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

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

"Make love / then war. I’ll bring round the car." = his entire appeal summed up in two sentences

full admission: michael and i are facebook pals and we have emailed each other. he's a fan of my rockcrit. he is most definitely a crank and he trolls his facebook friends on a weekly basis. but i like cranks.

he's got a book of criticism in the works and i will definitely buy it.

that makes sense. i kind of enjoy his voice more when he has his critic hat on than his poet hat, i think.

i like reading what people think of his stuff. i like hi poems cuz they're funny/clever. poetry rarely makes me laugh. but i'm no expert on form and poetry and stuff. so, i'm curious what people think. even if they hate it. i think if i were a poet i would be jealous and hate him just cuzza the attention/reviews he's gotten in the mainstream press. and the whole poetry for people who don't like poetry thing. what makes him unique to me is that i really enjoy reading his poetry reviews and i never read poetry reviews. cuz they make my eyes glaze over. so, you know, accessibility, humor...

*HIS* poems...

scott what do you think of frederick seidel, ilx what do you think of frederick seidel

i like him! that's what started my paul muldoon/new yorker poetry thread on this board. a seidel poem. and that's where i first cut & paste alien -vs- predator poem by MR. maybe the most shared/recopied poem in the internet era.

i mean that poem got him a book deal! only in america...

I first discovered Seidel in the most appropriate way possible: temping as a secretary at an investment firm, seeing one of his poems in The Wall Street Journal without context or explanation. Robbins seems to be copying him in both form and subject.

Robbins seems to be copying him in both form and subject.

That's never going to work.

he really isn't though

they both do rhyme and they both do glib but i think their projects are pretty different! other people seem to disagree though

otm, I do think there are big sonic lifts from bits of Seidel, like when I said upthread:

Formally it feels a bit samey, like his music is just a bit too narrow. I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly it is,

the answer was Seidel I realised, & I felt a bit durr for missing it. But I don't think the subject or technique is the same really.

i'm not a big poetry guy so its all new to me. everyone usually just rips off ashbery, right?

weird, I just recommended robbins to a friend the other day. she follows poetry and hadn't heard of him. I thought this dude was like the enfant terrible jimi hendrix now?

kinda feel like we won't know what robbins is all about until he pulls the next rabbit out of his hat. I like his stuff but the style seems to have its own expiration baked into it, and he could get a lot more mileage out of this voice if he let it run free a little. maybe nothing ever happens to him so he's just gotta write about twizzlers and rappers.

http://www.onthebusesfanclub.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderpictures/ARTHUR.jpg

MR always reminds me of Mark Leyner. in a good way though. though i haven't read leyner in years and i don't know if i would go back and re-read his old comic novels. they definitely were OF THEIR TIME and all that. as MR is today.

cough

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.

― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:29 (9 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

well there ya go.

they are both FUNNY. i mean there is no expiration date on funny.

What I wrote upthread was:

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?

― alimosina, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 04:58 (9 months ago) Permalink

The quotation is from someone who began his poem:

The morning slathers its whatever
across the thing.

I could accept the criticism or the poetry, but when both are the from same person, at least one project must be a put-on. Other readers will do as they please, but that's where I draw my line. (If something comes along to change my mind about Robbins, well and good. So far nothing has.)