Human Crookedness in a Divinely Ordered World: On Michael Robbins' "Walkman"

Michael Robbins | Walkman | Penguin Books | 2021 | 80 Pages

In 2012, the year the apocalypse was supposed to begin, I picked up a New York Times somebody had left on a table at the student center and spotted Dwight Garner’s review of Alien vs. Predator, Michael Robbins’ debut book of poetry. I was twenty years old, and I was still having my brain and identity completely rewired by every fifth book that came my way. Alien vs. Predator was one of those books and, even more felicitously, it led me to Robbins’ criticism, which led me to John Jeremiah Sullivan, Anthony Madrid, Renata Adler, Frederick Seidel, John Berryman, and Guy Davenport, then on to Joyce and Pound, and so for a while there the sky flashed, the great sea yearned…

I share this anecdote because this kind of beautiful, youthful experience is what the poet’s new book Walkman is about. There’s a lot of rapture in Walkman, a lot of nostalgia; there are even some ruins. I share it also because the youthful Robbins fan in me would probably be appalled by all the above, which seems like a departure from the trajectory of the first two books. Ruins? The guy is supposed to be our poet of Safeway parking lots.

Michael Robbins was born in Kansas in the 70s and had a rough childhood that Walkman is less shy about than his previous books. He grew up to get a PhD from UChicago, and then hit the fabulous poetry bigtime when Paul Muldoon put “Alien vs. Predator” in the New Yorker. Since then he’s published two books of poetry and one book of criticism, 2018’s Equipment for Living, and gotten tenure at Montclair State. He’s a Christian Marxist, which was the bleeding edge in the Obama era but seems quite respectable today.

His previous poems, arranged in the fateful Alien vs. Predator (2012) and the somewhat cuddlier The Second Sex (2014), are works where a lot happens in small spaces. A good example is the first book’s “Welfare Mothers”:

I get up in the evening, dress
the buffalo, slip into its carcass,
a floor too cool for corn. I’m born again
as the Tennessee Valley Authority.
I’m not with you in Rockland, a fortiori.

Guy Davenport compared Tennyson’s surfeit of punctuation to Victorian railroad signaling and Apollinaire’s total lack thereof to the flight of an airplane. Well, here we’re northbound on the Dan Ryan Expressway: the syntax shuffles across three lanes toward the exit; the internal rhyme zooms by on the shoulder; you might spot billboards for Dickinson, Ginsberg, and Neil Young.

I first swooned over Robbins because only he could create that kind of experience in poetry. Unlike your Mary Olivers and Billy Collinses, he was living in the same country I lived in, a land not of wild and precious lives but of Shark Week and blue-chip Dow industrials. But unlike 20th-century emissaries like Frederick Seidel and August Kleinzahler, who live in that country too, he seemed to be native to it. And there was also the technique of his verse, its savage concentration on meter and enjambment, on exactly how a sound might land crooked and ricochet into the next line.

Well, the new book is not like the first two. In Walkman we are a ways out of town, off the Dan Ryan and onto a narrowing I-94. There are two or three poems in the vintage Robbins style and some lovely epigraphs, one of which I think started off as a post on Twitter:

Scallop draggers far offshore
pull up tusks where long before
megafauna browsed in grass—
ocean now. This too shall pass.

But the marquee poems in Walkman are in a new style Robbins has been developing since 2018. They are long, mostly unrhymed, and only rarely divided into stanzas. These poems meander across a page and a half in the shortest cases and almost 15 in the longest, and the energy of the first two books expands to fill the added volume in accordance with Boyle’s Law. The old poems sometimes seemed like they had been written by a neural network, or “a mind alive but not thinking at all”, a phrase by the rock critic Greil Marcus. These poems, though, are clearly made out of a human life. It’s the life of a guy who has had beautiful experiences, who explored the Zapotec ruins of Monte Albán and once “watched the stars blink / on with a Mexican girl” but now just has to wake up, morning after morning.

The title poem of this book first appeared in the Paris Review in 2018, and I admit when I first read it I thought he was losing his edge. And I was right! There’s nothing in this book to temper that first impression. Robbins is over the hill and knows it. The tone in Walkman is gentle and nostalgic, the enjambment doesn’t shuck subject from predicate like it used to, the allusions come far less often, and if you’re a partisan of the Obama-era Robbins you will be disappointed by all that. But if you can find it in yourself to dig into this new mode, you will reap rich rewards.

One of these rewards is Robbins’ writing about the end of the world. Robbins was starting to write about the ecocide engulfing our planet in The Second Sex, but in Walkman it really takes over. The first poem in the book introduces the figure of a crank who used to come into Kinko’s when Robbins worked there back in the 90s:

He wanted to let people know
That God would punish the area
With natural disasters
If the county succeeded
In evicting him from the land
He was squatting on…

Robbins quotes the kind of thing he would write: “ATTN NBC NIGHTLY NEWS THERE WILL / BE FIRES TORNADOES TYPHOONS…” The unnerving question Robbins asks later is “What if he wasn’t batshit but a true / prophet?” 

The apocalypse asserts itself ever more frequently as the book goes on. “When Didn’t I Know It,” halfway through the book, remembers a Nixon-era childhood (“there were more trees then / and fewer on fire”). “CVS on Fire” starts with a cheeky Wallace Stevens reference and ends up, through a Stevensian chain of equivalence, advocating for ecoterrorism. The book culminates in the long poem “The Seasons”, which, fair warning, is pretty harrowing:

…Climate crash,
dispossession of commons
writ global, Shell spill
crackling in flame, minus
divinity. The trinity—
capital, land, labor—
falls apart…

At about 15 pages, “The Seasons” is a little epic that dedicates about 40 percent of its space to the relationship between primitive accumulation, extractive industry, and the resulting Hydra of planetary disaster. In Robbins’ account, the state evicts people, like the Kinko’s crank from the title poem, funnels them into population centers, and burns as much as fossil fuel as it takes to wring productivity out of them. Unfortunately for us, the amount it happens to take is a few gigatons too many for our biosphere’s equilibrium, which means, well, fires tornadoes typhoons.

Robbins encircles this vortex with Rilke, Leopardi, the cave paintings at Chauvet, both versions of The Fly, and, especially, the Eucharist. This is one of Robbins’s most Christian poems, and human crookedness in a divinely ordered world is its thematic preoccupation from the vatic first line: “The star that looks awry upon the sinner / orients the temple.” (Apparently this is cribbed from the 17th-century Anglican cleric Jeremy Taylor.) The poem starts there and ends with Yoko living alone in the Dakota, where John was killed, and if everything in between is drawn, in the aggregate, towards horror and catastrophe, the individual modules still offer consolation, joy and hope. 

That right there is the real thing, the thing men die miserably for lack of. The intensity that I cherished in the first two books is gone from line to line but reasserts itself at the level of the whole book. Robbins has gotten subtler in his deployment of images and allusions, and it lets him maintain the aesthetic impact of the old poems on a scale, and in a rhapsodic tone, that would be impractical at the old level of compression. 

If you are a fellow devotee of the old Robbins, take heart: the new style only clarifies why the first books were so good. And if you have never read the guy before, start with this book—with this book, I insist, and not the first two books, because the new tone is as right for our time as the old one was for its time. A decade into the apocalypse, Robbins, God help him, has not yet averted his eyes.