Village Voice Spotlights Michael Robbins's New Essay Collection

Following two collections of poetry, Alien vs. Predator (2012) and The Second Sex (2014), Michael Robbins's first book of essays, Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music, has landed in bookstores nationwide. Village Voice's Sarah Aziza spends time with the author and learns more about his influences. Aziza: "One minute he’s quoting Chilean poet Nicanor Parra ('The United States, the country where liberty is a statue'); the next, he’s gushing about Rihanna ('Her music is so catchy…and when millions of people love the same thing, that’s significant')." Let's join Aziza's conversation with Robbins there: 

This is what Robbins’s book feels like: a string of eloquent near–non sequiturs looping around themes of art, politics, and pop culture. Published by Simon & Schuster, Equipment for Living is the author’s first collection of prose following two volumes of poetry (2012’s Alien vs. Predator and 2014’s The Second Sex, both from Penguin Poets). Comprising original essays and previously published magazine pieces, Equipment for Living sees the author trafficking in ambiguity, content to offer more questions than answers (“Every sentence ends in an em dash,” he says, describing his life). He also has no problem shifting from a snarky, three-page think-piece on Neil Young (“Kill Rock Stars’ Memoirs”) to a theory-heavy treatise on Frederick Seidel. These disparate parts hold together, he tells me, because “similar questions inform them.”

Those questions involve the big and existential: “What does poetry do?” (Robbins’s answers include “many things” and “nothing”) and “Can something mass-produced still be art?” (“Yes”). But he also touches on more trite (and more dogging) queries, such as “Are lyrics poetry?” and “Did Bob Dylan deserve the Nobel Prize?” The eclecticism of Robbins’s frame of reference is impressive, if occasionally disorienting, hopping from Kenneth Burke and Theodor Adorno to the Clash and Langston Hughes. In “Destroy Your Safe and Happy Lives,” he uses Blake, Kant, and Milton to discuss various forms of metal music (heavy, black, Swedish). In “Rhyme Is a Drug,” he investigates the history of rhyming in composition, beginning with “Mongol hordes.”

For all this variety, the author generally avoids condescension and includes a healthy dose of mordant humor, usually at the expense of his teenage self. At the back of the book, Robbins invites readers to explore an extensive “playlist” ranging from poet Paige Ackerson-Kiely to Neil Young and Crazy Horse. The compilation, he says, “includes both pieces that got me through the last several years during which these essays were written and stuff that got me through my adolescence and early twenties, which is when one often has one’s most intense responses to pop music and poetry.”

Continue at the Village Voice.