In 1979, she moved to British Columbia, where she remained for twenty-three years. During her time there, she was a member of The Kootenay School of Writing, which is a non-profit society that offers an alternative to the mainstream pedagogy of most Canadian universities.
Although it is not necessarily acknowledged as much as her ties to The Kootenay School of Writing, she was integrally involved in Vancouver's art scene. Robertson is an honorary board member of Artspeak Gallery. She has written on and reviewed exhibitions and pieces by Kelly Wood, Robert Garcet, Liz Magor, Allyson Clay, Kathy Slade, and Hadley+Maxwell, among others. She has also written on architecture and sites in British Columbia, such as New Brighton Park and Value Village. Robertson contributed the "Beneath the Pavilions" column to Mix from 1997-1999.
She co-edited the poetry journal Raddle Moon with Susan Clark in Vancouver, and has worked as an arts journalist, a book seller, a copy editor, an astrologer, a guest lecturer, and an essayist. She has written on the work of Robin Blaser, Denise Riley, Dionne Brand, Peter Culley, Ted Berrigan, John Clare, Lorine Niedecker, Pauline Reage, Michele Bernstein and Albertine Sarrazin.
In 2006, she was a judge of the Griffin Poetry Prize and Holloway poet-in-residence at UC Berkeley. Currently she is artist-in-residence at California College of the Arts, in San Francisco.
Her work is a deep questioning of language, history and gender that can help a reader to feel the world as constructed by words in new ways, sometimes uncomfortable, often beautiful often ugly.
She intentionally alters her writing style for each book-length work, although tends to not to stray too far from the form of the sentence and the issue of civic referentiality. Robertson refers to pronouns and self-referentiality as masques or puppets.
Many poets and writers have influenced Robertson. She has mentioned Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, the French feminists, Marguerite Duras, Nicole Brossard, Erin Mouré, Gail Scott, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, bpNichol, Steve McCaffery, and Charles Bernstein.
The Weather
One of her best known works, The Weather was written following her six-month Judith E Wilson visiting fellowship at the University of Cambridge. Variously described by others as a collection of poems inspired by BBC shipping forecasts, Wordsworths's The Prelude based upon a poetics derived from British metereology and its importance in contemporary culture and history, Robertson herself suggests "the weather" can refer to culture-specific customs, the problematic concepts of the universal, sincerity, friendship, the constitution of the English subject, and the historical merging of Romantic conceptions of identity and language.
In preparation for its completion, she researched pastoral poetry, meteorological prose, and Anglo-centric subjectivity, guided by authors like Wordsworth, Reverend Blomefield, Luke Howard, Thomas Forster, Aikin, Aratus, John Constable, and William Cobbett.
The Apothecary (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami, 1991; reissued 2001)
The Barscheit Horse with Catriona Strang and Christine Stewart (Hamilton, Ontario: Berkeley Horse, 1993)
XEclogue II-V (Vancouver: Sprang Texts, 1993)
XEclogue (Vancouver, BC: Tsunami Editions 1993, reissued by New Star Books, 1999)
The Glove: An Essay on Interpretation (Vancouver: UBC Fine Arts Gallery, 1993)
The Badge (Hamilton, Ontario: The Berkeley Horse/Mindware, 1994)
Earth Monies (Mission, BC: DARD, 1995)
The Descent (Buffalo, NY: Meow, 1996)
Debbie: An Epic (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 1997; UK: Reality Street, 1997)
Soft Architecture: A Manifesto (Vancouver: Artspeak Gallery, 1999)
The Weather (Vancouver, BC: New Star, 2001; UK: Reality Street, 2001)
A Hotel (Vancouver: Vancouver Film School, 2003)
Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture (Astoria, OR: Clear Cut Press, 2003)
Face/ (New York: A Rest Press, 2003)
Rousseau’s Boat (Vancouver, BC: Nomados, 2004)
First Spontaneous Horizontal Restaurant. Belladonna 75. (Brooklyn: Belladonna Books, 2005)
The Men: A Lyric Book (Toronto: BookThug, 2006)
Lisa Robertson's Magenta Soul Whip (Coach House Press, 2009)
R's Boat (University of California Press, 2010)
Selected Essays
"Coasting" with Jeff Derksen, Nancy Shaw, and Catriona Strang. Telling it Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Ed. Mark Wallace. (Tuscaloosa: Alabama UP, 2002)
"The Weather: A Report on Sincerity." DC Poetry Anthology 2001.
"How Pastoral: A Manifesto." A Poetics of Criticism. Ed. Juliana Spahr. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994)
"My Eighteeneth Century." Assembling Alternatives. Ed. Romana Huk. (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 2003)
"On Palinode." Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)
Selected Interviews and Conversations
"Correspondence" with Steve McCaffery. Philly Talks #17. (Philadelphia: Kelly Writers House, 2000)
"Lifted" with Kai Fierle-Hedrick. Chicago Review 51:4/52:1 (2006)
