My impressions:
There's an intensity of reference that's a bit exhausting - its's kind of 'surprise! surprise! surprise! surprise!'. I'm struggling to get over that, tbh; the moments of going 'oh Summer Breeze GnR Larkin Ghostface Adorno GrantMorrison etc etc'. I usually find allusion a p limited tool, but the rate and range(*) here are overwhelming, & give the verse its flavour and substance.
Formally it feels a bit samey, like his music is just a bit too narrow. I'm trying to put my finger on what exactly it is, it's like some fragments of Stevens (Blue Guitar couplets?) or Ashbery maybe, stuck on a loop. He does love the sound of words, but it's a bit too obvious - the light verse charge very nearly sticks, and looks true over the course of single poems.
So I'm saying that it doesn't quite get out of the trap of sounding superficial while trying to represent overstimulated superficiality maybe - but I like it more the more I read - the effect of the volume, a mind spinning pointlessly, trying to grab onto things and slipping off them, entertaining itself in whirlwind or falling apart in front of the mass of manufactured stuff, then asserting 'I' again before losing track of it. (The major sound-syntax signature of the book, all those sentences starting out with 'I…' would be deliberate I guess.) Trying to say something serious but everything turning into a joke.
(*) It's not really the span of the range that locks my attention, it's narcissism: white middle class 30-something male who likes pop culture and canonical poetry (The big gap is us/uk.) Feels like someone is close to locking patterns in my head into a music, which makes it more frustrating that this does feel a bit empty, that it's not quite managing to adhere to the world or to feelings or… i dunno.
Little 'RIP Alex Chilton' in the acknowledgments.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 13:40 (eleven years ago) link
Oh, that huge blockquote was from the New Yorker poetry thread:
I'd Like To Give A Shout-Out To Paul Muldoon For Making Me Want To Read New Yorker Poems!
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 13:41 (eleven years ago) link
Re: the first-person pronoun: one of the things that first struck me about (the poem) "Alien vs. Predator" is the playful boastfulness of it, the absurd claims to some sort of demigodlike powers; this is, I suppose, part of the hip-hop influence ("hit the earth like a comet invasion / Nas is like that afrocentric asian / half-man, half-amazing"), with maybe some Whitman too?
― visions of kreayshawn with joanna newsom (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 14:00 (eleven years ago) link
Yeah, Appetite for Destruction (pasted upthread) has that same thing going on - distortion of hip-hop leaps out to kick it off, then it spins into war-violence, paranoia, fear, finally bleaker sort of giant-consumer-corpse monster egotism.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 14:38 (eleven years ago) link
sometimes the phrase
"that elk is such a dick"
gets stuck in my head, again and again.
It is hard to work out whether i like him or not, but i'd buy a book of his poems in service of finding out.
― ䷡ (c sharp major), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 14:41 (eleven years ago) link
as in, his stuff seems worth my expending the energy on it - even though so flash and rapid it doesn't feel instantly dismissable.
― ䷡ (c sharp major), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 14:45 (eleven years ago) link
tbh on first reading my heart really sank, thought I'd got excited over nonsense jingles + flattery-by-allusion, but now I think he's at least interesting, beyond the sound-and-rhythm fun; worth the effort for me maybe.
Still a bit wary, partly for reasons sketched above, partly because HYPE.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 14:58 (eleven years ago) link
so this guy is, like, the james ferraro of poetry?
― jabba hands, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:07 (eleven years ago) link
will maybe buy this on the strength of this:
The Dark Clicks On
The morning slathers its whateveracross the thing.
― blossom smulch (schlump), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:19 (eleven years ago) link
i liked 'alien vs predator' the poem a lot but the idea of it as a modus operandi makes me really kind of depressed. i think i have had this in the to-buy section on amazon for a very long time - it was up there months before it was released, i think - but (fittingly?) the idea of buying this makes me feel like one of those people who buy only one hip hop album a year.
there are probably a lot of MFA poets who have worked out similar schticks? maybe? i mean: the glibness about 'poetry', how it comes out. (the morning slathers its whatever, yes.) n.b. i'm not saying "there are probably a lot of MFA poets ..." as a thing i know - i'm speculating! i'm just assuming he can't be the only one!
but his real talent with cadence, assonance, half-rhyme is there. full rhyme even! it just seems to be there in relation to a fairly limited set of targets: like i feel this is pretty low-hanging fruit for someone in his 30s to be going at.
it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s. it feels a bit like mark leyner. but, then, there was a new mark leyner book this year, and people actually wrote things about it, suggesting people might want to read a new mark leyner book in 2012, as if his uselessness hadn't been recognised and he hadn't been off writing those 'what to ask the doctor after your fourth pina colada' books, so, in conclusion, fml. (incidentally, i hope one of the poems here concludes:
and so, in conclusion, fml.
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:29 (eleven years ago) link
Might as well put basic resources here too I guess, good housekeeping. Robbins on twitter and tumblr.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:34 (eleven years ago) link
this is a bit of gregory sherl from a book called the oregon trail is the oregon trail which i am going to put here for purposes of comparison:
I pause the game but your heart still beatsslowly. I rest the oxen, sing you folk songsabout mining a future west of Fort Kearney.We hide from typhoid behind trees suffocatingthe earth, but it still catches child #2, Wendy,and your heart drops like a bowling ball downa sewer. We always ford the river but today the swellis God’s stomachache, and we lose two oxen.
Christopher, child #1, falls into a ditchof rattlesnakes. Venom like whoa.Death eats grass and the weeds wrap aroundthe wagon’s wheels, cracking the axel.I can’t fix the axel, so we have to trade40 bullets to a banker from Boston. Your anklesare showing and a bulge is showing in the bankerfrom Boston, so I shoot him and take the bullets back.
On a night too lonely for color, you find bloodin places where blood should not be. Your tearsare a muted computer screen. Your dysentery is my dysentery.I hold your hand and your eyes are milk. I tell you Soon.Soon zombies will walk the earth, pouring salton open wounds. Today my fever kills my appetite,and the bear I shot is rotting the end of the world.
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:38 (eleven years ago) link
i want to know what would happen if ilm's whiney g weingarten were made to read this book
― thomp, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:43 (eleven years ago) link
it feels a bit like a vein that should have been tapped in the 90s.
YES.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:43 (eleven years ago) link
AvP in the New Yorker did feel belated, like 'how did it take so long for that to happen?'.
I suppose lots of MFA types must have got something similar (speculating too), but his engineering's quite daring in its crudity or flash or something: the frequent half-line sentences + piled-on full-rhyme couplets + simple syntax. (He's not one for following a thought or image over a stanza.)
ikwym too about the one hip-hop album a year thing.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 15:52 (eleven years ago) link
was going to call the thread 'HIPSTER POET Michael Robbins has written a book of HIPSTER POETRY called Alien vs Predator' to lure in posters who can't resist what-is-hipster clusterfucks, but decided against (felt like dad-joke bid for wider ilx attn).
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 16:18 (eleven years ago) link
Sometimes I subscribe to the t.s.eliot school of evaluating poets based on how many of their lines couldn't possibly have come from anyone else, and I think Robbins scores pretty well on that metric. Compared to something like that Oregon Trail poem just posted, he's much less verbose ('punchier'?), which also helps him seem less sentimental even when he touches on 'serious' matters (e.g. the one that ends "I rape the earth. It's not my fault.")
― visions of kreayshawn with joanna newsom (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:02 (eleven years ago) link
Also I like this book 10x more since I began hearing the title as "alien verse predator", like how a kid might say it
― visions of kreayshawn with joanna newsom (bernard snowy), Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:05 (eleven years ago) link
someone subscribe to the london review of books and then cut and paste this review here cuz i want to read the whole thing:
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n15/michael-robbins/my-heart-on-a-stick
you can read this other seidel review here though as a pdf:
http://humanities.uchicago.edu/orgs/review/5323_robbins_seidel.pdf
― scott seward, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:18 (eleven years ago) link
i HAVE to post a link to this again. i just have to. tour de force.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/239972
― scott seward, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:21 (eleven years ago) link
That Oregon Trail poem… I dunno. It feels to me like it's working imaginatively with the experience of playing a computer game, and a much more conventional poem results. Robbins doesn't seem especially interested in poem-as-artifact crafted from that kind of engagement with experience, but I think I'm okay with that at the moment.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 18:26 (eleven years ago) link
Scott, I won't post it here bcz i sort of know ppl there & feels bad karma to post the mag's stuff publically, but if your webmail works then it's on its way.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 19:07 (eleven years ago) link
thanks!
― scott seward, Tuesday, 3 July 2012 19:18 (eleven years ago) link
I reviewed this a while ago: http://causticcovercritic.blogspot.com.au/2012/03/alien-vs-predator.html
Main thought: The way that [his best ]lines work independently of their source poems leads to my main criticism: the fragmentary nature of many of these poems means that one line often doesn’t build on the next, as Robbins jumps manically to the next gag, the next bit of pomposity-bursting—I suspect could randomly rearrange and mix lines from half a dozen poems collected here and they’d be no worse for it. But poems that present a unified argument or the encapsulation of a place or an experience are not the sort of poems Robbins is usually interested in writing, so it’s not necessarily just to have a go at him for not writing them.
― an inevitable disappointment (James Morrison), Wednesday, 4 July 2012 00:32 (eleven years ago) link
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 (eleven years ago) link
Description in prose can be spun out at tedious length. What's another dozen sentences when you're pounding away at a comprehensive catalog of piled-up details?
Instead, he may have been thinking of a rather idealized concept of poetic description, where a few words are made to encapsulate masses of detail by a process of deft suggestion, incorporating gesture, rhythm and coloration. Or not. I am not a mind reader.
― Aimless, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 05:07 (eleven years ago) link
i would check out that NYT article linked upthread, even though there is a sly winking reference to mcclatchy early on, it is very full of truth, for example
Mr. Robbins’s pop-cultural knife skills, however, may be among the least interesting things about him. Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix. What puts his poems over is their sheer joy and dizzy command. He delivers his verses in tight, mostly rhyming quatrains and quintets that march down the page like the work of Frederick Seidel or Mr. Muldoon himself ...
When Mr. Robbins’s poems miss, they miss hideously, veering close to nonsense (“My smoothie/comes with GPS”). Non sequiturs are heaped into tottering piles. In bad young poets, knowingness is to knowledge what truthiness is to truth, as Mr. Robbins’s lesser stuff makes plain.
... But he has a sky-blue originality of utterance.
anyway i agree with aimless on "gesture, rhythm and coloration"
i don't like slam poetry and i already had a beatnik phase but i think sometimes this stuff sounds so nice read aloud
ototh everything i've read by mcclatchy and wheeler otoh has made me wince
― the late great, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 06:13 (eleven years ago) link
i would disagree with Rare is the young poet these days who doesn’t dice our wired world into a baseline mirepoix perhaps but i know what he means
― the late great, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 06:14 (eleven years ago) link
that beatdown on hass was funny
― the late great, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 06:26 (eleven years ago) link
seidel review was great too
thanks scott!
― the late great, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 06:27 (eleven years ago) link
Thar review of Hass was hilarious: "Does ass fucking really require such a high-minded justification? Upon being told someone is fucking someone else in the ass, has anyone ever responded, “What! Why?” I regret to inform the reader that Hass goes on to compare this sex act to the sacking of Troy."
― an inevitable disappointment (James Morrison), Wednesday, 4 July 2012 07:46 (eleven years ago) link
that's probably the most unfair line in it, though!
― thomp, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 08:00 (eleven years ago) link
"sacking" more like "sacking" amirite
― the late great, Wednesday, 4 July 2012 08:42 (eleven years ago) link
Confirmed reports of three people I know reading this. This means obv its popularity is only matched by Fifty Shades of Grey.
― thomp, Saturday, 7 July 2012 13:25 (eleven years ago) link
One of them reminded me where Rilke being a jerk came from:
3. A stimulant for an old beast
Acacia, burnt myrrh, velvet, pricky stings.—I'm not so young but not so very old,said screwed-up lovely 23.A final sense of being right out in the cold,unkissed.(—My psychiatrist can lick your psychiatrist.) Women get under things.
All these old criminals sooner or laterhave had it. I've been reading old journals.Gottwald & Co., out of business now.Thick chests quit. Double agent, Joe.She holds her breath like a sealand is whiter & smoother.
Rilke was a jerk.I admit his griefs & music& titled spelled all-disappointed ladies.A threshold worse than the circleswhere the vile settle & lurk,Rilke's. As I said,—
― thomp, Saturday, 7 July 2012 13:29 (eleven years ago) link
Rilke consults Dr. Freud
― Aimless, Saturday, 7 July 2012 16:55 (eleven years ago) link
xpost good eye! I had to stop reading Dream Songs last year cuz they were making me too unhappy, but i've been meaning to return to them
― visions of kreayshawn with joanna newsom (bernard snowy), Saturday, 7 July 2012 17:48 (eleven years ago) link
Also, can we talk about Robbins' relation to other poets/"the canon"? As mentioned upthread, I like his "Reading Late Ashbery", but the Whitmanny one about the twig (don't have the book at hand right now) seemed a little facile..... Berryman's obviously present as an influence througout, including some explicit invocations of Mr. Bones -- wonder how this ties in to Robbins' own hip-hop influence/blackface anxieties/etc??
― visions of kreayshawn with joanna newsom (bernard snowy), Saturday, 7 July 2012 18:52 (eleven years ago) link
apparently we can't
― thomp, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 09:47 (eleven years ago) link
I'd like to but I've been apart from my copy of AvP for a few days & my crippling prac crit anxiety leaves me unwilling to say anything without TEXTUAL SUPPORT.
― woof, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 10:34 (eleven years ago) link
good interview:
http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?id=754
― scott seward, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 14:49 (eleven years ago) link
"I'm just an evangelist for Sullivan right now. That man can sing. I haven't felt this way about a writer since I read Michael Herr's Dispatches. Sullivan could write about anything and I'd read it. David Grann, too — I read every word he writes. But Grann’s definitely a reporter, a journalist. Sullivan, to me, is the American writer right now, in any genre. I'd put him up there with Herr, Didion, McPhee, Dillard, DFW. I think he's a horse. He's staring us down."
i really gotta get that sullivan collection. i never go to stores with new books in them. will go to amherst this weekend.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 14:50 (eleven years ago) link
also didn't know about the marilynne robinson review MR wrote. will have to read that now:
http://observer.com/2012/03/keeping-faith-in-when-i-was-a-child-i-read-books-marilynne-robinson-criticizes-american-politics/?show=all
― scott seward, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 14:52 (eleven years ago) link
i love books pretty much the only place i can go to hear from robinson fans.
― scott seward, Tuesday, 10 July 2012 14:53 (eleven years ago) link
http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/life/ct-prj-0902-frederick-seidel-20120905,0,7555100,full.story
― scott seward, Tuesday, 4 September 2012 19:09 (eleven years ago) link
1
Every book has a beginning, and this is this book's beginning. It starts with a question and then it answers the question. The question is to whom should I dedicate my new little fun book nugget? That's kind of a disclaimer, saying that the book is lepidum, or "fun." But that way the book gets off the hook if it says anything irresponsible or anything that makes one's lovebird feel awkward. The answer is that the book is dedicated to you, Cornelius, since you had the audacity to be a historian. And to write three books and belabor them! Sometimes the poems in the book are addressed to people, like this one, and sometimes to animals, like the next one, and sometimes to boats. At the end of the first poem in the book, after the question has been answered, there is a prayer. The prayer is about amor fati and virgins. It gets heard.
― j., Thursday, 6 September 2012 11:57 (eleven years ago) link
Hymen o Hymenaee!
― Aimless, Thursday, 6 September 2012 17:08 (eleven years ago) link
sorry, that one's too long to type in!
― j., Thursday, 6 September 2012 17:31 (eleven years ago) link
He revs the language like a hypersonic superbike.
― thomp, Thursday, 6 September 2012 22:24 (eleven years ago) link
can I just—
― when you put it like that nickelback saved rock (bernard snowy), Saturday, 8 September 2012 04:17 (eleven years ago) link
There have been plenty of years of my life when twenty bucks for a book was at the far edge of the possible. Not now, happily.
― Aimless, Friday, 7 March 2014 02:23 (ten years ago) link
I paid 11 for Ashbery's Flow Chart last month, that was a splurge
― merciless to accomplish the truth in his intelligence (bernard snowy), Friday, 7 March 2014 04:50 (ten years ago) link
how do you feel about edward dorn, f.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 00:21 (5 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
really like it - the protean central voice and the presentation of time are done very well I think. it's a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form. "Western frontier as appropriate place and set of characters with which to study the soul and it's journeys" is absolutely a premise I buy. it's witty, conversational and fun, and laced with song. i like Burroughs, but you allow a lot for the pleasure of listening to his discursive tone of voice - Gunslinger reminded me of Burroughs, but here the internal philosophy, structure and tale, such as it is, is in its own terms coherent, which gives it that overarching tension that long poems need. there's some brilliant set pieces, like this abstract gunfight between the Horse and a loose-tongued stranger:
The Stoned Horse said Slowlynot looking upfrom his rolling and planningStranger you got a [i]pliable lipyou might get yourself describedif you stay on.
Come on!Who's the horse, I mean who'shorse is that, we can't haveNo Horse! in here.It ain't properand I think I'm gonnaput a halter on you!
Uh uh, the Gunslinger breathed.Anybody know the muthafuckathe Stoned Horse inquiredof the general air.Hey, hear that the strange gaspedthat's even a negra horse!
Maybe so, maybe notthe Gunslinger inhaledbut stranger you got an Attitudea mile longas his chair dropped forwardall four legs on the floorand as the disputational .44occurred in his hand and spun therein that warp of relativity one seesin the backward turning spokesof a buckboard,
then came suddenlyto rest, the barrel utterly justifiedwith a line pointingto the neighborhood of infinity.The room froze harder.
Shit,Slinger, Lil noticed, You've pointedyour .44 straightout of town.I keep tellin younot to be so goddamn fancynow that amacher's got the drop on you!
Not so, Lil!the Slinger observed.Your vulgarity is flawlessbut you are the slave of appearances –-this Stockholder will findthat his gun cannot speakhe'll findthat he has been Described STRUMthe greenhorn pulledthe trigger and his store-bought ironcoughed out some cheap powder,and then changed its mind,muttering about having been up too late last night.Its embarrassed handlerlooked, one eye wandering,into the barreland then reholstered it and stood there.
strum
The total .44recurred in the Slinger's handand spun therethen came home like a sharp knockand the intruder was described -a plain, unassorted white citizen.
the successful unpunctuated distinction of speech and description is always i think a sign of writer invisibly in charge of their rhythms and tone (like Evelyn Waugh or PG Wodehouse's long pages of brief exchanges where the identity of the speaker remains fixed in the mind. It reminds me of what George Saintsbury in his book on English prose rhythm said about Malory's Morte d'Arthur:
[There are plenty of sentences in Malory beginning with "and"; but it is not the constant go-between and usher-of-all-work that it is in Mandeville.] The abundance of conversation gets him out of this difficulty at once; and he seems to have an instinctive knowledge - hardly shown before him, never reached after him till the time of the great novelists - of weaving conversation and narrative together. [...] His narrative order and his dialogue are so artistically adjusted that they dovetail into one another.
After all, this method and presentation is a 20th/21st C one, but Dorn does it very well. The closest analogue in some ways feels like the Pynchon of Mason & Dixon and Against the Day.
cost me £10, which didn't seem unreasonable - tho like Aimless I'm now in the happy position where I can spend that amount on a book without feeling a bit sick.
― Fizzles, Friday, 7 March 2014 06:55 (ten years ago) link
"a precise, clever performance, which it needs to be given the looseness of its environment and form" -- yeah, i think at the time i looked at it i wasn't really in the mood to read it charitably: like, my response was Yes I Get It And I Am Bored Of This Riff Now And I Am Only About Two Fifths Convinced Your Line Breaks Are Not Arbitrary. i think it's a lot like other pynchon performances too, like the occasional drops into pulp in GR.
when i read the north atlantic vortex pomes i found myself thinking mb i should have given slinger more of a shot; have forgotten what i liked about those, though. was enthused about the collected but i. the cover is carcanet's worst ever ii. fear of amassing further collective works i will not open, like geo. hill's collected e.g., which has been glaring at me resentfully from various piles and bookshelves, still totally unopened, since december
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:00 (ten years ago) link
yeah the North Atlantic Turbine poems definitely show that he knows what he's doing with his linebreaks/form - iirc i liked them because there is a spine of traditional lyric there, he's closer to a posed or precise English voice than I expected - & I think that gave me some of the trust needed to follow Gunslinger (which I liked a lot). I'd like to read more but, yeah, it's stuck in the black hole of being a huge ugly book that I can't or won't carry round with me. I will never learn about big collecteds.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:15 (ten years ago) link
actually maybe I will. I've been buying single volumes of Geo Hill 2nd-hand lately - cheaper since the collected.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:19 (ten years ago) link
interesting. if you should decide any of them are run-don't-walk let me know and i will set up some kind of lever and axle system with which to heave the collected onto some sort of lectern for necessary physical support and prise it open to the relevant section
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:41 (ten years ago) link
i just this week ordered a single louise gluck instead of all of the louise gluck under one cover. i feel very glad of that.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 11:42 (ten years ago) link
we should start a Hill thread. Maybe he'll show up too.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 11:49 (ten years ago) link
actually, I haven't seen that collected Hill about – does it go full on with the apparatus?
(I don't know why the thought of lots of notes at the back depresses me. Maybe it's because Hill feels a bit too much like a poet born to be annotated)
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 13:04 (ten years ago) link
i literally haven't opened the thing. it feels a little intimidating.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Friday, 7 March 2014 14:00 (ten years ago) link
I always used to like that he was a poet with a tiny collected. You could take it anywhere.
― woof, Friday, 7 March 2014 14:24 (ten years ago) link
I'm reviewing the collected Hill for Poetry. Thing is HUGE. No notes, just nearly 1000 pages of poems—including no fewer than FOUR new books. I love Hill, but I'll stick w/ my nice portable Penguin UK ed. of the Selected.
My being here should in no way preclude anyone's saying anything about my work, to answer something said above. Me. My work. See? Two separate things. Not really, but I wouldn't argue w/ anyone's taste—no one's poetry's for everyone.
― murk, Friday, 7 March 2014 21:29 (ten years ago) link
Also: I reviewed Glück's collected for the LARB, but rereading it recently I felt I was overgenerous. Meadowlands is the shit.
― murk, Friday, 7 March 2014 21:30 (ten years ago) link
Been digitally carrying around Jack Gilbert's medium-hefty Collected Poems for the past month.
― That's So (Eazy), Friday, 7 March 2014 23:01 (ten years ago) link
I am actually kind of tempted to order the smaller Hill, or at least to hope to find it, as a way of delaying opening 'Broken Hierarchies' again. Odd that both of the books I'm most putting off reading right now look like they're written by Santa Clauses gone to seed.
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Saturday, 8 March 2014 09:44 (ten years ago) link
The American ed. is the same, just not as compact & attractive, in my view, but still portable:
http://www.amazon.com/Selected-Poems-Geoffrey-Hill/dp/0300164300/ref=sr_1_2_title_1_pap?ie=UTF8&qid=1394382467&sr=8-2&keywords=geoffrey+hill
― murk, Sunday, 9 March 2014 16:28 (ten years ago) link
I just read Colin Burrow's review of Broken Hierarchies in the lrb, and it is not a terrible piece of work but I do find it dismal or circular or something when historically minded eng lit dons claim Hill as a great poet.
Four new volumes. I'm not going near it. going to reread Mercian Hymns instead.
― woof, Thursday, 13 March 2014 14:21 (ten years ago) link
('I liked that,' said Offa, 'sing it again.')
― woof, Thursday, 13 March 2014 14:23 (ten years ago) link
so
https://twitter.com/alienvsrobbins/status/473826291507277824
has 'otm' penetrated wider public consciousness and i hadn't noticed or
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:08 (nine years ago) link
hey murk how far from the end of broken hierarchies are you now
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:13 (nine years ago) link
have you started it?
― woof, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:26 (nine years ago) link
no judgement I'm not exactly tearing through that Dorn.
― woof, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 14:50 (nine years ago) link
i read mercian hymns and three other pages selected at random
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:45 (nine years ago) link
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, June 3, 2014 10:08 AM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=otm
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 16:52 (nine years ago) link
had no idea! thought it was ilx specific.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:11 (nine years ago) link
did click through tho on the money is like 5th down w 4 votes
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:39 (nine years ago) link
1 otmOther Than Mexicans A term used by US Border Patrol agents when catching illegal aliens.What a night last night! We caught 250 people 23 of them were OTMsby abula February 29, 2004 58 34
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:40 (nine years ago) link
how ironic
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Tuesday, 3 June 2014 17:57 (nine years ago) link
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2014/07/atheists_the_origin_of_the_species_by_nick_spencer_reviewed.single.html
3,200 comments
― ♛ LIL UNIT ♛ (thomp), Wednesday, 9 July 2014 06:16 (nine years ago) link
enjoyed that but i am not going near those comments
― woof, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 09:20 (nine years ago) link
gotta admit i've really come around on this guy and this book
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 14:11 (nine years ago) link
There once was a rapping tomato,That's right, a rapping tomato,And he rapped all day,From April til May,and also, guess what? it was me.
― thomp, Saturday, June 9, 2012 6:50 PM (3 weeks ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink
also this is hilarious
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Wednesday, 9 July 2014 14:14 (nine years ago) link
Michael Robbins@alienvsrobbinsAnyone interested in buying my 2011 32" LG LCD flat-screen HDTV? Great shape. Will let it go cheap if you transport from Crown Heights.
― lag∞n, Sunday, 10 August 2014 23:52 (nine years ago) link
B-)
http://i.imgur.com/7UlScn2.png
― lag∞n, Sunday, 10 August 2014 23:59 (nine years ago) link
yo did you guys see 'country music' in the nyer last month, i thought it was p fuckin lovely
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/07/07/lifeguard-2
God keep Carl Perkins warmand Jesus Christ erasemy name from all the files inthe county’s database.The dog that bit my legthe night I left the state,Lord won’t you let hisvaccines be up to date.
― BIG HOOS aka the steendriver, Monday, 11 August 2014 02:02 (nine years ago) link
Thanks, but there's a glitch on the NYer's website. That poem is in quatrains. All stanza breaks have disappeared from poems on their site, which is really annoying. Here's Shannon McArdle's version, icyi:
http://michaelrobbinspoet.tumblr.com/post/94073831275/shannon-mcardle-formerly-of-the-mendoza-line-one
― murk, Tuesday, 12 August 2014 15:56 (nine years ago) link
sick! (wont play for me tho)
― lag∞n, Tuesday, 12 August 2014 16:13 (nine years ago) link
hm, it don't work. well, here it is on shannon's blog:
http://www.shannonmcardlemusic.com/blog/2014/8/12/god-bless-michael-robbins.html
did anyone else love the mendoza line as much as i did?
― murk, Wednesday, 13 August 2014 04:10 (nine years ago) link
i am a fan
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 13 August 2014 04:22 (nine years ago) link
lmao i both can can't believe there's an ilx thread about this dude
one of the worst writers and people
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:43 (five years ago) link
i agree since he unfollowed me on twitter
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:45 (five years ago) link
he was an incredible asshole on a message board i was on circa 2010-2011? right around the time "alien v predator" hit the new yorker. that poem is ok, but dude's essays truly reveal the total nothing going on behind his eyes
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:51 (five years ago) link
I think he posted here a few times. He’s a metal fan. I saw his essay collection in the bookstore the other day. Blurbed by Elif Batuman.
― o. nate, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 17:58 (five years ago) link
He posts upthread a few times.
― woof, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:01 (five years ago) link
i'm pretty sure he's aware of how much i hate his work
― jolene club remix (BradNelson), Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:04 (five years ago) link
lol
― lag∞n, Wednesday, 6 March 2019 18:05 (five years ago) link
yeah this dude is like nails on a chalkboard for me
― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, 7 March 2019 07:49 (five years ago) link