Michael Robbins
If you’re in Hyde Park on Saturday, please come see me read my poems at Majel Connery’s fantastic Salon performance series.
On the Program:
Larry Zbikowski (guitar)
Harold Olivey (voice)
Michael Robbins (poetry)
Des Pickard (singer/songwriter)
at the home of
Sidney Nagel & Young-Kee Kim
4913 S Kimbark Ave.
Chicago, IL
7:30p doors
8:00p performances
& if you’re in Hyde Park tomorrow night, please come see Nick Demske & Gina Myers read their poems at Series A, at the Hyde Park Art Center!
Michael Robbins
Look, I don’t have time to do critical justice to Big Boi’s Sir Lucious Left Foot: The Son of Chico Dusty, so I’m just going to say that it’s the best album of the year by far & you need it in your life. And that I hope whatever morons at Jive passed on the record are tearing their eyelashes out as they read the jubilant critical responses. (“Too artsy,” they told him. Like Fellini or something! Rule 4080 proved again.)
Robert P. Baird
1/ From “Antagonism and Crisis,” Joshua Clover’s talk for the Rethinking Poetics conference:
But what do we lose, in this nuancing? We lose too much. If we don’t lose much descriptively, we lose the one idea, the one real situation that the distinction has been trying to preserve: that there is a fundamental antagonism, that it has two sides, and that they are set against each other in a dynamic that is not eternal and abstract but concrete and historical. And the loss of this idea is unhappier for poetry than any happiness we might gain by doing away with the distinction.
…
Anyway this Third Way, this American Hybrid, generally uses the language of “getting past” the fundamental antagonisms between the dominant-mainstream and the emergent-experimental (these terms are inexact, but fairly well-understood). The conception of the hybrid is that we can simply choose to leave the antagonism behind.
2/ From the introduction to Clover’s interview with MIA in the new Believer:
Rioter or passenger, outsider or insider, revolutionary or sellout? The categories don’t work so well these days, if they ever did. This is the point, inevitably, of the music, and it is the music that matters. It is art for a moment when categories aren’t working very well, when things are falling apart and centers aren’t holding. It does not try to contain this situation but to register it, to give it a feeling, to get a sense of whether it might indeed be late in something—pop music, history, the U.S. empire.
Michael Robbins
Just a note to say I have a new poem up at The Morning News, which recently started publishing poems (by the likes of D. A. Powell & Andrea Cohen, no less). “Slider” is from my “bad romance” period. Hope you dig.