{"id":110953,"date":"2017-05-17T12:49:44","date_gmt":"2017-05-17T16:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=110953"},"modified":"2017-05-19T13:16:41","modified_gmt":"2017-05-19T17:16:41","slug":"the-house-of-song-an-interview-with-michael-robbins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/05\/17\/the-house-of-song-an-interview-with-michael-robbins\/","title":{"rendered":"The House of Song: An Interview with Michael Robbins"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

The Overlook Mountain House\u2014near Woodstock, New York\u2014features prominently in \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday.\u201d<\/p><\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n

After his first two collections, <\/em>Alien vs. Predator<\/a> and <\/em>The Second Sex<\/a>, Michael Robbins drew comparisons to poets like Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon. In those poems\u2014with titles like \u201cMy New Asshole\u201d and \u201cPissing in One Hand\u201d\u2014Robbins is concerned for the fate of the whales, and he\u2019s unafraid to spit vitriol about banks, oil pipelines, Xbox, Jesus, Jay Z. He writes about the modern world with such referential range, and such sharpness, that you can almost miss his superhuman command of verse and rhyme, which Dwight Garner has called \u201cdizzying.\u201d Those poems are anchored by constant allusions and tributes to the music Robbins loves. Most memorably, in <\/em>Alien vs. Predator\u2019s \u201cI Did This to My Vocabulary,\u201d he exclaims the names of heavy-metal bands as Santa Claus roll calls his reindeer in \u201cThe Night Before Christmas\u201d: \u201cOn Sabbath, on Slayer, on Maiden and Venom! \/ On Motorhead, and Leppard, and Zeppelin, and Mayhem!\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Two poems published in <\/em>The Paris Review over the past year, <\/em>\u201cWalkman<\/a>\u201d and \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday<\/a>,\u201d are more autobiographical and ruminative; they seem to follow in the tradition of the New York School. \u201cSchuyler was too tender \/ for me then,\u201d Robbins writes in \u201cWalkman,\u201d \u201cbut now \/ he is just tender \/ enough.\u201d It\u2019s this pivot toward tenderness\u2014rich with memories, \u201cbeautiful experiences,\u201d secrets, breakups, apologies, Schuyler-esque wishes\u2014that might best characterize the departure from his earlier work. You can hear a little Taylor Swift (Robbins is a fan) in the last lines of \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday\u201d: \u201cWherever \/ you are, I hope you stand \/ still now and then \/ and let the prayers \/ wash over you like the breakers \/ at Fort Tilden that day \/ the huge gray gothic \/ clouds massed and threatened to drop \/ a storm on our heads \/ but didn\u2019t.\u201d<\/em>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

I met Robbins at a caf\u00e9 in Brooklyn, where we talked about <\/em>Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music<\/a>, his book of essays forthcoming in July, and the stylistic shift between his collections and his poems in the <\/em>Review.<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The two poems in the Review <\/em>recently\u2014\u201cWalkman\u201d and \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday\u201d\u2014are a radical departure from those in your books.<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

After The Second Sex<\/em>, I didn\u2019t want to write any more poems in the vein of my two collections. I just didn\u2019t want to be one of those poets who write the same book over and over again. I knew that I wanted to write a different kind of poem. So the first thing I decided, before I knew what I was going to write, was that I wasn\u2019t going to rhyme, and I wasn\u2019t going to worry about meter.\u00a0<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Was that easy?<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

Well, there\u2019s not any strict meter in those first two books, but there\u2019s the ghost of pentameter\u2014well, there\u2019s the ghost of the iamb, mostly. I just knew that the first thing I had to do if I wanted to write different kinds of poems was shake that off. But as I set out to write a poem, that rhythm was in my head. It\u2019s not like you\u2019re counting out beats and trying to make the line rhyme, but you think in rhyme and certain rhythms, after a while. When I was younger, I didn\u2019t understand how Milton could have dictated Paradise Lost<\/em>, when he was blind, to his daughter, because I didn\u2019t understand how you could just extemporaneously compose iambic pentameter\u2014I thought it was something you had to labor at. But people used to grow up writing in that rhythm, and it became the natural cadence for poetic speech.<\/p>\n

First I wrote a couple things that were really just strange little ditties that didn\u2019t escape that model, but I was just trying to think my way out of it by writing. And then \u201cWalkman\u201d just exploded out. I had no idea when I was writing it if it was going to be a success. I wrote that poem in a way that I had never written any poem before, which is I spent nine hours writing it. That\u2019s just what I did one day. I didn\u2019t know that was going to happen. I just started writing, and a few more lines came to me, and then I was writing for nine hours, and it was more or less in the form you see now. I revised it, but the basic skeleton was there after nine hours. And I had been reading a lot of James Schuyler, which I mention in the poem, and I sort of had his\u2014he sometimes writes in long, looping lines, but also sometimes in very short lines, and I had those shorter-line poems in my head. But when you read the poem it doesn\u2019t sound like Schuyler. And I hadn\u2019t read Schuyler that deeply before. Before I started writing this, I read his entire corpus, at least his collected poetry, and I had never done that before, and that\u2019s all I read for three weeks. And that\u2019s an intense experience. You\u2019re reading thirty-page poems, and they\u2019re very much about what James Schuyler is thinking, and what kind of flower he\u2019s interested in, and what the weather is like, and it was just a different kind of immersion for me. \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday\u201d came in the same vein\u2014 that one was more imposed, it wasn\u2019t like a breaking of a dam, like \u201cWalkman\u201d was.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Does it feel like a permanent departure from that former style?<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

Those two poems\u2014I like them, but in some respects, they resemble kinds of poetry that I have disliked for most of my life. And that, too, was something where I was like, I\u2019m just going to go with it, and people can think these poems are bourgeois or self-involved or precious or overly serious or what have you. On Facebook, on The Paris Review <\/em>page, one of the first responses under \u201cYou Haven\u2019t Texted Since Saturday\u201d was just some guy who wrote, \u201cEw.\u201d And I was like, Fair enough!<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

One of the essays in your forthcoming book, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music<\/em>, is \u201cRed,\u201d a review of the Taylor Swift album by the same name, a critical analysis of Swift herself, and a three-page bird-flip to all her haters.<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

My favorite piece about Taylor Swift was Rick Moody\u2019s takedown, because he singles me out, and some other critics. He just can\u2019t believe that anybody likes Taylor Swift. It was nice to be singled out by Rick Moody as a Taylor Swift partisan.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Have you ever seen such a critical rush to defense for a pop artist as you\u2019ve seen with Taylor Swift?<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know that I\u2019ve ever seen one as widespread. The notion that a teenage girl is going to come along and write country-music songs about breakups seems to invite, in many people, a dismissive response, sort of ipso facto. I thought that was interesting. And you see it not just with her, but with Britney Spears and Katy Perry, and a lot of so-called pop artists. So-called pop, where \u201cpop\u201d doesn\u2019t just mean popular but designates a certain kind of ephemeral and chart-busting experience\u2014bubblegum. I don\u2019t see why we should rely on such preworked categories instead of just admitting that that is a perfectly valid experience. I\u2019ve never been to a Taylor Swift concert. I would like to go to one, but it\u2019s true that I don\u2019t want to be around that many twelve-year-old girls. But at the same time, I don\u2019t see any reason for dismissing the validity of twelve-year-old girls\u2019 experiences.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think educated people are more likely to write off pop music?<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

No\u2014that\u2019s been an interesting shift. You couldn\u2019t really find an Adorno today talking about how primitive jazz is\u2014I mean, obviously jazz today is seen as non-primitive, but you\u2019re not going to find many people writing off pop music the way it was possible to do in the past. I think everyone recognizes that a lot of what Adorno said about the monetization of popular music is true, but he uncharacteristically did not view it as dialectically as it should be viewed. I don\u2019t know that there\u2019s a whole lot of intellectual disparagement of pop music anymore\u2014of course it happens\u2014hi, Rick Moody\u2014but it\u2019s not as common as it was.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

At one point, you mention you\u2019re not sure what poetry or pop music would look like after capitalism.<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

Well, it existed before capitalism. Pop music obviously is a special case, but there was poetry before capitalism. There might be poetry after capitalism. I mean, partly what I\u2019m saying is that we don\u2019t know what will come after capitalism, so we don\u2019t know what cultural forms will speak to that condition. But also what I mean is that poetry and pop music are now inseparable from capitalism. They\u2019re not just reflections of it, they\u2019re not even mediations\u2014 they\u2019re a part of it. They\u2019re imbricated as material social processes in capitalism now. So I don\u2019t know, no one can know, what they would look like after capitalism, except that they would be very different. I don\u2019t know if they would survive or not survive, but whatever they do, they wouldn\u2019t survive in their current form.<\/p>\n

INTEVIEWER<\/p>\n

There are a few down-tempo moments in Equipment for Living<\/em> when it seems like you become exasperated with certain critical approaches to both poetry and pop. \u201cAs for me and my house,\u201d you say, \u201cwe serve the song.\u201d<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

The experience I\u2019ve been trying to get to the bottom of\u2014and I don\u2019t and I can\u2019t, and this book is actually a failure to do so\u2014was nicely captured in a Facebook post by a friend of mine who wrote that her son kept playing the same pop song over and over again. I don\u2019t remember the song, which is unfortunate, but she asked him, Why do you like it so much? And he said that the chorus made him feel haunted. And I was just like, Yeah! That\u2019s it! That\u2019s the thing. That hauntedness that you feel is a very strange experience, and I guess it\u2019s what people mean by aesthetic, by the<\/em> aesthetic, which is a term that has always caused more trouble than it has resolved. But there\u2019s something about certain songs, certain poems, certain movies, that gives us that kind of experience. None of this is new. This is something that people have been trying to get to the bottom of since someone first recited the\u00a0Iliad <\/em>around a fire. But it\u2019s a strange experience. It\u2019s strange that words and songs can have that kind of power. And I don\u2019t want to romanticize it, and I don\u2019t want to just have recourse to the sublime. I want to try and understand it as it works in myself and as it works in social reality. It turns out that\u2019s very hard to do.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Can you give me any exclusive access to some B sides in the book\u2019s final chapter, \u201cPlaylist\u201d?<\/p>\n

ROBBINS<\/p>\n

I just made an actual playlist on Spotify for the book, which is over nine hours long. The online marketing manager at Simon & Schuster asked me to do it, and I realized that there were a few more songs that I might have liked to write about, just some perfect songs that have never let me down. Cyndi Lauper\u2019s version of \u201cMoney Changes Everything.\u201d Fleetwood Mac\u2019s \u201cStorms.\u201d Swamp Dogg\u2019s \u201cSynthetic World.\u201d Roxy Music\u2019s \u201cTrue to Life.\u201d Dave Alvin\u2019s \u201cFourth of July.\u201d Willie Nelson and Merle Haggard\u2019s version of \u201cPancho and Lefty.\u201d And, most of all, \u201cDr. Wu\u201d by Steely Dan. Those great lines: \u201cAll night long \/ we would sing that stupid song \/ and every word we sang I knew was true.\u201d That\u2019s pretty much the dialectic of pop music that I love. The words to the stupid song are true, and you know it.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Daniel Johnson is an editorial assistant at Bedford\/St. Martin’s Press.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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