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

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

well, the augustan stuff, these mannered young men, anyway. (medieval latin lyric is much more straightforward iirc)

or maybe like a jigsaw, you find the bits that are in the same case but scattered among the line and join them back together into something approaching sense.

cui dono lepidum novum libellum
arida modo pumice expolitum

lepidum and novum and expolitum are all masculine accusatives so they are all referring to the masc acc noun libellum, but arida and pumice are feminine ablatives so they belong together in the modifying clause

to whom do i give my new witty little book
just-now polished with dry pumice

etc

xposts oh fair enough! the dry pursuit of textbook exercises is something i recognise (i sometimes do it with maths, to check i still can)

as I may have said before I starting doing greek to take the place of crosswords. Latin one of these days.

i would probably have better luck if i replaced crosswords with greek: i don't think i have finished a cryptic in my life.

i guess what i want from a poem that makes a big deal of being a translation is that excitement of fitting things together, trying things out, working out what sounds good to you. 'this is a translation and the act of translation feels like this', not 'this is a translation and i am your translator and here is what i know'.

wherever your griping is coming from, i don't think it would stand up against the book, which i think is really fine. i think it pretty much CONSTANTLY trades on the excitement of fitting things together, trying things out, working out what sound good to you. that open letters monthly bit focuses too much on the 'theoretical' intrusions into the text, and it's seriously misleading about them because it doesn't try to capture how naturally brown will shift in and out of different registers from poem to poem or sentence to sentence. it's inventive and playful and compelling. reading it out loud is the best - his ear for speech from specific social / practical contexts is super exact and economical.

I choose to not. And I don’t feel bad about it either.

Where Catullus is losing his poise in his poems (or getting them stolen), here Brown's writing is about pulling back into equilibrium and self-justification. Brown by his own account finds that the work of translation as traditionally understood threatens the integrity of the self -- as well he might, because it always has. But instead of going on into danger, come what may, he pulls back into the safe zone.

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

Maybe there's something in the poem which remains after the conceit that nobody realized it is gone, but we'd have to see the rest to know.

But to go by other samples, Brown (and the reviewer) have embraced the Scholasticism of our time. Brown even writes the phrase "to cancel the somatic vehicle" in apparent earnestness. He must follow the prime directive: unmask and expose what they didn't realize, but we know. So that conceit is necessary. But what to do when faced with Catullus's

I hate and I love. Why do I do this, perhaps you’ll ask.
I don’t know. But I feel it happening and am tortured.

This is like a crystal of pain. Catullus has exposed himself completely. What is left for Brown to do?

I hate. I hate and. I hate “and.” I hate love. I hate questions.
I’m doing it. I hate doing it. I hate “doing.” I hate

I hate forts. I “hate” “forts.” I hate fortitude. I hate perhaps.
Perhaps I hate? No, I hate “perhaps.” Perhaps you’ll ask why hate.

What comes across is not hate but childish frustration. ("I hate forts"?) Brown seems to be at a loss. Then he falls back into ordinary critical prose separated by line breaks. This is what the reviewer finds most compelling, compared to Brown's "coy games" elsewhere. I'll take her word for it.

With theory we know the answers in advance, so any vertigo is that of an amusement park ride, where you get shaken up a bit and then come to rest where you started. Brown seems OK with that. It's the story he wants to tell, and he finds it interesting.

when does catullus ever lose his poise in his poems? they're incredibly carefully crafted.

for all he is "confessional" he is a very painstaking stylist.

Oh agreed. But in the couplet above, the speaking subject has been taken outside himself and is in torment. Whereas Brown isn't going to get into Catullus's mind, and wants you to know that he doesn't feel bad about it. I take that as the opposite motion. It may be pragmatic but what does it leave him with to say? "I hate forts"? In a sense he's made a fort of theory which defends him from Catullus, and from failure (theory can never fail).

I wrote the above after reading Robbins on Seidel, and the contrast between Brown and Seidel was the fuel.

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

― thomp, Saturday, September 8, 2012 10:27 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that is also a book i enjoy! sadly my the-books-of-jack-spicer is in a box, i was about to look for it so i could start typing bits in

wait no

The dead are notoriously hard to satisfy. Mr. Spicer's mixture may please his contemporary audience or may, and this is more probable, lead him to write better poetry of his own

http://samriviere.tumblr.com/post/30660042155

i don't think i understand what's going on there

(Have been reading Riviere's 81 Austerities, incidentally - strongly suspect him of being an ILxor, probably Nakhchivan)

(Could also imagine Patricia Lockwood posting - think ILx has inadvertently divined the voice of 21st century poetry)

I think I see what he's doing there & I enjoy that picture more than the bb Catullus trans. Never thought of that Dream Song as being in that line.

How is his book? Thinking about reading it though I haven't seen much of his work.

i guess if sounds like nakh, then sure, i'll read it.

nakh if you are sam riviere can you introduce me to harry burke why because he look intersting

actually i found a picture and he looks about 16? blimey. i guess i am an adult now, the bright young poets really are younger than me.

His work loses something in person (LOL at the Maria Minerva song)
http://vimeo.com/32034539

his little flat vowels

actually the bit where he reads out a url is pretty good.

best-selling poet starving in garret!

http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/31385996913/in-which-i-shamefacedly-ask-my-fake-internet-friends#notes-container

he'll pull through. good material for the next book! anti-car poems are very now and very environmentally friendly.

oh never mind looks like he took it down. weird.

first poems since the book came out. in poetry magazine:

Big Country
By Michael Robbins
Fiddle no further, Führer. Rome is built.
It took all day. Now let us so
love the world. I’m just thinking out loud.
My stigmata bring out my eyes.

The smallpox uses every part of  the blanket,
and the forest is a lady’s purse.
The Indian is a pink Chihuahua peeking
his head from the designer zipper.

Out here it’s mostly light from the fifteenth
century slamming into the planet.
I can’t see the forest for the burn unit.
All the planet does is bitch bitch bitch.

I know it’s last minute but could you put
out my eyes? At the subatomic level,
helmeted gods help themselves to gold.
Up here? The body’s an isolation ward.

That’s Incredible!
By Michael Robbins
I will pull an airplane with my teeth
and I will pull an airplane with my hair.
I write about cats. Cats, when you read this,
write about me. Be the change you want to see.

I’ve legally changed my name to Whites Only.
Changed it back, I should say.
DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME made me
the man I am today.

That, and the University of  Phoenix.
Old man, take a look at my life.
Charles Simic, in the gloaming, with a roach,
take a look at my life. I’m a lot like you.

A man stands up and says I will catch
a bullet in my teeth! That’s incredible!
He eats a sword, hilt first, and spits
up a million people persons.

A dolphin pulls an airplane with its blowhole
and keeps the black box for itself.
Bottleneck dolphins don’t even have bones,
yet here we are, giving them medals ...    

This is my ass. And that is a hole
in ground zero. I know which is which.
It’s the one with the smoke pouring out.
This is my handle; this is my spout.

Be Myself
By Michael Robbins
I took back the night. Wrested it
from the Chinese, many of  whom
were shorter than me.
Two billion outstretched Chinese
hands, give or take a few
thousand amputees.

A cheap knockoff, the night
proved to be — Nokla
not Nokia on the touchscreen.
Well, even Old Peng gotta eat,
Confucius say. Or maybe that
was Cassius Clay.

In me, folks, a movable object
meets a resistible force. I haven’t
worked a day since the accident
of   birth. Born of  woman,
my father the same. Make love
then war. I’ll bring round the car.

These children that I spit on
are immune to my consultations.
I’ll have none myself. It isn’t
(Write it!) a fiasco. I am small,
I contain platitudes.

The Second Sex
By Michael Robbins
After the first sex, there is no other.
I stick my gender in a blender
and click send. Voilà!
Your new ex-girlfriend.

You cuckold me with your husband.
I move a box with Ludacris.
The captain turns on, we begin our descent.
Be gentle with me, I’m new to this.

I say the wrong thing. I have OCD.
My obsessive compulsions are disorderly.
I say the wrong thing, did I already say?
I drive my dominatrix away.

The coyote drives her in a false-bottomed van.
He drops her in the desert. The bluffs are tan.
She’ll get a job at Chili’s picking up butts.
I feel ya, Ophelia, I say to my nuts.
And there is pansies. That’s for thoughts.

i wish i hadn't looked at that paris review interview before trying to read the poems. he comes off as such a dick that it kind of contaminated the 'voice' for me.

i am now eight units into 'teach yourself beginner's latin'.

I usually stall at about unit 10

okay.....nevermind...

no! I was happy to see the poems. They did leave me a little cold on first glance though - sounding a bit samey now. Will read more carefully later.

scott are you following michael robbins on tumblr