What if the poem’s not written to fulfill a discourse or to address an institutional formation, but to open new living and thinking? How much privacy would this poem need in the making? How much time? How much silence? Does the poem have, in Denise Riley’s words, “The right to be lonely”? I’m trying to think about solitude as an organ or an ornament of the social, not its opposite. Can the poem become the space of that solitude? In this instance I took 9 years to build a pronoun. During that time I didn’t talk about it, and that was a freedom and a pleasure.

Lisa Robertson lives with her dog in La Malgache, France, population 4. During her time in this place she has published Revolution, A Reader, an annotated anthology made in collaboration with Matthew Stadler, and Nilling, a collection of essays.