{"id":28294,"date":"2012-03-27T11:00:38","date_gmt":"2012-03-27T15:00:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=28294"},"modified":"2012-03-26T22:15:11","modified_gmt":"2012-03-27T02:15:11","slug":"michael-robbins-on-%e2%80%98alien-vs-predator%e2%80%99","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/03\/27\/michael-robbins-on-%e2%80%98alien-vs-predator%e2%80%99\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Robbins on \u2018Alien vs. Predator\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/em>

Michael Robbins.<\/p><\/div>\n

Reading the poetry of Michael Robbins is kind of like driving around the parkways and frontage roads of America\u2019s suburbs. His poems have a Best Buy, a Red Lobster, a Kinko\u2019s, a Pizza Hut, and a Guitar Center; they reference the slogans of Christian billboards and the bumper stickers of hippies; they offer the choice between Safeway and Whole Foods and between the corporate classic-rock station, the corporate urban-music station, and All Things Considered. The poems are heavy with concern for the elephants, the whales, and the freedom of Tibet. They have a Rhianna song stuck in their heads. <\/em><\/p>\n

Among poets, Robbins follows in the footsteps of Frederick Seidel and Paul Muldoon in writing about contemporary life using more traditional poetic forms and rhyme. He also references and sometimes even quotes Philip Larkin, John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, Wordsworth, and others. But Robbins is more playful and less grandiloquent than his sometimes-grim forefathers: after reading his first book, <\/em>Alien vs. Predator<\/a>, the two things I kept thinking of were not poetry at all, but rather the short stories of George Saunders and the video art of Ryan Trecartin. As Saunders did with marketing jargon and Trecartin with reality television, Robbins congeals his suburban idyll, transforming its vacant vernacular into unsettling poignancy. And sometimes it\u2019s even funny.<\/em><\/p>\n

I reached Robbins by phone in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. We spoke the day after Rick Santorum\u2019s victory in that state\u2019s Republican primary.<\/em><\/p>\n

Where are you working right now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I\u2019m a visiting poet at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, which is where I\u2019m staying and just waiting until I get out of this city.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t like it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The people are great at the university, my students are great, but Hattiesburg is \u2026 it\u2019s just like if you opened a university in a Taco Bell, basically. It\u2019s just the ugliest place I\u2019ve ever seen in my life. <\/p>\n

Is it maybe good for the work though?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I spend a lot of time in my apartment, so I suppose it is in that sense. But there\u2019s no bookstore, there\u2019s like one Books-A-Million, whose Bible section is larger than its poetry section, which anyway has, like, books by Bill Bryson in it and stuff. You can quote me on all that if you want to, I don\u2019t care.<\/p>\n

You don\u2019t mind?<\/strong><\/p>\n

No, I want to be on record saying that I hate Hattiesburg.<\/p>\n

I see you thank Paul Muldoon in the beginning of the book, and he first published you<\/a> in the The New Yorker<\/em>, right? Is Paul Muldoon a mentor? <\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, Paul is responsible for anyone having noticed me at all, so in that sense I can\u2019t thank him enough. But also Muldoon\u2019s ability and Frederick Seidel\u2019s as well\u2014their ability to be contemporary and to respond to the present while at the same time enjoying rhyme and meter. I find it interesting that rhyme is something that is less valued now in contemporary poetry and is viewed as unsophisticated or retro or just old-fashioned. There\u2019s not a lot of strict meter in my book, but there are a lot of rhymes, including some very doggerel-ish rhymes, and I enjoy that. Muldoon\u2019s rhymes are the best rhymes right now in the world. So he was important to me.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clich\u00e9 to ask about the relationship between rap music and poetry, but you mention a lot of rappers and a kind of homage to hip-hop, \u201cTo the Break of Dawn,\u201d closes the book. What does it mean to put Wordsworth and Jay-Z together in the same poem?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Muldoon has a line in \u201cSleeve Notes\u201d where he\u2019s talking about Leonard Cohen and he says, \u201chis songs have meant far more to me \/ than most of the so-called \u2018poems\u2019 I\u2019ve read.\u201d Most of us have given up the idea that popular music is not an art form. There\u2019s a way that popular music does what poetry used to do: it brings people together in a common conversation, and there\u2019s a definite sense in which poetry over the past fifty years has become less and less of a popular art form and more a cloistered pursuit. I make the obvious distinction between Wordsworth and Jay-Z, but I don\u2019t make a distinction in the impact they\u2019ve had on my life. Each of them has provided me with what Kenneth Burke calls \u201cequipment for living.\u201d<\/p>\n

Are there any musicians who have influenced your poetry?<\/strong><\/p>\n

When I was seventeen it was the Clash and the Stones. I was just thinking the other day how I couldn\u2019t have imagined when I was seventeen that when I was forty I\u2019d be listening to Prince and Steely Dan more than the Clash and the Stones. But recently I’ve decided Iron Maiden\u2019s Killers<\/em> is the best record ever made. Please don\u2019t talk to me about Pet Sounds<\/em> or London Calling<\/em>.<\/p>\n

You know what was really surprising to me? My friend Bobby Baird counted up the allusions to Guns N\u2019 Roses in the book, and I was really surprised to find that I allude to Guns N\u2019 Roses more than any other music, because I didn\u2019t think they\u2019d been that important to me.<\/p>\n

In your poems there are a lot of ready-made phrases from the American vernacular and advertising slogans. Do they come to you when you\u2019re writing because your mind has been sort of colonized by them?<\/strong><\/p>\n

My poetry is partly about how everything is for sale. It seems astonishing to me that we accept that as normal. At the same time, I love Taylor Swift and it would be ridiculous for me to not listen to Taylor Swift or to not see Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol<\/em>, which I just saw, because they are consumer spectacles that disguise the actual relations of production. So yeah, I think the sense that those phrases are completed for me by capitalist vernacular, by advertising, by jargon and clich\u00e9 is a way of thinking about language and my relationship to it. I want to register my antagonism while also registering my complicity.<\/p>\n

Can we talk about your poem \u201cLust for Life\u201d<\/a> ? I was curious about the elephants. They come up a few times in your poems.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ah, yes. The elephants. Other people have noticed that. Again, that was surprising to me. Someone said, \u201cYou have a lot of elephants in your poems,\u201d and I said, \u201cI do?\u201d<\/p>\n

Elephants and bats. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Well, I like both elephants and bats\u2014it might be as simple as that. But I wrote this right around the time that the elephants were dying at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago. There was a mysterious wave of elephant deaths, and now they don\u2019t have any elephants. I was also reading an article<\/a> about how poachers are killing so many elephants that the young males are basically just like gangbangers. There\u2019s this adolescent-elephant violence spree in parts of Africa because they\u2019re not being socialized properly. And whatever the elephants are doing in my poems, the reason they\u2019re there is because I do spend a lot of time thinking about the nonhuman world and the horrific devastation that we\u2019re sowing there.<\/p>\n

And what about the bats?<\/strong><\/p>\n

The bats. Have you ever seen bats fellating themselves at the zoo, or is that just me?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think I have, but maybe I just haven\u2019t spent enough time in the bat cave.<\/strong><\/p>\n

I do spend a lot of time there. I haven\u2019t been to the zoo in Hattiesburg because I\u2019m worried it will depress me, but probably bats are interesting to me because they\u2019re like these weird \u2026 they\u2019re just weird. They\u2019re not birds, but they\u2019re flying around, they\u2019re fellating themselves. And isn\u2019t it the case that there are more \u2026 let me look this up, I\u2019ll look this up on Wikipedia\u2014\u201cBats represent about 20 percent of all classified mammal species worldwide.\u201d<\/p>\n

So statistically they would have to be in your poems.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Right, if there are going to be mammals in my poems\u2014and there are various mammals\u2014you\u2019re just going to have to include bats or it\u2019s going to be strange. A fifth of all mammal species are bats? I mean, that\u2019s crazy. We should take them seriously.<\/p>\n

The bat, since Thomas Nagel’s \u201cWhat Is It Like to Be a Bat?\u201d, is a metonym for what reductionist accounts of consciousness cannot conceive\u2014the subjective character of experience, for instance. And I play on Nagel\u2019s title in two bat lines in the book.<\/p>\n

It was election night there last night. How did you spend that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

I spend most nights in Hattiesburg sitting in my apartment imagining that I\u2019m somewhere else. I actually watched Nicholas Cage\u2019s new movie, Seeking Justice<\/em>, illegally on the Internet.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s funny that you hate this suburbia you describe, because it\u2019s also, from reading your poems, kind of your muse. <\/strong><\/p>\n

Kind of my what? Oh, my muse?<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve dismissed<\/a> Robert Hass\u2019s descriptions of the natural world\u2014<\/strong><\/p>\n

I don\u2019t dismiss them, but I do find it a little bit precious and pious the way some of his poems can seem as if, you know, some of his poems have obviously never been in a Best Buy or a Target. I\u2019ve now been to Walmart five times in my life because it\u2019s the only place to buy good food here, and it\u2019s true that I hate it, because Hattiesburg is basically nothing but that. But it\u2019s also true that this is how most people live. And I don\u2019t want to go to Walmart, I don\u2019t want to go to Best Buy, but when you do go to those places there\u2019s something really odd taking place that you should pay attention to. I think you could have a religious experience in a Best Buy as readily as you could have one on a Tibetan mountaintop. This is a strange, strange world. It\u2019s a very strange world. And I never stop being astonished by it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading the poetry of Michael Robbins is kind of like driving around the parkways and frontage roads of America\u2019s suburbs. His poems have a Best Buy, a Red Lobster, a Kinko\u2019s, a Pizza Hut, and a Guitar Center; they reference the slogans of Christian billboards and the bumper stickers of hippies; they offer the choice […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":203,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[907],"tags":[6880,6889,712,970,1088,6885,4094,6881,6883,6886,5250,6888,3684,2253,6891,6882,514,6887,6884,40,6890,5961],"class_list":["post-28294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-work","tag-alien-vs-predator","tag-elephants","tag-frederick-seidel","tag-george-saunders","tag-guns-n-roses","tag-iron-maide","tag-jay-z","tag-john-betjeman","tag-kenneth-burke","tag-killers","tag-leonard-cohen","tag-lust-for-life","tag-paul-muldoon","tag-philip-larkin","tag-robert-hass","tag-ryan-trecartin","tag-suburbia","tag-taylor-swift","tag-the-clash","tag-the-new-yorker","tag-thomas-nagel","tag-walmart"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nMichael Robbins on \u2018Alien vs. Predator\u2019 by Emily Witt<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"March 27, 2012 \u2013 Reading the poetry of Michael Robbins is kind of like driving around the parkways and frontage roads of America\u2019s suburbs. 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