Michael Robbins - Alien Vs. Predator (nb this book of poems is not about aliens, predators or their conflicts)

is that a profession or the name of a pernicious tendency or a provincial locality or what

there was a point when i knew the answer to that

It's his sort of antiquarian, sort of made-up word for Welsh. So locality basically.

Herbert i think i'd push up a bit. also <3 woof obv. Marvell's going up to ten not for consistency but for what he does when he does it - tho those nines are p solid and a hard league to escape from imo. Like Herrick but too high imo. Jonson???? walking to Scotland to meet W Drummond is all i remember. (I know f' all about 17th C poetry). lol@ Vaughan twins, obv soft spot for Ths.

Rochester didn't used to get so much love 40 years ago. I'm glad to see he's rising in the world again.

maybe nothing ever happens to him so he's just gotta write about twizzlers and rappers.

― unprepared guitar (Edward III), Friday, April 5, 2013 5:28 PM (4 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

haha this gets at it exactly

what if twizzlers and rappers are what happen 2 u hmmmm?

im glad the warning was added to the thread title, i kept accidentally clicking it

Huh, never heard of this guy, but I like the samples reproduced on this thread. I definitely get a Mark Leyner vibe, in that it provokes a similar response to how I felt when I first encountered Leyner back in the day, ie., "You can do that in a poem (novel)!?" and both make me laugh, which is always a plus.

well that was my long-ago (now) response to the seidel and robbins poems that muldoon put in the new yorker. i had forgotten that poetry could be funny. and entertaining. and still be decent poetry. i certainly forgot this reading the new yorker over the years. which is why i started the muldoon/new yorker thread. definitely refreshing. do i want all poetry to be like this? no. i think its cool that people who never buy poetry bought the robbins book though. like me. when was the last example of that? brautigan probably. ginsberg before him. unless you count rod mckuen. actually, maya angelou would be a more recent example. michael robbins and maya angelou should go on a world tour.

Sadly it seems harder to think of poets who are both funny and good than it should be. In addition to Ginsberg and Brautigan, I guess I would include Frank O'Hara, Philip Larkin, hmm... running out of names. I guess I don't find Ashbery very funny. I probably need to read more poetry.

Oh yeah, Charles Simic can be kind of funny.

my kids thought the robbins book was hysterical. i read almost the whole thing to them and maria when i got it.

I guess one question in my mind is how much of Robbins' effect depends on being transgressive or shocking - because that kind of thing tends to have a short shelf-life. Not many people still listen to Lenny Bruce.

you gotta live or die by your words. his poems read really well and are a lot of fun to read aloud. will people want to read them in 50 years? who knows?

Good point. I'm not really worrying about people 50 years hence. More like whether these are poems I'll want to re-read. "Worried" is probably too strong a word. I've read some of them twice now, and so far they are holding up!

missed this one:

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/books/ct-prj-0908-poetry-essay-20130906-1,0,7411339,full.story

'take my american poetry, please!'

man septemberrrrr but i wanna read internet excerpts nowwwwwwww

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51MD4Lv8NLL._SY344_BO1,204,203,200_.jpg

oh boy

j., you can! 12 of the poems have been published online (in The New Yorker, Poetry, Commonweal, The Economy, Hazlitt, Lemon Hound, & The Walrus).

well that sounds like a needless hassle, what am i, a poetry hunter-gatherer, this is late late web 2.0 capitalism, where's my commodity (that other people will buy and type from)

boo

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/book-reviews/he-who

you need to work on yr google skillz

https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/poem-springtime-chicago-november

also, website w/ links: michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com

it's too late now that i know he thinks 'naturalism appears incoherent'

he's me, & he's right. you don't have to be a theist to figure that out. read john mcdowell. also, lol at the usual atheist bigotry. see ya.

murk if you are actually M.R. you should know that Grado headphones are not acceptable in a library environment because they are "open" style headphones and thus leak sound, it's very annoying

you know, you're actually quite right about that. i bought some noise-canceling sennheisers recently & tho they're lower grade than the grados my ipod sounds better on them. also less leakage.

sorry for being cranky, but deciding not to read someone's work because of his philosophical or religious beliefs is just dumb, unless he's a nazi or something, & even then ...

there's no way i'm reading this whole thread

i could care less what kind of -eist anyone is, but apologetics games are just a travesty

and i would recommend some reading for you in turn if you haven't picked up teh ilx house tone yet

i don't think i require any reading recommendations. i'm familiar with the arguments for naturalism. they're woefully unconvincing. i've been writing articles attacking scientism for years. i'll take mcdowell & marilynne robinson & nagel & charles taylor & hart & mark johnston & anyone else from plato on who, theist or not, understands how conceptually thin bald naturalism is. the naivete of the scientistic worldview is astounding—uncannily like that of the most naive theistic construal available to the most benighted peasant in 15th-century europe.

but i also don't think i'll be sticking around. depressing to have my first interaction on here entail a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times.

as for the "house tone," if suggesting you read john mcdowell's "mind and world" violates it, good.

you weren't following my meaning at all. you think we're having a conversation that we're not having. the suggested reading would be ilx itself, for you, so you can pick up OUR tone(s). sheesh. i'm not gonna read your book or not read your book for any special reason having to do with you or anything you believe or don't, except your belief in writing funny poems.

https://www.beloit.edu/reason/images/348601.jpg

it's too late now that i know he thinks 'naturalism appears incoherent'

Yeah, mr, this was a joke. ilx has evolved it's own standards of rhetoric and evidence, although it often seems like knowing how to navigate those doesn't prevent arguments.

murk, can you elaborate on how memes entail intelligent design? I'm not seeing the argument. I think Dawkins would say that there definitely are strictly natural processes by which intentional contents can be selectively replicated. Certain intentional contents have the right features, or the right pragmatic consequences, to compel psychological uptake. This can be voluntary or not - what matters is how they appeal to the brain. Mutations occur because of shifting social and psychological conditions. Some intentional contents lose their appeal. Some are able to mutate enough to stay in circulation.

I'm not saying that it's the most fascinating theory in the world, but the leap to intelligent design makes no sense to me.

murk you should stay a while. & I like your poetry. i mean yes I spend some of this thread umming over it but that is a compliment in my head.

i see. i picked a fine time to be humorless. j., if you give me yr email address, i'll get yr address from you & make sure you receive a bound galley of the book when they're available.

jmm, more tk when i have a moment to spare.

but i also don't think i'll be sticking around. depressing to have my first interaction on here entail a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times

There's lots more interesting things to discuss around here than naturalism vs theism. Judging by the band references in your poems you might enjoy some of the threads on I Love Music (sister board).

yeah, i've lurked on the rolling metal & country threads for years. i know scott seward & chuck eddy a bit.

well then MIX IT UP a little!

i sent you a webmail, you probably want to check your spam filters etc.

i'm leery of mixing it up. see above—i lose my internet cool too easily.

woof, love the title of this thread.

a conversation i've had literally hundreds of times.

It would appear to be a compelling enough topic that each new encounter requires getting it out of the way. Once had, it needn't be repeated.

However, if your intent in participating in ILB is to seek intellectual stimulation of such a high order that you need not run over ground you've covered before elsewhere, or explain cherished ideas that you've developed over a long period of time, then prepare for disappointment. We are only human. Our only claim to intellectualism here is that we do not dismiss it out of hand, but rather we find the world of ideas worthwhile and reading of literature rewarding. We share that.

Once had, it needn't be repeated.

cmon aimless remember where you are

Right. I went for a long walk, thought a bit about this thread. It seems likely to me that MR aka murk may not have much to gain from engaging with ilx. Shocking conclusion, I know. If I'm wrong, then now that he's touched the ilx tarbaby, he'll be sticking around for sure. He won't be able to help it.

In the meantime, I will go to his link and try to find out how he is using 'naturalism'. The only use of this term in regard to lit that I can recall was to describe the Hamlin Garland-Theodore Dreiser-Frank Norris-Stephen Crane school of writing, and that's nowhere in the same neighborhood of how he's using it above, obviously. As a term of art in philosophy, I don't have it in my mental dictionary.

OK. Got it.

naturalism—the doctrine that there is nothing apart from the physical order, and certainly nothing supernatural—is an incorrigibly incoherent concept

I'll just point out the main thing to notice in approaching this quote is that "naturalism" is not interchangeable with "science". Science pragmatically limits itself to natural phenomena and does not pretend to address questions of transcendence. This allows it a remarkable coherence within its own sphere of inquiry. Neither Hart nor MR is calling scientific knowledge incoherent, but rather the attempt to apply that knowledge to questions that science wisely ignores and to dismiss or deny matters of transcendence on the very grounds that scientific knowledge does not shed light on them. Which is simply perverse.

However, this seems like a discussion more fit for I Love Everything more than I Love Books, in that ILE has cornered the market on threads upon this subject matter. We trod that sorry path again a couple of weeks ago on Are you an atheist?. I understand now why murk would want to sidestep that dreary exercise.

Yes, Aimless, this is what I say in the piece, & what Hart says. The problem is not with science but with scientism, an epistemically arrogant presumption to transcendent knowledge (God is a "delusion," &c.) that happens to be ironically faith-based. This is what I (& many others) accuse Dawkins, Hitchens, Dennett, et al., of practicing. They can't even get the arguments straight (e.g., Dawkins misunderstands Thomas's Aristotelian notion of "first cause"; Hitchens makes innumerable historical errors, &c.).

But Hart's & Eagleton's & Robinson's books exist, so I don't have to have these exactly-the-same-every-time discussions.

Does transcendent knowledge constitute a specific checklist of things or is it just demarcated as things that are currently untestable, or things thought to be never testable?