A Review of the Fierce, Plaintive, Stylish Rabbit, by Sophie Robinson

At the UK's Poetry School, Rosanna Hildyard reviews Sophie Robinson's new book, Rabbit (Boiler House Press, 2018), looking closely at the poem "Art in America." "The fierce, plaintive, stylish poems in Rabbit are about the experience of unbelonging and being distanced from others," writes Hildyard. More:

[In] ‘art in america’, Robinson’s speaker is the ‘only person at the john giorno installation / in hell’s kitchen on a wednesday afternoon’. It is ‘the’ John Giorno exhibition; evidently, this is an event not to be missed (we’ve all heard people talk about ‘the Tracey Emin’ or ‘the Anni Albers’), and, significantly, Robinson chooses to show Giorno’s great importance with the detail that his exhibition includes a ‘twenty foot projection screen’. Alongside this, Robinson quotes Giorno on his success: ‘thanks for nothing america i did it all without you’.

Ironically, the importance of art is only to do with the relative size of the screen – it’s literally superficial. Although America bows down before Giorno (giving him ‘the’ show in central Manhattan), his exhibition is nothing to do with the actual creative work. Robinson makes the point that the importance of art to our society, rather than being an act of communication, is about showing and projecting images on larger and larger scales, to an audience.

Bleak. But the music of ‘art in america’ helps it transcend cynicism and become truly powerful. Jack Underwood has written about how poems are shaped like rollercoasters in terms of structure and pace, giving the example of Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘The Fish’, which teeters us up the rails before plunging us down in a release of tension. ‘art in america’ is definitely one of these rhetorically rollercoastery poems. Taking up five pages, it gives itself the space to play with line lengths and to build to a crescendo that climaxes, visually and aurally, in a block of almost-solid prose, in monotonous, rapid-fire short sentences: 

ambition makes me sick. i want to close every door.

i don’t care about kathy acker. i don’t care about anything anymore.

there’s no art in america, its all sugar and war.

i shouldn’t have taken what i took the way i took it              but listen:

Read the full review here.