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

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.

they would almost have to.

for funny, mark leidner's my dude:

http://www.actionyes.org/issue9/leidner/leidner1.html

http://www.thermosmag.com/poetry/leidner.html

that second one i have apparently been linked to already in some other context

yh i remembered 'romantic comedies' too-- seems patricia lockwood tweeted a link to it last year? anyway it is the best

He lied to her and she splattered paint all over his car except she made the paint the exact same color as his car to express the complexity of her anger but he didn’t get it.

i'm not sure how i feel about its massiveness

i heard him read it before i saw it in print, so great (maybe he broke it up into two parts?). not sure if he's an arty stand-up comic or a hilarious poet.

new poem. i don't know what i think. i told him he really blew it by not working "High Tang" into it.

http://thewalrus.ca/seasons-in-the-abyss/

The "Hash-Berryman" reference is to this.

this hash-berryman person seems awful

Robbins' stance depends on everyone else playing the straight man. What will he do when his critics turn just as goofy and juvenile?

if yr referring to this 'hash-berryman' person, i think the answer is "be visibly more talented"

hash-berryman one of the worst pieces of 'criticism' I ever read. 'wah wahhh my own hangups prevent me from writing or appreciating good rhymed verse, so obviously anyone choosing to work in that medium is a "pop-poet" who values style over substance, & also why can't I use social media to harass successful people all day long'

... like, obviously "The bomb bay opens with a queef" isn't gonna un-blow-up anybody's stuff, but I think the questions surrounding political poetry are sufficiently complex that you can't just bang your fist on the table and scream "RHYMING IS REACTIONARY NOSTALGIA!!!" or w/e

it totally fits that robbins is the kind of person who refuses to vote for obama though

Flarf You!

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/246092

dinged marjorie perloff w/ a sic, dang

Somehow my Introduction to Poetry class managed to keep their shit together.

"Almost anything can claim to be a poem. It takes a lot of reading to feel confident about evaluating that claim," the taon Aimless vevved flarfingly.

i've read (some of) that izenberg book he exploits, it's really worth a look if you have any interest at all in post-WCW/post-Pound poetry, or in theory-of-poetics

yeah that looks interesting, hard to see on that precis quite where it departs from the silliman/hejinian/bernstein theoretical line i guess

i tried to give away my copy of the last edition of that anthology in january or so. can't recall if i got the guy to take it. also, robbins seems like he'd be an awesome guy to take Introduction to Poetry with, but i did hope "Somehow my Introduction to Poetry class managed to keep their shit together." was going to be a line from one of his

i don't know, tom, i think it may just be more conceptually perspicious/fresh, but i couldn't really say at this point. seems like izenberg's trying to pull off a basic reorientation on the critical side rather than making apologetics from within particular poetics/writerly communities.

haha well that sounds like a recommendation to me!!

oh also it takes up yeats early on (so, trying to establish something outside the objectivist/langpo circle) and one of the chapters on oppen is about crusoe and wittgenstein and 'other minds'.

font is annoying tho.

I once tried to explain my admiration for Paul Muldoon to a young poet I know, a graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. I opened a book to Muldoon’s poem “Yarrow”; she immediately balked: “I don’t like poems that look like that.” She meant poems written in regular stanzas. This isn’t anecdotal evidence; it’s an anecdote. Everyone I know has one.

still, isn't there something accurate in that reaction??

i am still totally undecided as to whether that's an okay opinion to hold

i am curious to see what he does with 'other minds', seeing as i spent my dissertation trying to ignore the fact that that was a thing

i mean i tend to think that a measure of respect to a fellow practitioner would include being open to the idea that there are good and bad poems like that and that it might be a worthwhile test of sympathy to try and see what appeal they hold to other people, and other boring democratic shit like that

hey woah the izenberg book is actually affordable, i guess i will get it come payday

there is that, but i dunno, there's a certain amount of obstruction to be overcome during the process of 'poetic education' and maybe people on the teacherly/pro-democratic-sympathy side are too wishful about how readily the obstruction can be swept away by charitable receptivity when the process really more often involves (a) forced subjection to poems one finds unpleasing, under the influence of credentialing/enculturating authority, (b) years/decades-long sequences of passing things by, just not getting them at all, mutual indifference/misunderstanding.

well partly i'm wistful about it because i have spent time trying to convince myself i can get past those particular blockages myself but yeah

annoyingly i have this nagging feeling i've read 'yarrow' somewhere but i can't find it in any of the muldoon i have

hey after years of distaste for rhymey verse i read some heine and some herrick that made it seem like a thing so there's always a chance

herrick's pretty cool right? at least an 8/10 poet

ratings + c17th poets too obvious me-bait. I'm ignoring it.