I’m going to have a cigarette, even though I shouldn’t, to get the dopamine flowing. I become more articulate.
People were pretty weirded out when New Yorker poetry editor Paul Muldoon published a poem by Michael Robbins in 2009; its tone was much more brash than other poems that have appeared in the magazine. Fast-forward a few years, past a class teaching Muldoon (disclosure: I was in it, and it was OK) and a few more big-time publications and the March debut of Robbins’s first book, Alien vs. Predator. When the Times touted its “sheer joy and dizzy command” and compared it to Quentin Tarantino’s first movie, his star really got its shine on. —Asher Klein
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When did I first move here? I guess in the early 2000s. I had been in Spain and I didn’t have a visa, so it was hard to get work and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I must have been 30, I guess. I found this apartment living with two U of Chicago undergrads, then I got my own place in Hyde Park. I was near the University of Chicago and I didn’t really have anything else to do so I did a master’s there and then got into the PhD program in English. I was somewhat older than peers, because I spent more of my 20s bumming around trying to be a poet and failing.
I have a real aversion to poetry readings, even when I’m reading at them. I don’t think I read very well. There’s something about my reading style that I’m not satisfied with. I feel fake when I get up and read poetry. If I got up and read ten Yeats poems, I think I would feel more natural. There’s something about performing my own poetry that makes me feel self-conscious in a way that other poets seem to be able to turn to their advantage. I’m not shy and I’m not embarrassed, it’s just that somehow when I’m in front of a group of people reading my own words, I don’t feel related to the words the same way I do when I’m just reading them to friends or when I’m reading them in my head. People are looking at you and you’re reading your poems and what I’m thinking is, I’ve been in your position a million times. I’ve sat there and listened to the poet and I know that many of you are not paying any attention at all, you’re only seeming to. I just feel like it’s a waste of time and I would rather people just didn’t bother.
Index: 2012 People Issue
