When all my joys did on false thee depend.
And may ten thousand abler pricks agree
To do the wronged Corinna right for thee.
Neil Young and Crazy Horse
“Cowgirl in the Sand” (1969)
In the late ’70s, in a house in the woods, my dad would blast this song to holy hell, shaking the pines outside. I remember him sitting there, a can of Coors Light in one hand, nodding along, glazed with nirvana. Still in his twenties, Christ, he couldn’t have known a goddamned thing. But he could hear this for what it is—a war, a summa, the alpha and omega of rock and roll. The phonograph needle, the damage done.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t exist without Virginia Heffernan and Ben Loehnen. Popovers on me.
Zach Baron, Garnette Cadogan, Oren Izenberg, Anthony Madrid, Anahid Nersessian, Ben Ratliff, and Jen Vafidis provided rich and thoughtful comments on drafts of some of these pieces. They’re crazy smart and I’m lucky as hell to know them. I’m also indebted to Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Jennifer Days, Mark Fletcher, William Junker, Julia Kardon, Laura Kolb, Joshua Kotin, Christa Robbins, and John Wilson. And to Katherine, so important.
Thanks to the editors of the following journals, in which some of these essays and reviews, or parts of them, first appeared, often in different form: Bookforum, Harper’s Magazine, London Review of Books, Modern Philology, The New York Observer, Poetry, Post Road, Spin.
“Hooked Up,” “How to Write a Charles Simic Poem,” “No Taste of My Own,” a brief section of “Equipment for Sinking,” and the Prince entry in “Playlist,” originally appeared, in whole or part, under different titles, in Chicago Tribune Printers Row.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MICHAEL ROBBINS was born in Kansas during the Nixon Administration. He is the author of the poetry collections Alien vs. Predator and The Second Sex; his selected poems are featured in the second volume of the newly revived Penguin Modern Poets series; and his poetry and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Paris Review, Harper’s, and many other publications. He received his PhD in English from the University of Chicago and lives in Brooklyn with the best cat in the world.
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NOTES
1 Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm (New York: Harper, 1977), 50.
2 Harold Bloom, Agon (Oxford: Galaxy Books, 1982), 19.
3 Kenneth Burke, The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1974), 61.
4 Burke, 298.
5 Boethius, The Consolation of Philosophy, trans. P. G. Walsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), xix.
6 Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life (New York: Picador, 2013), 130.
7 Burke, 61.
8 Roland Greene et al., eds., The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, 4th ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 497.
9 Quoted in Angela Leighton, On Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 24. If you’re interested in the history of the concept of form and its maddening elusiveness, you need to check out this book.
10 Burke, 44.
11 Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 497.
12 Adam Phillips, Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 31.
13 Leo Bersani and Adam Phillips, Intimacies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 117.
14 John Jeremiah Sullivan, “The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie,” New York Times Magazine, April 13, 2014.
15 Eisenberg, 53–54.
16 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 29.
17 I have relied throughout this section on Lisa Gitelman, Scripts, Grooves, and Writing Machines: Representing Technology in the Edison Era (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), and Michael North, Camera Works: Photography and the Twentieth-Century Word (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
18 Elijah Wald, Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues (New York: Amistad, 2004), xxxi.
19 Ibid., 171.
20 Greil Marcus, Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, 6th ed. (New York: Plume, 2015), 31.
21 Ibid.
22 Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy, 2nd revised ed. (London: Bloomsbury, 2005), 599.
23 John Jeremiah Sullivan, Pulphead (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011), 122.
24 See http://thequietus.com/articles/07073-wolves-in-the-throne-room-interview?fb_comment_id=10150391339698799_23961114#ffa58a4c1522a6.
25 Erik Davis, “Deep Eco-Metal,” Slate (November 13, 2007), http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2007/11/deep_ecometal.html.
26 See http://www.tarpaulinsky.com/Summer05/Spahr/Juliana_Spahr.html.
27 Chuck Eddy, Stairway to Hell (Boston: Da Capo Press), 1.
28 Greil Marcus, Stranded: Rock and Roll for a Desert Island (Boston: Da Capo Press), 277.
29 See http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-374-23531-4.
30 Ellen Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 115.
31 Princeton Encyclopedia, 1182, 1191.
32 Hugh Kenner, “Rhyme: An Unfinished Monograph,” Common Knowledge 10, no. 3, (Fall 2004): 378.
33 Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound, The Chinese Written Character as a Medium for Poetry: A Critical Edition, eds. Haun Saussy, Jonathan Stalling, and Lucas Klein (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 138.
34 Gillian White, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 52–53.
35 Anthony Madrid, “The Warrant for Rhyme” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 17–18.
36 Kenner, “Rhyme,” 385.
37 A. E. Stallings, “Presto Manifesto!” Poetry (February 2009), https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/detail/69202.
38 Simon Jarvis, “Why Rhyme Pleases,” Thinking Verse 1 (2011), 18.
39 Madrid, “Warrant,” 9.
40 Princeton Encyclopedia, 1184–85.
41 Kenner, “Rhyme,” 384.
42 Madrid, “Warrant,” 24.
43 Jarvis, “Why Rhyme Pleases,” 41.
44 Much of what follows is excerpted and revised from my essay “Paul Muldoon’s Covert Operations,” Modern Philology 109, no. 2 (November 2011).
45 Steven Matthews, “Muldoon’s New Poems and Lyrics,” Poetry Review 97, no. 1 (Spring 2007): 92.
46 Clair Wills, Reading Paul Muldoon (Newcastle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1999), 208.
47 See MacDonald P. Jackson, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Rhyme and Reason in the Dark Lady Series,” Notes and Queries 244 (1999): 219–22.
48 See John Shoptaw, On the Outside Looking Out: John Ashbery’s Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), on this notion, adapted from Abraham and Török.
49 See Roy Booth, “Standing within the Prospect of Belief: Macbeth, King James, and Witchcraft,” in John Newton and Jo Bath, eds., Witchcraft and the Act of 1604 (Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2008).
50 Robert Hass, Twentieth Century Pleasures, 3rd ed. (New York: Ecco, 2000), 31.
51 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory
of Poetry, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 15.
52 Oren Izenberg, Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 98.
53 Princeton Encyclopedia, 1048.
54 W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand (New York: Vintage International, 1989), 5–6.
55 John Ruskin, The Genius of John Ruskin: Selections from His Writings, ed. John D. Rosenberg (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 137, 170.
56 Richard Brody, Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2008), 217.
57 Pauline Kael, I Lost It at the Movies: Film Writings 1954–1965 (New York: Marion Boyars Publishers, 1994), 308.
58 Sullivan, Pulphead, 142.
59 Kael, I Lost It, 130.
60 James Dickey, The Selected Poems, ed. Robert Kirschten (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), xv. It is only fair to note that Kirschten is paraphrasing Dickey on Robert Penn Warren.
61 James Dickey, The Complete Poems of James Dickey, ed. Ward Briggs (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2013), 859.
62 Joanna Paul, Film and the Classical Epic Tradition (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2013), 38.
63 Quoted in Paul, 39.
64 Paul, 59.
65 Paul, 40.
66 Guy Davenport, The Geography of the Imagination: Forty Essays (Boston: David R. Godine, 1997), 42.
67 Michael Herr, Dispatches (New York: Vintage International, 1991), 71.
68 Dave Hickey, “The Song in Country Music,” in Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, eds., A New Literary History of America (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2009), 845–46.
69 Christopher Ricks, Dylan’s Visions of Sin (New York: Ecco, 2003), 14–15.
70 LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka), Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: Harper Perennial, 1999), 50.
71 Ricks, Dylan’s Visions, 115.
72 Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (London: Verso, 2015), 220.
73 Stephen Metcalf, “Bob Dylan Is a Genius of Almost Unparalleled Influence, but He Shouldn’t Have Gotten the Nobel,” Slate (October 13, 2016), http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/10/13/why_bob_dylan_shouldn_t_have_gotten_the_nobel_prize_for_literature.html.
74 Willis, Out of the Vinyl Deeps, 15.
75 Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: Vintage, 1982), 76.
76 Greil Marcus, “Bob Dylan, Master of Change,” New York Times, October 13, 2016, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/14/opinion/bob-dylan-master-of-change.html.
77 Allen Grossman, True-Love: Essays on Poetry and Valuing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 154.
78 Alex Halberstadt, “The Motorcycle Diarist,” New York (November 25, 2007), http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/24986/.
79 Calvin Bedient, untitled review, Boston Review 26, no. 5 (October/November 2001), http://bostonreview.net/BR26.5/bedient.html.
80 George Puttenham, The Art of English Poesy, in Gavin Alexander, ed., Sidney’s “The Defense of Poesy” and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (New York: Penguin, 2004), 162.
81 Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poets and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 298, 296.
82 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 299.
83 Alexander Nehamas, Nietzsche: Life as Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987), 127.
84 Friedrich Nietzsche, Writings from the Late Notebooks, ed. Rüdiger Bittner (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 39. Hereafter WL.
85 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Aaron Ridley and Judith Norman, eds., The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 75.
86 Nietzsche, WL, 65.
87 Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. and ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 79. (I have slightly altered the translation.)
88 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 98.
89 Dante, The New Life, trans. Dante Gabriel Rossetti (New York: New York Review Books, 2002), 7.
90 Edward John Trelawny, Recollections of the Last Days of Shelley and Byron (London: E. Moxon, 1858), 89.
91 Theodor Adorno et al., Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980), 189.
92 Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 37.
93 Winfried Menninghaus, Disgust: The Theory and History of a Strong Sensation, trans. Howard Eiland and Joel Golb (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 105.
94 See Martha C. Nussbaum, Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004).
95 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1968), 42.
96 Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, 3.
97 Ezra Pound, The Cantos of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1996), 550.
98 Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence Between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 708.
99 Raymond Geuss, Public Goods, Private Goods (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 27–28.
100 Theodor Adorno, Lectures on Negative Dialectics, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 48; Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1978), 39, 5.
101 Oren Izenberg, “Confiance au Monde; or, the Poetry of Ease,” nonsite no. 4, December 1, 2011, http://nonsite.org/article/confiance-au-monde-or-the-poetry-of-ease.
102 Theodor Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 110.
103 Grossman, True-Love, 154.
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Equipment for Living Page 18