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

also I wrote this: http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/03/dayal_patterson_s_history_of_black_metal_reviewed.single.html

i enjoyed that. I do not know anything about Black Metal, but I did like the cheerful attempt to chart a course around the book's shit prose.

I've only really begun to think through the implications of your dropping by here. Let's say I read your next book (which I will), and let's say I want to pop into ILX & say 'Yes, but…' and 'This is good, but then maybe…' (& this is how I respond to things I like), it could be awkward. Even if I slope off to another thread, then that's talking behind your back. So maybe I'll just post here, try to believe you both are/aren't present & see what happens.

I had a very similar transilvanian hunger experience.

also: I liked the article about music and character identification. it's probably the reason I liked that much despised Goon Squad novel.

I remain non-committal about AvP - and am determined to remain non-committal for SS to avoid awkwardness woof describes.

have just moved house tho and have just put AvP in the poetry shelf - between the wall and... hang on (am lying on bed upstairs and need to check)... Yeats! twixt a lough and a hard place.

http://i1142.photobucket.com/albums/n601/gamalielratsey/2014-03-06233700_zps546714c4.jpg

how do you feel about edward dorn, f.

i feel like i wish i could afford a copy of gunslinger

20 bucks delivered, doesn't seem that far out. also if you buy the new collected dorn brick then by weight you're only paying six, seven bucks for slinger

There have been plenty of years of my life when twenty bucks for a book was at the far edge of the possible. Not now, happily.

I paid 11 for Ashbery's Flow Chart last month, that was a splurge

how do you feel about edward dorn, f.

― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 00:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

really like it - the protean central voice and the presentation of time are done very well I think. it's a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form. "Western frontier as appropriate place and set of characters with which to study the soul and it's journeys" is absolutely a premise I buy. it's witty, conversational and fun, and laced with song. i like Burroughs, but you allow a lot for the pleasure of listening to his discursive tone of voice - Gunslinger reminded me of Burroughs, but here the internal philosophy, structure and tale, such as it is, is in its own terms coherent, which gives it that overarching tension that long poems need. there's some brilliant set pieces, like this abstract gunfight between the Horse and a loose-tongued stranger:

The Stoned Horse said Slowly
not looking up
from his rolling and planning
Stranger you got a [i]pliable lip
you might get yourself described
if you stay on.

Come on!
Who's the horse, I mean who's
horse is that, we can't have
No Horse! in here.
It ain't proper
and I think I'm gonna
put a halter on you!

Uh uh, the Gunslinger breathed.
Anybody know the muthafucka
the Stoned Horse inquired
of the general air.
Hey, hear that the strange gasped
that's even a negra horse!

Maybe so, maybe not
the Gunslinger inhaled
but stranger you got an Attitude
a mile long
as his chair dropped forward
all four legs on the floor
and as the disputational .44
occurred in his hand and spun there
in that warp of relativity one sees
in the backward turning spokes
of a buckboard,

then came suddenly
to rest, the barrel utterly justified
with a line pointing
to the neighborhood of infinity.
The room froze harder.

Shit,
Slinger, Lil noticed, You've pointed
your .44 straight
out of town.
I keep tellin you
not to be so goddamn fancy
now that amacher's
got the drop on you!

Not so, Lil!
the Slinger observed.
Your vulgarity is flawless
but you are the slave
of appearances –-
this Stockholder will find
that his gun cannot speak
he'll find
that he has been Described
STRUM
the greenhorn pulled
the trigger and his store-bought iron
coughed out some cheap powder,
and then changed its mind,
muttering about having
been up too late last night.
Its embarrassed handler
looked, one eye wandering,
into the barrel
and then reholstered it and
stood there.

strum

The total .44
recurred in the Slinger's hand
and spun there
then came home like a sharp knock
and the intruder was described -
a plain, unassorted white citizen.

the successful unpunctuated distinction of speech and description is always i think a sign of writer invisibly in charge of their rhythms and tone (like Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse's long pages of brief exchanges where the identity of the speaker remains fixed in the mind. It reminds me of what George Saintsbury in his book on English prose rhythm said about Malory's Morte d'Arthur:

[There are plenty of sentences in Malory beginning with "and"; but it is not the constant go-between and usher-of-all-work that it is in Mandeville.] The abundance of conversation gets him out of this difficulty at once; and he seems to have an instinctive knowledge - hardly shown before him, never reached after him till the time of the great novelists - of weaving conversation and narrative together. [...] His narrative order and his dialogue are so artistically adjusted that they dovetail into one another.

After all, this method and presentation is a 20th/21st C one, but Dorn does it very well. The closest analogue in some ways feels like the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.

cost me £10, which didn't seem unreasonable - tho like Aimless I'm now in the happy position where I can spend that amount on a book without feeling a bit sick.

"a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form" -- yeah, i think at the time i looked at it i wasn't really in the mood to read it charitably: like, my response was Yes I Get It And I Am Bored Of This Riff Now And I Am Only About Two Fifths Convinced Your Line Breaks Are Not Arbitrary. i think it's a lot like other pynchon performances too, like the occasional drops into pulp in GR.

when i read the north atlantic vortex pomes i found myself thinking mb i should have given slinger more of a shot; have forgotten what i liked about those, though. was enthused about the collected but i. the cover is carcanet's worst ever ii. fear of amassing further collective works i will not open, like geo. hill's collected e.g., which has been glaring at me resentfully from various piles and bookshelves, still totally unopened, since december

yeah the North Atlantic Turbine poems definitely show that he knows what he's doing with his linebreaks/form - iirc i liked them because there is a spine of traditional lyric there, he's closer to a posed or precise English voice than I expected - & I think that gave me some of the trust needed to follow Gunslinger (which I liked a lot). I'd like to read more but, yeah, it's stuck in the black hole of being a huge ugly book that I can't or won't carry round with me. I will never learn about big collecteds.

actually maybe I will. I've been buying single volumes of Geo Hill 2nd-hand lately - cheaper since the collected.

interesting. if you should decide any of them are run-don't-walk let me know and i will set up some kind of lever and axle system with which to heave the collected onto some sort of lectern for necessary physical support and prise it open to the relevant section

i just this week ordered a single louise gluck instead of all of the louise gluck under one cover. i feel very glad of that.

we should start a Hill thread. Maybe he'll show up too.

actually, I haven't seen that collected Hill about – does it go full on with the apparatus?

(I don't know why the thought of lots of notes at the back depresses me. Maybe it's because Hill feels a bit too much like a poet born to be annotated)

i literally haven't opened the thing. it feels a little intimidating.

I always used to like that he was a poet with a tiny collected. You could take it anywhere.

I'm reviewing the collected Hill for Poetry. Thing is HUGE. No notes, just nearly 1000 pages of poems—including no fewer than FOUR new books. I love Hill, but I'll stick w/ my nice portable Penguin UK ed. of the Selected.

My being here should in no way preclude anyone's saying anything about my work, to answer something said above. Me. My work. See? Two separate things. Not really, but I wouldn't argue w/ anyone's taste—no one's poetry's for everyone.

Also: I reviewed Glück's collected for the LARB, but rereading it recently I felt I was overgenerous. Meadowlands is the shit.

Been digitally carrying around Jack Gilbert's medium-hefty Collected Poems for the past month.

I am actually kind of tempted to order the smaller Hill, or at least to hope to find it, as a way of delaying opening 'Broken Hierarchies' again. Odd that both of the books I'm most putting off reading right now look like they're written by Santa Clauses gone to seed.

The American ed. is the same, just not as compact & attractive, in my view, but still portable:

http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Geoffrey-Hill/dp/0300164300/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1394382467&sr=8-2&keywords=geoffrey+hill

I just read Colin Burrow's review of Broken Hierarchies in the lrb, and it is not a terrible piece of work but I do find it dismal or circular or something when historically minded eng lit dons claim Hill as a great poet.

Four new volumes. I'm not going near it. going to reread Mercian Hymns instead.

('I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.')

so

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824

has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or

hey murk how far from the end of broken hierarchies are you now

have you started it?

no judgement I'm not exactly tearing through that Dorn.

i read mercian hymns and three other pages selected at random

so

https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824

has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or

― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 10:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=otm

had no idea! thought it was ilx specific.

did click through tho on the money is like 5th down w 4 votes

1 otm
Other Than Mexicans
A term used by US Border Patrol agents when catching illegal aliens.
What a night last night! We caught 250 people 23 of them were OTMs
by abula February 29, 2004

58 34

how ironic

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/07/atheists_the_origin_of_the_species_by_nick_spencer_reviewed.single.html

3,200 comments

enjoyed that but i am not going near those comments

gotta admit i've really come around on this guy and this book

There once was a rapping tomato,
That's right, a rapping tomato,
And he rapped all day,
From April til May,
and also, guess what? it was me.

― thomp, Saturday, June 9, 2012 6:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

also this is hilarious

Michael Robbins
‏@alienvsrobbins
Anyone interested in buying my 2011 32" LG LCD flat-screen HDTV? Great shape. Will let it go cheap if you transport from Crown Heights.

B-)

http://i.imgur.com/7UlScn2.png

yo did you guys see 'country music' in the nyer last month, i thought it was p fuckin lovely

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/lifeguard-2

God keep Carl Perkins warm
and Jesus Christ erase
my name from all the files in
the county’s database.
The dog that bit my leg
the night I left the state,
Lord won’t you let his
vaccines be up to date.

Thanks, but there's a glitch on the NYer's website. That poem is in quatrains. All stanza breaks have disappeared from poems on their site, which is really annoying. Here's Shannon McArdle's version, icyi:

http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/94073831275/shannon-mcardle-formerly-of-the-mendoza-line-one

sick! (wont play for me tho)

hm, it don't work. well, here it is on shannon's blog:

http://www.shannonmcardlemusic.com/blog/2014/8/12/god-bless-michael-robbins.html

did anyone else love the mendoza line as much as i did?

i am a fan

lmao i both can can't believe there's an ilx thread about this dude

one of the worst writers and people

i agree since he unfollowed me on twitter

he was an incredible asshole on a message board i was on circa 2010-2011? right around the time "alien v predator" hit the new yorker. that poem is ok, but dude's essays truly reveal the total nothing going on behind his eyes