“a mind alive but not thinking at all”
Greil Marcus writes about my book in the February issue of The Believer, so I am geeking out:
With Davy Crockett-Mike Fink brags brought up to date (“I clear the jungle with the edge of my hand. / I make love to an ATM. I enrich uranium,” followed by the perfect capper: “I’m uninsured”) and pop songs bouncing off a nineteenth-century novel (in “Self-Titled,” I can’t tell if I like “This is Uncle Tom to Ground Control” more than “I just died in my arms tonight”), it might be more true to say Robbins’s poetry is thought, or rather a mind alive but not thinking at all, a jumble of memory and stimuli and distractions and it’s-on-the-tip-of-my-tongue, never mind, a roaring in the head of someone talking to someone else while what he’s really doing is talking to himself, but barely listening, and having the time of his life.
My book has been named an “Editors’ Choice” by the New York Times Sunday Book Review
Here is an appreciation of the snowy cravat Algernon Charles Swinburne I wrote for Poetry magazine
My takedown of Dylan Thomas for Poetry magazine is up at the Poetry Foundation (click photo). I am not displeased w/ it. Happy new year!
Head over to the Poetry Foundation to read about my relationship with my cat. And look around while you’re there, there are some awesome poems.
