Why do I always think this stuff's about love?
The beauty of showing up late to Michael Robbins' "Alien vs. Predator" in the January 12 New Yorker: Everyone's read and taken a stab at the analysis already, so I end up less confused than I could be. "I suppose it's the old story: boy meets capital, boy sells capital to someone who can't afford it, who then loans it to someone who can never pay it back," the poet tells one interviewer. "It's a love poem." To the extent you want to believe that. Elsewhere in the interview: "What poetry are you working on?" "I'm working on a series of poems that advance my thesis that the Wu-Tang Clan brought down the twin towers."
Here's Robbins' audio reading of it. The Unofficial New Yorker Poetry Supplement blog finds the poem challenging our assumptions of the world around us in a consumerist era. Another analysis goes a similar direction, "The narrator appears to be some kind of deity, but not the traditional type "“ a self-centred, contemptuous little shit, prone to unexpected violence, incarnate as much in a cigarette as in the New York Times itself." Which, again, would make the world absurd. Robbins gets involved in the comment thread on that page (which is cool, as he does elsewhere), but he doesn't judge the analysis.
A Village Voice interview with Robbins gets at where maybe I differ from these interpretations. If we're looking to decide whether the absurdity of "Aliens vs. Predator" is a purpose or a natural environment, his take on modern culture's place in poetry seems to point toward the latter.
You know, I'm more wary than maybe anyone alive of the division into two camps of poetry, where you've got the avant garde and the mainstream. I think it's a really impoverished way of thinking about the forms of poetic thinking. But at the same time, I do think that the Venn Diagram of poetry's audience and its practioners more and more comes to resemble the final moments before a total eclipse. And I think part of that is because, for all the insular, difficult, obscure poetry that everyone is supposed to struggle with, there's also this sort of 'My grandmother fed a deer in the backyard' poetry.
And that's the point I was trying to make in the Gibbons piece, is that this idea that 'wonder,' the sort of commodity 'wonder,' that is available to the denizens of suburban backyards, is something that takes a kind of real inattention to the culture we live in to write. It doesn't respond to the way I think about the world. I'm all for wonder, and I'm all for feeding deer, but you know…
Wonder could be in a Best Buy.
Well, that's the thing, right? We live surrounded by wonder. We live in a gigantic spectacle that is the most ominous machine ever created, and we can't pretend that we are sitting on a Chinese mountain in the eighth century.
Me stretching it some: It's like the set-aparts for pop cultural titles.
He makes a Springsteen reference near the end of the interview, and we all know the car songs are never about the car. So, all in all, I'm disinclined to think his absurd work is about absurdity. The closing line about the bra jumps at me as a return to the you/I/we of the opening. Which maybe makes me the alien and you the predator in a mixed-up, consumed world where we can very well try to be our own ridiculous angels, still enjoy FU Penguin and sort out what isn't interpretation.
But, like I said in the post title, love is reality bias. I like the poem.
(5m later: Maybe it is about a god crazy enough to create us. Hmm.)
(10m: Back to my first take. The gods may be all crazy but so are we.)
(Updating for 15m at the 10m point: I'm probably back to the 5m take.)
