Michael Robbins: Alien vs. Predator

What don’t I feel preyed upon by? (Laughs)

No. I’m 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 I’m 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 it’s handy, but the attractive surfaces are meant to be sinister as well. It’s about being preyed upon by capitalism, I suppose. I meant for it to be something of a dark book. (Laughs)

I’m 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 can’t remember exactly what the list is, but that’s pretty much how I feel. I’ve spent a lot of my life dealing with anxiety and depression and spent a lot of my life kvetching about the way we’re all sort of subordinated to the logic of the market. The pop culture is there in part just because I love it, but it wouldn’t be there without the economic apparatus that supports it. It’s not a wholly negative thing. Capitalism is a dialectical thing. Marx himself celebrated capitalism as an advance over feudalism.

There’s alienation and there’s predation and there’s also the sense that I myself am the predator consuming pop culture, consuming goods. It’s that sense of conflict that the “vs.” part is supposed to get across. There’s a great deal of conflict in my own absorption in these things, but like I said, that’s an interpretation that I can impose after the fact. At the time I’m not sure that I was thinking about these things, but that’s how poems work. They don’t necessarily make themselves clear to you right away.

Well, it is. That’s another thing that frustrates me about the concentration on it. Again, it doesn’t frustrate me to the point that I’m not very, very pleased that the work’s getting attention, but pop culture gets addressed in poetry all the time. I’s 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 I’m just like my mother. / She’s never satisfied. / Maybe I’m just like my father: / Always a bridesmaid, never a bride.” It’s 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.

I don’t think so. I think poetry has to be heightened language distinct from ordinary English. If it’s not patterned language, then it’s not poetry. What I took issue with in Stone’s 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 you’re just taking English and not doing things with the language, then I don’t 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 it’s a question of how that heightening takes place.

I think that’s just what poetry should do.

Oh definitely. I mean Rimbaud said: It is necessary to be absolutely modern. I think that poetry, if it’s 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 don’t know what else art is for if it’s 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 it’s 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 doesn’t seem to us to be anachronistic in hip hop. There are some great poets writing in hip hop at the moment. I don’t feel like poetry should have to be composed of boring sentence fragments. (Laughs)

Yeah, Sleeve Notes. I do think that as I’ve 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 it’s an understandable hyperbole. It can feel like that, especially when you’re younger. I’m old now. (Laughs)

I hope so. I don’t think one should hesitate to be beautiful if one can. It’s again a question of the kind of beauty. There’s 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 one’s body in some way or rises into the air or has become a cheap way of accessing beauty without earning it. I’m wary of that. I think that there’s a hell of a lot of ugliness in the world and that ugliness can be treated in a beautiful manner.

It’s 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 you’ve experienced beauty. That of course is a very common problem in art. I would never want to suggest that I don’t fall into that trap myself sometimes, but I try to be aware of it.

Well yeah, you can just have Chancy walk on the water– (Laughs)

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. That’s what annoys me about Ruth Stone. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead. She had a hard life and made art out of it. I’m in no position to dismiss her life’s work, but that’s what annoys me about poetry like hers. It’s 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, I’m probably not supposed to. I mean I’ve already attacked all of these people in print, so I’ll try not to name anyone I haven’t already dissed so as not to impair my job prospects. (Laughs)

And Benjamin would have been the last person to ignore Dairy Queen. I am living at the moment in Hattiesburg Mississippi so I’m experiencing a lot of that dissonance myself, but it’s 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 can’t wait to get out of Hattiesburg. (Laughs)

I have a one year visiting position as Visiting Poet at the University of Southern Mississippi. It’s been interesting, but I’m moving back to Chicago at the end of this month.

The first poets that I remember reading with any attention were Yeats, Rimbaud and Dylan Thomas. I couldn’t 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 didn’t know what the hell Yeats, or especially Thomas, was talking about. I’m not a big fan of Dylan Thomas, but there was a poem–and I can’t even remember which one–that 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. I’ve hated him long enough.

Yeats and Rimbaud continue to me a lot to me. Rimbaud’s going to mean a lot to any kid who’s 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.

Yes, I did. I’m a doctor. I tell my students not to call me Dr. Robbins, but they keep doing it. (Laughs) It’s horrible. I think if you’re not Condoleezza Rice or Henry Kissinger, you should think it’s totally pretentious to be called doctor if you’re not a medical doctor. I mean they should too, but they’re beyond shame. (Laughs)

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. It’s an exhilarating thing to be an autodidact, but it’s also possible to have the wrong conversations with yourself. Not the wrong conversations, but to have conservations that don’t 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 don’t 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.

I never tell anyone that. (Laughs) It’s a part of my life I would like to forget. There’s that I use this epigraph from Fucked Up, the hardcore band. It’s the only epigraph in the book and it introduces the fourth section and it just says “I’ve wasted a lifetime / Not proud of it” and that was just a little personal reminder. I don’t want to say I’m a late bloomer. By the Frost/Whitman/Stevens model for first book publishing, I’m doing all right but I took too long to really get serious and my MFA experience was part of that. I’m like a born again Christian in many ways. Not literally, although I am interested in Christianity. What I mean is there’s this sense that your old life is gone and you’ve cast off some kind of skin. That’s how I feel about the first, oh, thirty years of my life. (Laughs) I was very irresponsible for a very long time.

I think a lot of people can. I just gave a copy of Denis Johnson’s Jesus’ Son to a friend of mine and she read it and we were talking about that gamble–I don’t know to what extent it’s autobiographical–of 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 you’re not going to get swallowed along the way. I feel grateful that I can put that epigraph from Fucked Up in my book. (Laughs)

I think everyone should worry about that. (Laughs) But sure. William Logan has some line about, I don’t 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] aren’t too contemporary anyway. There are references to the Stones and to Berryman, but I hope that what’s lasting in the poems will outlast their topicality.

I hope so. There are cultural markers in poems. There just are going to be. It’s not like I don’t think about it. The book’s 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) You’re foolish to assume that you’re going to be immortal. I don’t care. I’m happy to be a poet that people read during my lifetime and after that, I won’t have any idea what’s going on. (Laughs) I’ve never understood the bid for immortality. You’re not going to be around to care.

It was actually my mentor and friend Oren Izenberg’s 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 he’s just got to play a solo in the desert. There’s no chord connecting his guitar to an amp, but he doesn’t care. It’s an important image. It’s like the moon landing for my generation. (Laughs)