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

will maybe buy this on the strength of this:

The Dark Clicks On

The morning slathers its whatever
across the thing.

i liked 'alien vs predator' the poem a lot but the idea of it as a modus operandi makes me really kind of depressed. i think i have had this in the to-buy section on amazon for a very long time - it was up there months before it was released, i think - but (fittingly?) the idea of buying this makes me feel like one of those people who buy only one hip hop album a year.

there are probably a lot of MFA poets who have worked out similar schticks? maybe? i mean: the glibness about 'poetry', how it comes out. (the morning slathers its whatever, yes.) n.b. i'm not saying "there are probably a lot of MFA poets ..." as a thing i know - i'm speculating! i'm just assuming he can't be the only one!

but his real talent with cadence, assonance, half-rhyme is there. full rhyme even! it just seems to be there in relation to a fairly limited set of targets: like i feel this is pretty low-hanging fruit for someone in his 30s to be going at.

it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s. it feels a bit like mark leyner. but, then, there was a new mark leyner book this year, and people actually wrote things about it, suggesting people might want to read a new mark leyner book in 2012, as if his uselessness hadn't been recognised and he hadn't been off writing those 'what to ask the doctor after your fourth pina colada' books, so, in conclusion, fml. (incidentally, i hope one of the poems here concludes:

and so, in conclusion, fml.

Might as well put basic resources here too I guess, good housekeeping. Robbins on twitter and tumblr.

this is a bit of gregory sherl from a book called the oregon trail is the oregon trail which i am going to put here for purposes of comparison:

I pause the game but your heart still beats
slowly. I rest the oxen, sing you folk songs
about mining a future west of Fort Kearney.
We hide from typhoid behind trees suffocating
the earth, but it still catches child #2, Wendy,
and your heart drops like a bowling ball down
a sewer. We always ford the river but today the swell
is God’s stomachache, and we lose two oxen.

Christopher, child #1, falls into a ditch
of rattlesnakes. Venom like whoa.
Death eats grass and the weeds wrap around
the wagon’s wheels, cracking the axel.
I can’t fix the axel, so we have to trade
40 bullets to a banker from Boston. Your ankles
are showing and a bulge is showing in the banker
from Boston, so I shoot him and take the bullets back.

On a night too lonely for color, you find blood
in places where blood should not be. Your tears
are a muted computer screen. Your dysentery is my dysentery.
I hold your hand and your eyes are milk. I tell you Soon.
Soon zombies will walk the earth, pouring salt
on open wounds. Today my fever kills my appetite,
and the bear I shot is rotting the end of the world.

i want to know what would happen if ilm's whiney g weingarten were made to read this book

it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s.

YES.

AvP in the New Yorker did feel belated, like 'how did it take so long for that to happen?'.

I suppose lots of MFA types must have got something similar (speculating too), but his engineering's quite daring in its crudity or flash or something: the frequent half-line sentences + piled-on full-rhyme couplets + simple syntax. (He's not one for following a thought or image over a stanza.)

ikwym too about the one hip-hop album a year thing.

i want to know what would happen if ilm's whiney g weingarten were made to read this book

was going to call the thread 'HIPSTER POET Michael Robbins has written a book of HIPSTER POETRY called Alien vs Predator' to lure in posters who can't resist what-is-hipster clusterfucks, but decided against (felt like dad-joke bid for wider ilx attn).

Sometimes I subscribe to the t.s.eliot school of evaluating poets based on how many of their lines couldn't possibly have come from anyone else, and I think Robbins scores pretty well on that metric. Compared to something like that Oregon Trail poem just posted, he's much less verbose ('punchier'?), which also helps him seem less sentimental even when he touches on 'serious' matters (e.g. the one that ends "I rape the earth. It's not my fault.")

Also I like this book 10x more since I began hearing the title as "alien verse predator", like how a kid might say it

someone subscribe to the london review of books and then cut and paste this review here cuz i want to read the whole thing:

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/michael-robbins/my-heart-on-a-stick

you can read this other seidel review here though as a pdf:

http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/5323_robbins_seidel.pdf

i HAVE to post a link to this again. i just have to. tour de force.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239972

That Oregon Trail poem… I dunno. It feels to me like it's working imaginatively with the experience of playing a computer game, and a much more conventional poem results. Robbins doesn't seem especially interested in poem-as-artifact crafted from that kind of engagement with experience, but I think I'm okay with that at the moment.

Scott, I won't post it here bcz i sort of know ppl there & feels bad karma to post the mag's stuff publically, but if your webmail works then it's on its way.

thanks!

I reviewed this a while ago: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/alien-vs-predator.html

Main thought: The way that [his best ]lines work independently of their source poems leads to my main criticism: the fragmentary nature of many of these poems means that one line often doesn’t build on the next, as Robbins jumps manically to the next gag, the next bit of pomposity-bursting—I suspect could randomly rearrange and mix lines from half a dozen poems collected here and they’d be no worse for it. But poems that present a unified argument or the encapsulation of a place or an experience are not the sort of poems Robbins is usually interested in writing, so it’s not necessarily just to have a go at him for not writing them.

Robbins on Hass: "...he thinks that merely intoning the names of things can replace the hard work of description."

You say "the hard work of description", Mr. Robbins?

Description in prose can be spun out at tedious length. What's another dozen sentences when you're pounding away at a comprehensive catalog of piled-up details?

Instead, he may have been thinking of a rather idealized concept of poetic description, where a few words are made to encapsulate masses of detail by a process of deft suggestion, incorporating gesture, rhythm and coloration. Or not. I am not a mind reader.

i would check out that NYT article linked upthread, even though there is a sly winking reference to mcclatchy early on, it is very full of truth, for example

Mr. Robbins’s pop-cultural knife skills, however, may be among the least interesting things about him. Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix. What puts his poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command. He delivers his verses in tight, mostly rhyming quatrains and quintets that march down the page like the work of Frederick Seidel or Mr. Muldoon himself ...

When Mr. Robbins’s poems miss, they miss hideously, veering close to nonsense (“My smoothie/comes with GPS”). Non sequiturs are heaped into tottering piles. In bad young poets, knowingness is to knowledge what truthiness is to truth, as Mr. Robbins’s lesser stuff makes plain.

... But he has a sky-blue originality of utterance.

anyway i agree with aimless on "gesture, rhythm and coloration"

i don't like slam poetry and i already had a beatnik phase but i think sometimes this stuff sounds so nice read aloud

ototh everything i've read by mcclatchy and wheeler otoh has made me wince

i would disagree with Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix perhaps but i know what he means

that beatdown on hass was funny

seidel review was great too

thanks scott!

Thar review of Hass was hilarious: "Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy."

that's probably the most unfair line in it, though!

"sacking" more like "sacking" amirite

Confirmed reports of three people I know reading this. This means obv its popularity is only matched by Fifty Shades of Grey.

One of them reminded me where Rilke being a jerk came from:

3. A stimulant for an old beast

Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.
—I'm not so young but not so very old,
said screwed-up lovely 23.
A final sense of being right out in the cold,
unkissed.
(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under
things.

All these old criminals sooner or later
have had it. I've been reading old journals.
Gottwald & Co., out of business now.
Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.
She holds her breath like a seal
and is whiter & smoother.

Rilke was a jerk.
I admit his griefs & music
& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.
A threshold worse than the circles
where the vile settle & lurk,
Rilke's. As I said,—

Rilke consults Dr. Freud

xpost good eye! I had to stop reading Dream Songs last year cuz they were making me too unhappy, but i've been meaning to return to them

Also, can we talk about Robbins' relation to other poets/"the canon"? As mentioned upthread, I like his "Reading Late Ashbery", but the Whitmanny one about the twig (don't have the book at hand right now) seemed a little facile..... Berryman's obviously present as an influence througout, including some explicit invocations of Mr. Bones -- wonder how this ties in to Robbins' own hip-hop influence/blackface anxieties/etc??

apparently we can't

I'd like to but I've been apart from my copy of AvP for a few days & my crippling prac crit anxiety leaves me unwilling to say anything without TEXTUAL SUPPORT.

good interview:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=754

"I'm just an evangelist for Sullivan right now. That man can sing. I haven't felt this way about a writer since I read Michael Herr's Dispatches. Sullivan could write about anything and I'd read it. David Grann, too — I read every word he writes. But Grann’s definitely a reporter, a journalist. Sullivan, to me, is the American writer right now, in any genre. I'd put him up there with Herr, Didion, McPhee, Dillard, DFW. I think he's a horse. He's staring us down."

i really gotta get that sullivan collection. i never go to stores with new books in them. will go to amherst this weekend.

also didn't know about the marilynne robinson review MR wrote. will have to read that now:

http://observer.com/2012/03/keeping-faith-in-when-i-was-a-child-i-read-books-marilynne-robinson-criticizes-american-politics/?show=all

i love books pretty much the only place i can go to hear from robinson fans.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/life/ct-prj-0902-frederick-seidel-20120905,0,7555100,full.story

1

Every book has a beginning, and this is this book's beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That's kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or "fun." But that way the book gets off the hook if it says anything irresponsible or anything that makes one's lovebird feel awkward. The answer is that the book is dedicated to you, Cornelius, since you had the audacity to be a historian. And to write three books and belabor them! Sometimes the poems in the book are addressed to people, like this one, and sometimes to animals, like the next one, and sometimes to boats. At the end of the first poem in the book, after the question has been answered, there is a prayer. The prayer is about amor fati and virgins. It gets heard.

Hymen o Hymenaee!

sorry, that one's too long to type in!

He revs the language like a hypersonic superbike.

can I just—

whoops I meant to—

um, that look-i-have-read-Catullus poem is... what am i supposed to like about it?

or, you know, what is one supposed to like about it. i mean, i went and read a review of it, to work it out, and that didn't seem to tell me very much except that apparently using the word "belabour" must be charming, or something.

and translation studies, and etc.

but this messy, lazy, clever-sixth-former-who-has-slept-through-their-a-level-set-text-classes-and-thinks-catullus-is-a-bit-like-him (and i would know) stuff is just... boring.

ha, i think it looks great

I’ve been really trying
baby
to hold back this feeling
for so long
don’t fight it since dad owns your sex
don’t fight it since Rome owns your sex

EYEROLL

how would we ever know that augustan rome was patriarchal without the clever young men of the early 21st century to remind us

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

I think he posted here a few times. He’s a metal fan. I saw his essay collection in the bookstore the other day. Blurbed by Elif Batuman.

He posts upthread a few times.

i'm pretty sure he's aware of how much i hate his work

lol

yeah this dude is like nails on a chalkboard for me