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

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

heh

let us say the sloppiness of all this is a rejection of the words arida modo pumice expolitum
that still doesn't make it right

how do u feel about EP's 'homage to sextus propertius'

i quite like it, though it suffers from the same feeling, that it has been written by a bore, but EP at least wants to pretend he has a feel for language.

where BB clearly wants to pretend that he has not

i kind of love this whole "i'm translating ... BUT AM I" sub-genre, so there's that ... maybe if i could actually do latin i would feel differently

and i am inevitably harsher on BB because he lives in a world in which Anne Carson already exists

that was a funny thing about this review here: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/odi-et-amo/

n an ideal world, perhaps it wouldn’t be too much to expect your readers to chuckle knowingly, on the basis of their intimate familiarity with the complete oeuvre of Catullus, but we live in this one.

on the basis of my intimate familiarity with the complete oeuvre of Catullus, if you must put it like that, i find these scraps insufferable

what's carson's catallus thing like? i've never read her, i picked up 'grief lessons' and thought it looked kind of exciting and then i lost my copy

xpost

that was re yr 'if i could actually do latin' (tbh you probably could do latin-enough-for-poetry, with a bilingual edition and a rough guide to pronunciation we all have enough tools to develop opinions on our own)

i know these poems and i have spent a lot of time thinking about these poems and as such i judge that this young man... has not.

oh i don't know if carson has particularly done catullus? I think of her as greek-and-not-latin. (the one time i studied translation studies i did an intense compare and contrast, carson vs catullus, on sappho's phainetai moi)

it was more that she has a method of engagement with classical poetry that is so powerful, and critical, and subtle, and surely just knowing that her work exists would shame a person out of this sort of sloppiness.

oh crap what am i saying, i've even read her catullus thesis thing, i just can't remember what went on in it any more

'enough latin' is something i've been meaning to get around to for a while /: i started working through wheelock's latin last year but gave up after a couple weeks because my girlfriend kept ragging on me for it

(the one i have not read is the one about her brother, which is like the catullus one about the brother)

would it be more fun to have a bilingual edition of some poetry, and a dictionary, and some verb and noun tables (or a shorter latin primer), and do it that way? would you get less ragged on for that?

doing latin poetry is basically doing the crossword

oh we split up. i would probably have been ragged on more for doing that, she was a philologist

i don't know if i'd find that more fun? i get some kind of satisfaction out of working through dull textbooks that i don't or wouldn't from trying to do it as some kind of imaginative pursuit instead

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