Michael Robbins made a splash in the poetry world when his poem Alien vs. Predator was published in The New Yorker in 2009. The poem, which called Rilke a jerk and included the line That elk is such a dick, was atypical for the magazine. Robbins, who received a Ph.D. in English, would go onto write poems like Dig Dug, which was inspired by the video for Guns N' Roses November Rain and has just had his first book published by Penguin Poets, Alien vs. Predator.
Robbins poetry owes as much to hip-hop and contemporary music as it does to classical poetry and its clear from talking with Robbins that while he is as obsessed with pop culture as the rest of the us, hes more concerned with poetic form. His poems take place amidst chain stores and suburban wastelands with references to the Care Bears, Jeffrey Dahmer, Soylent Green and everything in between.
However, hes interested in what has always been the focus of poetry: truth, beauty, ugliness, vulgarity and making some sense of the world in a fun way that sounds good when read aloud. In talking with SG, Robbins quoted Rimbaud and Eliot with the same ease with which he discussed Guns N' Roses. and complained about the laziness of many contemporary artists, and, as in his work, was not just fun to talk with but was thoughtful in talking about life and art.
ALEX DUEBEN: The title of your poetry collection is Alien vs. Predator. How did you decide on that title?
MICHAEL ROBBINS: It honestly just came to me when I was trying to think of a title. I never am sure whether the justifications or interpretations that I give for the title afterwards have much to do with that initial decision. I mean as soon as I thought of it, the title made sense to me. Its a cheeky appropriation of a schlocky movie franchise. Also, theyre both major words in American culture. Were always catching predators and legalizing aliens. It made sense to me. I mean the book is partly about my feeling of alienation and being preyed upon. (Laughs)
AD: Its interesting that you phrase it like that. What do you feel preyed upon by?
MR: What dont I feel preyed upon by? (Laughs)
AD: I ask because I think its possible to read the book as being preyed upon by pop culture, but I dont think you mean that.
MR: No. Im not going to bite the hand that feeds me, but I do think the pop culture angle has been getting too much attention to the exclusion of other aspects of the book that Im interested in. I mean I understand it. You have a book of poetry that talks about black metal or something, you have a topic to talk about and its handy, but the attractive surfaces are meant to be sinister as well. Its about being preyed upon by capitalism, I suppose. I meant for it to be something of a dark book. (Laughs)
AD: I think the definitely feels that way.
MR: Im preyed upon by lots of things. Stephen Dedalus has that line in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where he says I fear many things: dogs, horses... I cant remember exactly what the list is, but thats pretty much how I feel. Ive spent a lot of my life dealing with anxiety and depression and spent a lot of my life kvetching about the way were all sort of subordinated to the logic of the market. The pop culture is there in part just because I love it, but it wouldnt be there without the economic apparatus that supports it. Its not a wholly negative thing. Capitalism is a dialectical thing. Marx himself celebrated capitalism as an advance over feudalism.
Theres alienation and theres predation and theres also the sense that I myself am the predator consuming pop culture, consuming goods. Its that sense of conflict that the vs. part is supposed to get across. Theres a great deal of conflict in my own absorption in these things, but like I said, thats an interpretation that I can impose after the fact. At the time Im not sure that I was thinking about these things, but thats how poems work. They dont necessarily make themselves clear to you right away.
AD: As you pointed out your work is sometimes treated a novelty because you use pop culture, which is not often addressed in poetry.
MR: Well, it is. Thats another thing that frustrates me about the concentration on it. Again, it doesnt frustrate me to the point that Im not very, very pleased that the works getting attention, but pop culture gets addressed in poetry all the time. Is just a lack of familiarity with contemporary poetry that leads it to it seeming to be novel in my work. I mean Paul Muldoon is often writing about pop culture. My friends Nick Demske and Anthony Madrid both have books that are immersed in pop culture. My friend Anthony Madrid has these great lines: Maybe Im just like my mother. / Shes never satisfied. / Maybe Im just like my father: / Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Its there. Contemporary poets are writing in the culture that they live in and they respond to it. I would say that my work is sort of manic about it. (Laughs) There is perhaps a difference of degree, although Nick Demske is a terrific poet who is just dripping with pop culture.
AD: You wrote a piece for Poetry a little while back where you reviewed a few books and in talking about Ruth Stone you took issue with her heightened language.
MR: I dont think so. I think poetry has to be heightened language distinct from ordinary English. If its not patterned language, then its not poetry. What I took issue with in Stones work is her treating poetry as a kind of chapel that we all go to and forget our lives as people immersed in the ordinary. Even her treatment of the ordinary seems to me to be pious. Piety in poetry annoys me. But if youre just taking English and not doing things with the language, then I dont know what the point is. Pound said great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. I do believe that language can exist in a heightened form without being pious. I think that the heightening of language is what poetry does, but its a question of how that heightening takes place.
AD: I think thats very true. Rhythm and structure are clearly very important to you and it feels like youve internalized poetic form and structure, but youre writing about the world you see, the world around us.
MR: I think thats just what poetry should do.
AD: Should being the key phrase in that sentence.
MR: Oh definitely. I mean Rimbaud said: It is necessary to be absolutely modern. I think that poetry, if its not responding to contemporary life, is failing to be poetry. Poetry for me is just a way of responding to contemporary life, responding to contemporary conditions and I would never want to deny that one must be absolutely modern. I dont know what else art is for if its not a way of being contemporary; if not a way of making sense of the life around us. That involves me in Best Buy and Red Lobster and popular music, but I think its possible to do that without eschewing the traditional means of imparting pleasure. Pleasures of sound, because sound to me is part of what makes poetry poetry. The intricate or rhythmical patterning of language. It doesnt seem to us to be anachronistic in hip hop. There are some great poets writing in hip hop at the moment. I dont feel like poetry should have to be composed of boring sentence fragments. (Laughs)
AD: I do remember Paul Muldoon wrote a poem about music, I think it was Sleeve Notes?
MR: Yeah, Sleeve Notes. I do think that as Ive said elsewhere, the way I respond to popular music and the way I respond to poetry are not mutually exclusive. Certainly I make obvious distinctions between them, but music has been an extraordinarily important thing in my life. I always think people are exaggerating when they say that rock and roll or a DJ saved their lives, but its an understandable hyperbole. It can feel like that, especially when youre younger. Im old now. (Laughs)
AD: And in your poems so much is going on amidst the pop culture references; the sort of things that have always happened in poems and that have always been discussed, just in a different landscape.
MR: I hope so. I dont think one should hesitate to be beautiful if one can. Its again a question of the kind of beauty. Theres a striving for beauty that annoys me in poetry, a kind of processed beauty. I often think of it as kind of the James Wright epiphany. I love James Wright and I love the poem A Blessing, but the way that poem ends with him realizing that if he stepped out of his body he would break suddenly into blossoms, that sort of gesture or device where one ends a poem with a little lyric epiphany and one steps out of ones body in some way or rises into the air or has become a cheap way of accessing beauty without earning it. Im wary of that. I think that theres a hell of a lot of ugliness in the world and that ugliness can be treated in a beautiful manner.
AD: Thats a prominent trend in all art forms, even among good writers.
MR: Its like American Beauty. Who was that, Sam Mendes? That to me is my exemplar of unearned emotion, unearned pathos, unearned beauty. It has all the trappings of beauty, but it only goes through the motions. The cheap reliance on things you already know to make you feel as though youve experienced beauty. That of course is a very common problem in art. I would never want to suggest that I dont fall into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it.
AD: That is a good one. I always think of Brideshead Revisited where the ending doesnt quite fit with what came before and feels uncomfortably shoehorned in.
MR: Well yeah, you can just have Chancy walk on the water (Laughs)
AD: And then it becomes something else entirely.
MR: Yeah. Instead of finding a way to actually convey the complexity of meaningful experience, you can just throw in a little gesture that is a shorthand for it. Thats what annoys me about Ruth Stone. I dont mean to speak ill of the dead. She had a hard life and made art out of it. Im in no position to dismiss her lifes work, but thats what annoys me about poetry like hers. Its what annoyed me about certain of Robert Hass poems. It what annoys me about Mary Oliver and Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (Laughs). One could go on and on. In fact, Im probably not supposed to. I mean Ive already attacked all of these people in print, so Ill try not to name anyone I havent already dissed so as not to impair my job prospects. (Laughs)
AD: I always come back to Larry McMurtys book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and that juxtaposition of reading Benjamin at a DQ in rural Texas, which seems like it would be dissonant, but its not at all.
MR: And Benjamin would have been the last person to ignore Dairy Queen. I am living at the moment in Hattiesburg Mississippi so Im experiencing a lot of that dissonance myself, but its not dissonance. Intellectual work should be available to us wherever we are, not just on the steps of the Met. Art should speak to people in Hattiesburg with the same pressure and the same urgency that it speaks to someone in the New York Public Library. Which is not to say that I cant wait to get out of Hattiesburg. (Laughs)
AD: Are you teaching there this year?
MR: I have a one year visiting position as Visiting Poet at the University of Southern Mississippi. Its been interesting, but Im moving back to Chicago at the end of this month.
AD: When did you first become interested in poetry?
MR: The first poets that I remember reading with any attention were Yeats, Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. I couldnt make heads or tails of any of them. (Laughs) I was probably in junior high or high school and it was partly that that attracted me. I didnt know what the hell Yeats, or especially Thomas, was talking about. Im not a big fan of Dylan Thomas, but there was a poemand I cant even remember which onethat went on for a hundred lines and then there was a stanza break and then another hundred lines. The hundredth line rhymed with the hundred-first line and the hundred-second line rhymed with the ninety-ninth line and so on until the very last line of the poem rhymed with the first line two hundred lines before. There was no way you would notice this hearing it, but that sense that intricate patterns could be sustained in ways that connected in ways that you had work to understand was fascinating to me. I probably should go ahead and pickup Dylan Thomas. Ive hated him long enough.
Yeats and Rimbaud continue to me a lot to me. Rimbauds going to mean a lot to any kid whos growing up in a conservative city and likes punk rock, but I find his work deepens as you get older. Rimbaud says in Illuminations: Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction. That spoke to me as a teenager and it speaks to me now in a more nuanced way as someone living in late capitalism in a country that is conducting an assault on its most helpless citizens.
AD: You recently received your Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
MR: Yes, I did. Im a doctor. I tell my students not to call me Dr. Robbins, but they keep doing it. (Laughs) Its horrible. I think if youre not Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger, you should think its totally pretentious to be called doctor if youre not a medical doctor. I mean they should too, but theyre beyond shame. (Laughs)
AD: Why did you decide to get a Ph.D.?
MR: I wanted to become an intellectual. (Laughs) I know that sounds horrible. I realized that I had a disease, the disease of autodidacticism for a long time. Its an exhilarating thing to be an autodidact, but its also possible to have the wrong conversations with yourself. Not the wrong conversations, but to have conservations that dont move you past certain assumptions in a way that the conversations at a great university like the U of C allow you to do. I just wanted to study with people smarter than me and really, really, really think about this art form that I decided to devote myself to. And to think about it hard. One thing I find is that not enough younger poets are immersed in the tradition as deeply as they should be. Reading George Herbert or reading John Donne, and in contemporary work reading outside what I thought of as my little corner of the tradition was, I dont think I could have written this book without that experience. It broadened my idea of what poetry was, what it could be, where it comes from, and what it accomplishes in our lives. It was a very valuable experience. I was lucky. I studied with Robert Von Hallberg and Oren Izenberg. I was thirty-something when I entered the Ph.D. program and I feel like they taught me how to read poetry. I also have an MFA and a masters degree, both of which are kind of useless.
AD: Where did you get your MFA?
MR: I never tell anyone that. (Laughs) Its a part of my life I would like to forget. Theres that I use this epigraph from Fucked Up, the hardcore band. Its the only epigraph in the book and it introduces the fourth section and it just says Ive wasted a lifetime / Not proud of it and that was just a little personal reminder. I dont want to say Im a late bloomer. By the Frost/Whitman/Stevens model for first book publishing, Im doing all right but I took too long to really get serious and my MFA experience was part of that. Im like a born again Christian in many ways. Not literally, although I am interested in Christianity. What I mean is theres this sense that your old life is gone and youve cast off some kind of skin. Thats how I feel about the first, oh, thirty years of my life. (Laughs) I was very irresponsible for a very long time.
AD: I can relate a little to that.
MR: I think a lot of people can. I just gave a copy of Denis Johnsons Jesus Son to a friend of mine and she read it and we were talking about that gambleI dont know to what extent its autobiographicalof living a dissolute life in the hopes of turning it into art later. Just what long odds those are and how likely it is that youre not going to get swallowed along the way. I feel grateful that I can put that epigraph from Fucked Up in my book. (Laughs)
AD: With so many pop culture references in your poetry, do you ever worry about the book being dated?
MR: I think everyone should worry about that. (Laughs) But sure. William Logan has some line about, I dont know if it was Tony Hoagland or who mentions Britney Spears in a poem and how Britney Spears will be forgotten in ten years and your poem will look ridiculous. I think William Logan knows exactly nothing about Britney Spears, but sure, one worries about it but I would hope that what matters in the poems is more lasting than the cultural references. A number of [the pop culture references] arent too contemporary anyway. There are references to the Stones and to Berryman, but I hope that whats lasting in the poems will outlast their topicality.
AD: I just think of a poem like Dig Dug, which I enjoy, but I also remember when the video for November Rain was released and I appreciate that you found the right rhyme for Axl. I wonder if it lacks something without that background and personal knowledge, but I think the poem works without it.
MR: I hope so. There are cultural markers in poems. There just are going to be. Its not like I dont think about it. The books been getting a lot of attention, but how many books have gotten a lot of attention that nobody reads in ten years and no one has heard of the person. (Laughs) Youre foolish to assume that youre going to be immortal. I dont care. Im happy to be a poet that people read during my lifetime and after that, I wont have any idea whats going on. (Laughs) Ive never understood the bid for immortality. Youre not going to be around to care.
It was actually my mentor and friend Oren Izenbergs idea to write a poem about the video for November Rain. He was going to write something about it and I just ran with the idea because I loved it. Slash is upset and the helicopter is swirling around and hes just got to play a solo in the desert. Theres no chord connecting his guitar to an amp, but he doesnt care. Its an important image. Its like the moon landing for my generation. (Laughs)
Robbins poetry owes as much to hip-hop and contemporary music as it does to classical poetry and its clear from talking with Robbins that while he is as obsessed with pop culture as the rest of the us, hes more concerned with poetic form. His poems take place amidst chain stores and suburban wastelands with references to the Care Bears, Jeffrey Dahmer, Soylent Green and everything in between.
However, hes interested in what has always been the focus of poetry: truth, beauty, ugliness, vulgarity and making some sense of the world in a fun way that sounds good when read aloud. In talking with SG, Robbins quoted Rimbaud and Eliot with the same ease with which he discussed Guns N' Roses. and complained about the laziness of many contemporary artists, and, as in his work, was not just fun to talk with but was thoughtful in talking about life and art.
ALEX DUEBEN: The title of your poetry collection is Alien vs. Predator. How did you decide on that title?
MICHAEL ROBBINS: It honestly just came to me when I was trying to think of a title. I never am sure whether the justifications or interpretations that I give for the title afterwards have much to do with that initial decision. I mean as soon as I thought of it, the title made sense to me. Its a cheeky appropriation of a schlocky movie franchise. Also, theyre both major words in American culture. Were always catching predators and legalizing aliens. It made sense to me. I mean the book is partly about my feeling of alienation and being preyed upon. (Laughs)
AD: Its interesting that you phrase it like that. What do you feel preyed upon by?
MR: What dont I feel preyed upon by? (Laughs)
AD: I ask because I think its possible to read the book as being preyed upon by pop culture, but I dont think you mean that.
MR: No. Im not going to bite the hand that feeds me, but I do think the pop culture angle has been getting too much attention to the exclusion of other aspects of the book that Im interested in. I mean I understand it. You have a book of poetry that talks about black metal or something, you have a topic to talk about and its handy, but the attractive surfaces are meant to be sinister as well. Its about being preyed upon by capitalism, I suppose. I meant for it to be something of a dark book. (Laughs)
AD: I think the definitely feels that way.
MR: Im preyed upon by lots of things. Stephen Dedalus has that line in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man where he says I fear many things: dogs, horses... I cant remember exactly what the list is, but thats pretty much how I feel. Ive spent a lot of my life dealing with anxiety and depression and spent a lot of my life kvetching about the way were all sort of subordinated to the logic of the market. The pop culture is there in part just because I love it, but it wouldnt be there without the economic apparatus that supports it. Its not a wholly negative thing. Capitalism is a dialectical thing. Marx himself celebrated capitalism as an advance over feudalism.
Theres alienation and theres predation and theres also the sense that I myself am the predator consuming pop culture, consuming goods. Its that sense of conflict that the vs. part is supposed to get across. Theres a great deal of conflict in my own absorption in these things, but like I said, thats an interpretation that I can impose after the fact. At the time Im not sure that I was thinking about these things, but thats how poems work. They dont necessarily make themselves clear to you right away.
AD: As you pointed out your work is sometimes treated a novelty because you use pop culture, which is not often addressed in poetry.
MR: Well, it is. Thats another thing that frustrates me about the concentration on it. Again, it doesnt frustrate me to the point that Im not very, very pleased that the works getting attention, but pop culture gets addressed in poetry all the time. Is just a lack of familiarity with contemporary poetry that leads it to it seeming to be novel in my work. I mean Paul Muldoon is often writing about pop culture. My friends Nick Demske and Anthony Madrid both have books that are immersed in pop culture. My friend Anthony Madrid has these great lines: Maybe Im just like my mother. / Shes never satisfied. / Maybe Im just like my father: / Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Its there. Contemporary poets are writing in the culture that they live in and they respond to it. I would say that my work is sort of manic about it. (Laughs) There is perhaps a difference of degree, although Nick Demske is a terrific poet who is just dripping with pop culture.
AD: You wrote a piece for Poetry a little while back where you reviewed a few books and in talking about Ruth Stone you took issue with her heightened language.
MR: I dont think so. I think poetry has to be heightened language distinct from ordinary English. If its not patterned language, then its not poetry. What I took issue with in Stones work is her treating poetry as a kind of chapel that we all go to and forget our lives as people immersed in the ordinary. Even her treatment of the ordinary seems to me to be pious. Piety in poetry annoys me. But if youre just taking English and not doing things with the language, then I dont know what the point is. Pound said great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree. I do believe that language can exist in a heightened form without being pious. I think that the heightening of language is what poetry does, but its a question of how that heightening takes place.
AD: I think thats very true. Rhythm and structure are clearly very important to you and it feels like youve internalized poetic form and structure, but youre writing about the world you see, the world around us.
MR: I think thats just what poetry should do.
AD: Should being the key phrase in that sentence.
MR: Oh definitely. I mean Rimbaud said: It is necessary to be absolutely modern. I think that poetry, if its not responding to contemporary life, is failing to be poetry. Poetry for me is just a way of responding to contemporary life, responding to contemporary conditions and I would never want to deny that one must be absolutely modern. I dont know what else art is for if its not a way of being contemporary; if not a way of making sense of the life around us. That involves me in Best Buy and Red Lobster and popular music, but I think its possible to do that without eschewing the traditional means of imparting pleasure. Pleasures of sound, because sound to me is part of what makes poetry poetry. The intricate or rhythmical patterning of language. It doesnt seem to us to be anachronistic in hip hop. There are some great poets writing in hip hop at the moment. I dont feel like poetry should have to be composed of boring sentence fragments. (Laughs)
AD: I do remember Paul Muldoon wrote a poem about music, I think it was Sleeve Notes?
MR: Yeah, Sleeve Notes. I do think that as Ive said elsewhere, the way I respond to popular music and the way I respond to poetry are not mutually exclusive. Certainly I make obvious distinctions between them, but music has been an extraordinarily important thing in my life. I always think people are exaggerating when they say that rock and roll or a DJ saved their lives, but its an understandable hyperbole. It can feel like that, especially when youre younger. Im old now. (Laughs)
AD: And in your poems so much is going on amidst the pop culture references; the sort of things that have always happened in poems and that have always been discussed, just in a different landscape.
MR: I hope so. I dont think one should hesitate to be beautiful if one can. Its again a question of the kind of beauty. Theres a striving for beauty that annoys me in poetry, a kind of processed beauty. I often think of it as kind of the James Wright epiphany. I love James Wright and I love the poem A Blessing, but the way that poem ends with him realizing that if he stepped out of his body he would break suddenly into blossoms, that sort of gesture or device where one ends a poem with a little lyric epiphany and one steps out of ones body in some way or rises into the air or has become a cheap way of accessing beauty without earning it. Im wary of that. I think that theres a hell of a lot of ugliness in the world and that ugliness can be treated in a beautiful manner.
AD: Thats a prominent trend in all art forms, even among good writers.
MR: Its like American Beauty. Who was that, Sam Mendes? That to me is my exemplar of unearned emotion, unearned pathos, unearned beauty. It has all the trappings of beauty, but it only goes through the motions. The cheap reliance on things you already know to make you feel as though youve experienced beauty. That of course is a very common problem in art. I would never want to suggest that I dont fall into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it.
AD: That is a good one. I always think of Brideshead Revisited where the ending doesnt quite fit with what came before and feels uncomfortably shoehorned in.
MR: Well yeah, you can just have Chancy walk on the water (Laughs)
AD: And then it becomes something else entirely.
MR: Yeah. Instead of finding a way to actually convey the complexity of meaningful experience, you can just throw in a little gesture that is a shorthand for it. Thats what annoys me about Ruth Stone. I dont mean to speak ill of the dead. She had a hard life and made art out of it. Im in no position to dismiss her lifes work, but thats what annoys me about poetry like hers. Its what annoyed me about certain of Robert Hass poems. It what annoys me about Mary Oliver and Billy Collins and Sharon Olds (Laughs). One could go on and on. In fact, Im probably not supposed to. I mean Ive already attacked all of these people in print, so Ill try not to name anyone I havent already dissed so as not to impair my job prospects. (Laughs)
AD: I always come back to Larry McMurtys book Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen and that juxtaposition of reading Benjamin at a DQ in rural Texas, which seems like it would be dissonant, but its not at all.
MR: And Benjamin would have been the last person to ignore Dairy Queen. I am living at the moment in Hattiesburg Mississippi so Im experiencing a lot of that dissonance myself, but its not dissonance. Intellectual work should be available to us wherever we are, not just on the steps of the Met. Art should speak to people in Hattiesburg with the same pressure and the same urgency that it speaks to someone in the New York Public Library. Which is not to say that I cant wait to get out of Hattiesburg. (Laughs)
AD: Are you teaching there this year?
MR: I have a one year visiting position as Visiting Poet at the University of Southern Mississippi. Its been interesting, but Im moving back to Chicago at the end of this month.
AD: When did you first become interested in poetry?
MR: The first poets that I remember reading with any attention were Yeats, Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. I couldnt make heads or tails of any of them. (Laughs) I was probably in junior high or high school and it was partly that that attracted me. I didnt know what the hell Yeats, or especially Thomas, was talking about. Im not a big fan of Dylan Thomas, but there was a poemand I cant even remember which onethat went on for a hundred lines and then there was a stanza break and then another hundred lines. The hundredth line rhymed with the hundred-first line and the hundred-second line rhymed with the ninety-ninth line and so on until the very last line of the poem rhymed with the first line two hundred lines before. There was no way you would notice this hearing it, but that sense that intricate patterns could be sustained in ways that connected in ways that you had work to understand was fascinating to me. I probably should go ahead and pickup Dylan Thomas. Ive hated him long enough.
Yeats and Rimbaud continue to me a lot to me. Rimbauds going to mean a lot to any kid whos growing up in a conservative city and likes punk rock, but I find his work deepens as you get older. Rimbaud says in Illuminations: Is it possible to become ecstatic amid destruction. That spoke to me as a teenager and it speaks to me now in a more nuanced way as someone living in late capitalism in a country that is conducting an assault on its most helpless citizens.
AD: You recently received your Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
MR: Yes, I did. Im a doctor. I tell my students not to call me Dr. Robbins, but they keep doing it. (Laughs) Its horrible. I think if youre not Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger, you should think its totally pretentious to be called doctor if youre not a medical doctor. I mean they should too, but theyre beyond shame. (Laughs)
AD: Why did you decide to get a Ph.D.?
MR: I wanted to become an intellectual. (Laughs) I know that sounds horrible. I realized that I had a disease, the disease of autodidacticism for a long time. Its an exhilarating thing to be an autodidact, but its also possible to have the wrong conversations with yourself. Not the wrong conversations, but to have conservations that dont move you past certain assumptions in a way that the conversations at a great university like the U of C allow you to do. I just wanted to study with people smarter than me and really, really, really think about this art form that I decided to devote myself to. And to think about it hard. One thing I find is that not enough younger poets are immersed in the tradition as deeply as they should be. Reading George Herbert or reading John Donne, and in contemporary work reading outside what I thought of as my little corner of the tradition was, I dont think I could have written this book without that experience. It broadened my idea of what poetry was, what it could be, where it comes from, and what it accomplishes in our lives. It was a very valuable experience. I was lucky. I studied with Robert Von Hallberg and Oren Izenberg. I was thirty-something when I entered the Ph.D. program and I feel like they taught me how to read poetry. I also have an MFA and a masters degree, both of which are kind of useless.
AD: Where did you get your MFA?
MR: I never tell anyone that. (Laughs) Its a part of my life I would like to forget. Theres that I use this epigraph from Fucked Up, the hardcore band. Its the only epigraph in the book and it introduces the fourth section and it just says Ive wasted a lifetime / Not proud of it and that was just a little personal reminder. I dont want to say Im a late bloomer. By the Frost/Whitman/Stevens model for first book publishing, Im doing all right but I took too long to really get serious and my MFA experience was part of that. Im like a born again Christian in many ways. Not literally, although I am interested in Christianity. What I mean is theres this sense that your old life is gone and youve cast off some kind of skin. Thats how I feel about the first, oh, thirty years of my life. (Laughs) I was very irresponsible for a very long time.
AD: I can relate a little to that.
MR: I think a lot of people can. I just gave a copy of Denis Johnsons Jesus Son to a friend of mine and she read it and we were talking about that gambleI dont know to what extent its autobiographicalof living a dissolute life in the hopes of turning it into art later. Just what long odds those are and how likely it is that youre not going to get swallowed along the way. I feel grateful that I can put that epigraph from Fucked Up in my book. (Laughs)
AD: With so many pop culture references in your poetry, do you ever worry about the book being dated?
MR: I think everyone should worry about that. (Laughs) But sure. William Logan has some line about, I dont know if it was Tony Hoagland or who mentions Britney Spears in a poem and how Britney Spears will be forgotten in ten years and your poem will look ridiculous. I think William Logan knows exactly nothing about Britney Spears, but sure, one worries about it but I would hope that what matters in the poems is more lasting than the cultural references. A number of [the pop culture references] arent too contemporary anyway. There are references to the Stones and to Berryman, but I hope that whats lasting in the poems will outlast their topicality.
AD: I just think of a poem like Dig Dug, which I enjoy, but I also remember when the video for November Rain was released and I appreciate that you found the right rhyme for Axl. I wonder if it lacks something without that background and personal knowledge, but I think the poem works without it.
MR: I hope so. There are cultural markers in poems. There just are going to be. Its not like I dont think about it. The books been getting a lot of attention, but how many books have gotten a lot of attention that nobody reads in ten years and no one has heard of the person. (Laughs) Youre foolish to assume that youre going to be immortal. I dont care. Im happy to be a poet that people read during my lifetime and after that, I wont have any idea whats going on. (Laughs) Ive never understood the bid for immortality. Youre not going to be around to care.
It was actually my mentor and friend Oren Izenbergs idea to write a poem about the video for November Rain. He was going to write something about it and I just ran with the idea because I loved it. Slash is upset and the helicopter is swirling around and hes just got to play a solo in the desert. Theres no chord connecting his guitar to an amp, but he doesnt care. Its an important image. Its like the moon landing for my generation. (Laughs)