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

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.)

not really a criticism there imo

sorry, 'contradiction'. just woke up.

new New Yorker:

https://sphotos-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/602040_10152732892025333_752358017_n.jpg

def leppard reference, i assume

no it's clearly about a german law firm

right isn't that what the def leppard song is about?

def leppard song is about their accountants iirc

we could do with another thread about a contemporary poet maybe, this is kind of depressing that it's the only one, anyway

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2013/mayjune/informal-colloquies.html?paging=off

It would be lovely to have more poems from Wheeler in (her pseudo-archaic) mode, or at least more that exploit her winning facility for rhyme, and perhaps fewer that till the exhausted soil of "experimental" fields:

Anabaptists
field field to
lip on a / in a daisy
pond muck
Curtailing assumptions such that
frog muck
panopticon the hazards
signage escalator mutant tut
After such escalator mutant tut, what forgiveness? I know it's bad form to say so, but fifty years after The Tennis Court Oath, this sort of thing is just possibly beginning to seem a bit rote. Certainly someone as lyrically capable—and as capable of lyrical subversion—as Wheeler needn't clutch so at the au courant. "It was the winter of the Z-pack" is startling in its sabotage of romantic anticipation. The lyric speaker of these poems gets "smashed by a Prius on a wild goose / chase" and still manages to affirm the sight of a "halo against the light."

But her openness to the possibilities of poetry regardless of tribal affiliation is one of Wheeler's virtues. "Such is the state of our poetry caught in my throat on its way / to my mouth, why not do everything," she writes toward the end of the book, before concluding: "but of course we do nothing." When third-hand experimentation is the norm, in life as in poetry, everything can look an awful lot like nothing. In these spring-loaded poems, Wheeler honors the less than everything that gets done in a life by infusing elegy with verve, anachronism with new-minted coin. "Let's make like we're not through," she writes, and it's all any of us can do—go on making things, making likenesses, as if we were not already finished, not already broken up, not already out the other side, like so many people we knew, like all the things they said.

I've seen that Wheeler several times in stores, but never managed to get past the fact that someone decided to put out a volume of poetry entitled Meme

"The book's title refers to a pseudo-concept popularized by intellectual featherweight Richard Dawkins."

I love his poetry reviews. I really do. he makes me excited about poetry and I am 95% not excited about modern poetry. for real, he's one of the only critics I can think of who makes me jealous. like, shit, I wish I could do that. I feel the same way about john jeremiah sullivan. they are the only two people I can think of. and MR feels the same way about JJS. I don't ordinarily think that way about other writers. if I had just said no to all those drugs in high school I might have gotten there...

the bit i quoted really annoyed me actually and then i realised i'd been trolled. also i posted the dawkins line contextless on facebook and three people liked it and one person figured out who the author was, though he may have cheated.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=1691&fulltext=1

Yahoo! emails back with bad Yahoo! news. “Queef” actually a pretty big problem for the “standards desk.”

auksdhlh he quotes george monbiot

my poet friends (who are very good and have nothing against pop culture references etc) haaate this dude.