as Robertson notes: "How boring and fascinating the men. / I do this for them with structure and bigness."  And yes, structure and bigness are the royal road to my heart as a poetry-reading man.

The Men reminds me in passing of Ben Marcus ("Prior and excellent head of the boy/.../ I'm ready to believe / when speech slips out of the animal's head / it seems normal") and of Mathias Svalina's Why I am White, which also plays a fantasia on a much-discussed category of identity, but I am above all reminded, of all people, of Walt Whitman and "Song of Myself."

I think this may be because of Robertson's confident and capacious first person pronoun -- "I love it exceedingly and I satisfy my judgement," "I saunter somewhere" -- and because of her catalogues -- "hydromel in wildness and hydromel in the form of the world and hydromel dripping from the face, your face, the face of the men, hydromel filling the boats in the interminable night" -- or even because of some group swimming (62).  

(Hydromel, by the way, is "a mixture of honey and water that becomes mead when fermented." I take the image to function in the poem as shorthand for the relationship between men and alcohol.)

I think The Men most reminds me of "Song of Myself" because Whitman, as a man, felt empowered to speak of all men in general, and Robertson, as a woman, feels likewise empowered to speak of all men in general, in the process noticing some points Walt did not mention:

Let the thought here be planted

That the men want to float

Just the pink tip of their

Thing touching the firmament

My god, how did she know that?  But perhaps Walt did mention this, depending on how you look at the "headland" passage in "Song of Myself."

Robertson tends to give men a break, even when a break is not really merited ("The problematic politics adorable"), but points out some necessary home truths. "They cannot resist their own honour." "Men, we are already people." As someone old enough to remember Robin  Morgan's Monster, I appreciated -- loved! -- Robertson's tone, exasperated but wanting to help if we could be bothered to listen.