Equipment for Living

by Michael Robbins

  Michael Palmer

  Sun (1988)

  The good news that Palmer’s work (and, in a more drastic but related fashion, Susan Howe’s) delivered to me as a young poet manqué had little to do with “the materiality of the signifier.” It was rather the joy of words gone wild, free to roam whence they would—“F for alphabet, Z for A, an H in an arbor”—but trailing always the ghosts of rhetoric and emotion: “Say this. I was born on an island among the dead. I learned language on this island but did not speak on this island. I am writing to you from this island.”

  Pet Shop Boys

  Very (1993)

  The after-party. Or the wake.

  Tom Pickard

  “Hawthorn” (2007)

  It opens like a ballad Francis Child missed or Fairport Convention forgot to record:

  there is a hawthorn on a hill

  there is a hawthorn growing

  it set its roots against the wind

  the worrying wind that’s blowing

  its berries are red its blossom so white

  I thought that it was snowing

  The rest of the poem never quite catches up to that. How could it?

  Vasko Popa

  “Horse” (1952)

  A poem about a horse can begin “Usually / He has eight legs”—? That was all I needed to know; nothing was ever the same.

  Ezra Pound

  Cathay (1915)

  The magic of Pound’s not-quite translations from the Chinese (and one from the Anglo-Saxon) renders their Casaubon-vexing inaccuracies insignificant. I hear the unacknowledged Whitman (“least of all Walt Whitman,” Eliot wrote of Pound’s influences) behind lines like these:

  And I, wrapped in brocade, went to sleep with my head on his lap,

  And my spirit so high it was all over the heavens,

  And before the end of the day we were scattered like stars, or rain.

  That’s from “Exile’s Letter,” which taught me how beauty is related to syntax:

  And if you ask how I regret that parting:

  It is like the flowers falling at Spring’s end

  Confused, whirled in a tangle.

  What is the use of talking, and there is no end of talking,

  There is no end of things in the heart.

  A “proper” translation of these lines might get us closer to Li Bai’s original, but the letter killeth and the spirit giveth life.

  Ezra Pound

  Translation of “Praise Song of the Buck Hare,” anonymous Siberian folksong (1938)

  The origins of this folksong are impossible to trace. Pound found the poem in a German translation of a Russian translation of an oral original sung among the Teleut people of Siberia. A monster riff of self-inflation, it zooms to life and never hits the brakes:

  I am the buck-hare, I am,

  The shore is my playground.

  Green underwood is my feeding.

  I am the buck-hare, I am,

  What’s that damn man got wrong with him?

  Skin with no hair on, that’s his trouble.

  Pound makes the hare sound like a jackrabbit disparaging cowboys: “What’s that fool got the matter with him? / Can’t find the road! Ain’t got no road he CAN find.” Then he sounds like John Berryman’s Henry rewriting Stevens’s “Bantams in Pine-Woods”: “I am the buck-hare, I am, / I got my wood-road, / I got my form.”

  Prince (1958–2016)

  The rain in Minneapolis is rain-

  colored. The poor, purple in the cold,

  are lifted up by no white bird.

  Ghostface recites the cancer rates

  while Prince commands the tide to turn—

  our paisley priest, our Swinburne.

  That’s the last stanza of my poem “New Bridge Strategies.” I know it’s bad form to quote myself at such length, but it serves a purpose. I allude in these lines to James Wright’s “Minneapolis Poem” and to the twelfth-century anecdote of King Canute’s demonstration of God’s supreme power (he orders the sea to turn back, knowing his secular power holds no sway). The vanity of human wishes was one of Prince’s great themes, often the one on which hinged his dominant theme of carnality.

  This was missing from many elegies and eulogies, especially those written to order in the hours after his death. Not, of course, that Prince ever lost all his mirth. But many of his biggest hits vibe all-is-vanity melancholy. It’s there in “1999” (“Everybody’s got a bomb / We could all die any day”—might as well dance our lives away); “Purple Rain” (“I never meant 2 cause u any sorrow / I never meant 2 cause u any pain”—unspoken corollary: but I did); “Gotta Broken Heart Again” (“Once your love has gone away / There ain’t nothing, nothing left to say”); “Little Red Corvette” (“I guess I should’ve known / By the way u parked your car sideways / That it wouldn’t last”—the pure poetry of details).

  And it’s all over “Sometimes It Snows in April,” a blown field miles outside pop’s recognized borders. It’s theater—an elegy for Christopher Tracy, the character played by Prince in his insane film Under the Cherry Moon—and all the more effective for it. Who knows who the singer is supposed to be? Who cares? Listen to the way he sings: “I used 2 cry 4 Tracy because I want to see him again / But sometimes sometimes life ain’t always the way.” The grief in his voice on these stone-simple lines is not fictional—if anything it’s too real, like the way he screams “Do you want him! Or do you want me! Cuz I want you!” on “The Beautiful Ones.” Prince pushed himself into the red at moments like these, became something larger than the radio could contain, an earth wire, an overload.

  Most of all it’s there in his guitar, an instrument he made cry like no one else since Hendrix. His solos are where everything in his music zeroes in on totality—parties weren’t meant to last, you’re on your own, something doesn’t compute, you done me wrong, we wouldn’t be satisfied, love will always leave you lonely; but also I want you, the rain sounds so cool when it hits the barn roof, I’m gonna listen to my body tonight, I’ll die in your arms. A rip cord elegance on “Purple Rain,” the physical graffiti that kick off “When Doves Cry,” a demolition of “Honky Tonk Women” on YouTube, an end-times power drive on Emancipation’s overlooked cover of “One of Us.”

  If a guitar solo can be a poem—but no. Prince wasn’t Milton to Jimi’s or Sly Stone’s Shakespeare. He transcended analogy: he was Prince. Our paisley priest has punched a higher floor.

  Public Enemy

  It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988)

  The first rap album I owned; purchased on used cassette for two dollars at Colorado Springs’ Independent Annex. I put it in my tape deck and giggled at the corny Brit trying to fire a crowd: “Let me hear you make some noise!” Then the aptly named production team the Bomb Squad dropped an arsenal on my speakers and I stopped giggling.

  Thomas Rhett

  “Learned It from the Radio” (2015)

  Shit jobs, cheating lovers, heavy drinking, rolling in the hay, rolling the windows down and singing along with the radio on a Friday night—the standard repertoire gets a downright Bon Jovial spin from the guitar bonanza that is twenty-first-century country radio. Miranda Lambert, Eric Church, Keith Urban, Brad Paisley, Maren Morris, Jason Aldean, Toby Keith, and a dozen more sing in the teeth of the dark times. And they sing about the songs and what they learned from them, as in Thomas Rhett’s paean to 4-wheel drive, the DJs in “little static towns,” and “the speakers in the door.”

  Rihanna

  Anti (2016)

  We’ll be parsing the vocals on this album for years—the dropped consonants, the lines thrown like daggers. On “Higher,” Rihanna sings with an abandon you never hear on the radio anymore, as if she hadn’t known she was being recorded, or didn’t care. My friend Jen Vafidis writes: “I’d say I identify with her, I often have ‘a little bit too much to say,’ but how can anyone truly identify with Rihanna? Why would anyone want to? You wish you didn’t feel the things she’s singing about. Thi
s is why she is my favorite performer these days. She makes me sad, happy, ashamed, and willing all at once.”

  The Rolling Stones

  Exile on Main St (1972)

  The Stones were my Beatles; I couldn’t begin to say which album mattered most. This is the one that kept me company through six European countries the summer I was twenty-two, sleeping on train platforms and cathedral steps with my Walkman stuffed down the front of my pants so I’d wake up if anyone tried to steal it.

  The Ronettes

  “Be My Baby” (1963)

  Forget the post-Beatles ’60s and the ’70s—the years 1954 to 1965 were rock and roll’s greatest decade (“rock and roll” as shorthand for the wild flowering fusion of R&B, doo-wop, gospel, rockabilly, the kitchen sink). The “5” Royales, the Coasters, the Drifters, Elvis, Ray Charles, James Brown, the Shirelles, the Beach Boys, the Chantels, Elmore James, Martha and the Vandellas, the Miracles, Darlene Love, a hundred more. From drummer Hal Blaine’s opening enfilade, everything about “Be My Baby” is shell-shocked: a sound caught between big dreams and last chances, on the short list of perfect rock songs with “That’s All Right,” “Down in Mexico,” “Say It,” “People Get Ready,” “I Think We’re Alone Now,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “Gimme Shelter,” “Thunder Road,” “Love to Love You Baby,” “Surrender,” “Billie Jean,” “Jump,” and “Swallowed by the Cracks.”

  Mary Ruefle

  Selected Poems (2011)

  Ruefle makes art where the obvious—“I was born in a hospital. I stank”—meets the ineffable—“My inability to express myself / is astounding.” Opposite banks of a single river, the poem a Tarzan-whoop vine-veering between them. Of the lunar crater Tycho she says, “I have never been there.” Of our residence on Earth: “I was going to ardently pursue this day / but you know how these things go.”

  Moacir Santos

  Coisas (1965)

  The great lost jazz album of the ’60s—The Penguin Guide to Jazz has no entry for Santos; Coisas wasn’t issued on CD until 2004 and promptly went out of print. Santos grew up an orphan in rural poverty in Brazil and became a composer whose arranging genius rivaled that of Ellington. You can hear samba and bossa nova and Rio jazz, and some of the melody lines remind me of Mingus, but this record is deeply its own thing, like the crocodile Mark Antony describes for Lepidus.

  James Schuyler

  Collected Poems (1995)

  My favorite poet these last several years, Schuyler knew that wishing for too many things is what makes you human: “I wish it was 1938 or ’39 again / and Bernie was sleeping / With me in the tent at the back of the yard”; “I wish / I could send you a bundle of orange lilies / to paint”; “I wish one could press / snowflakes in a book like flowers.” He constantly takes himself by surprise, revising himself by reevaluating his desires: “I wish I could take an engine apart and reassemble it. / I also wish I sincerely wanted to. I don’t.”

  Simple Minds

  “See the Lights” (1991)

  For some reason, this generic anthem was all I listened to one miserable summer.

  Frank Sinatra

  Songs for Young Lovers (1954)

  And Swing Easy! and Songs for Swingin’ Lovers! and A Swingin’ Affair! and Only the Lonely and Come Fly with Me and Come Dance with Me! and Sinatra at the Sands—the catalog is as rich as the voice. This one has “My Funny Valentine,” two-and-a-half minutes of genius phrasing and articulation. Dig how many moods he swings through as the final “stay” shades into “each day is Valentine’s Day.”

  Sister Sledge

  “Lost in Music” (1979)

  Disco was punker than punk, dance music spun oppositional courtesy of good old American bigotry (cf. Machine’s transcendent “There but for the Grace of God Go I”). Never mind the Sex Pistols—I’ll take Sylvester, Vicki Sue Robinson, Andrea True, Donna Summer, Diana Ross, Anita Ward, and, most of all, Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards. Especially lost in lyric sway with four sisters from Philly who invite you to shove your job and join a band.

  Bruce Springsteen & the E Street Band

  “Lost in the Flood” (1975)

  The live version on Hammersmith Odeon, London ’75. A singer—a punk, a grease monkey—slams a spike called the E Street Band directly into his bloodstream, where it surfs the sounds of his nervous system. The resulting animal is tight as the Famous Flames. Its voice is a thin tendril at first, but it snakes into the music’s chinks and hollows until it chokes the sun: “Hey kid you think that’s oil?” it screams. “Maaaaan that ain’t oil that’s blood.”

  Wallace Stevens

  “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Canto XXV (1937)

  A rumpus, a rollick, a roll in the hay:

  They did not know the grass went round.

  The cats had cats and the grass turned gray

  And the world had worlds, ai, this-a-way:

  The grass turned green and the grass turned gray.

  And the nose is eternal, that-a-way.

  Things as they were, things as they are,

  Things as they will be by and by . . .

  A fat thumb beats out ai-yi-yi.

  Superchunk

  “Me & You & Jackie Mittoo” (2013)

  “I hate music, what is it worth / Can’t bring anyone back to this earth,” Mac McCaughan bellows as the drums kick in, and his grief is a brick wall. Then a wrecking ball: “But I got nothing else, so I guess here we go.” And the song opens into the past, the singer and his friends crammed into the back of a van, back when a half hour in the Record Exchange was world enough and time. It ends abruptly, barely two minutes in, with McCaughan repeating the first two lines, revising them slightly—“It can’t bring you back to this earth”—and all you can think to do is play the song again and hope it comes out different this time.

  Jonathan Swift

  “Mary the Cook-Maid’s Letter to Dr. Sheridan” (1723)

  See also “To Their Excellencies The Lords Justices of Ireland: The Humble Petition of Frances Harris, Who Must Starve, and Die a Maid If It Miscarries”—exquisite examples of doggerel done doggone good.

  Ulver

  Bergtatt (1995)

  Black metal people who don’t like people who like black metal can like.

  Henry Vaughan

  “The Night” (1650)

  The final stanza, Jonathan F. S. Post says, shows Vaughan’s “reluctance to dissolve into rapture”; for Geoffrey Hill, it’s “the envisioning of perplexity itself”:

  There is in God (some say)

  A deep, but dazzling darkness; As men here

  Say it is late and dusky, because they

  See not all clear.

  O for that Night! Where I in him

  Might live invisible and dim!

  The parenthetical is both humble and guarded, resistant to certainty as well as to easy rapture. We, of course, are too wise to contort ourselves into perplexities concerning God, whose content we know to be exhausted by what “men here say.” Our instruments have vanquished the night; we see perfectly clearly.

  Wham!

  “Freedom” (1984)

  Forget the ’60s and ’70s—the ’80s were rock and roll’s greatest decade. Prince, Madonna, Jackson, Springsteen, but also ABC, Pet Shop Boys, Kix, Eric B. and Rakim, New Order, Iron Maiden, Don Henley, Public Enemy, DeBarge, John Waite, Grandmaster Flash, Tina Turner, Van Halen, the Beastie Boys, Slayer, and a hundred more. And somehow the son of a Cypriot restaurateur from London made the best Motown record Motown never made.

  John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester

  “The Imperfect Enjoyment” (c. 1672)

  English Renaissance poetry received impotence verse from Ovid via Christopher Marlowe (“like one dead it lay, / Drouping more then a Rose puld yesterday”). The genre enjoyed a vogue in the late seventeenth century; see also Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment,” originally misattributed to Rochester (“In vain he Toils, in vain Commands, / Th’ Insensible fell weeping in his Hands”). Before Rocheste
r’s rose can droop, it blooms too early:

  In liquid raptures I dissolve all o’er,

  Melt into sperm, and spend at every pore.

  A touch from any part of her had done ’t:

  Her hand, her foot, her very look’s a cunt.

  His lover, named Corinna after Ovid’s, gently chides him “and from her body wipes the clammy joys.” His shame prevents him from rising again to the occasion:

  Eager desires confound my first intent,

  Succeeding shame does more success prevent,

  And rage at last confirms me impotent.

  In a proto-Freudian paradox, desire gets in the way of intention. Freud saw impotence as the result of conflict between love and sexual desire. The “sensual current” must debase its object in order to find expression. As Rochester recalls past conquests, he turns his misogyny on himself, railing against his recalcitrant prick, wishing on it venereal ulcers and the dreaded stone. He ends with the hope that Corinna might be paid the “debt to pleasure” she is owed:

  May’st thou ne’er piss, who did refuse to spend