It Just Sort of Happened

Michael Robbins uses popular music the way Nathaniel Mackey uses jazz: as a set of principles rather than a story to borrow. Mackey’s Double Trio, released only months before Robbins’s new Walkman (Penguin, 2021), operates in the continuum of Black avant-garde jazz, manifesting the holler, the lunge, and the implacable knot of a band playing in many voices at once. And, yes, Mackey mentions jazz musicians constantly. Walkman works in the blunt, epic, bouillon ways of the pop song, unapologetically understandable and generally brief. And, yes, Robbins mentions Hole and Fleetwood Mac and Sonic Youth and Crime and Slade and Steve Perry and Dr. Dre in the very first poem. Robbins is immersed in pop songs: their cultural wrappers, their characters, their dumb and insolent sway.

Walkman is Robbins’s third collection, which in pop music is a bit like a fifth album. The title poem comes first and is the second longest in the book; “The Seasons,” the book’s longest poem, comes last. In this manner, Walkman mirrors the song sequence of Bob Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited. “Walkman” is Robbins’s “Like A Rolling Stone,” and “The Seasons” is his “Desolation Row,” ranging through the symbolic and the skeptical and the saved over its 15 pages.

The poem “Walkman” is already something of a hit, having been first published in the Paris Review and later included in The Best American Poetry 2018. The narrator sets the tone with sobriety in a low-key way: “I didn’t mean to quit drinking, / it just sort of happened.” The poem steadily marks life stations and automative journeys: “The bus I was on broke / down in the mountains / and I watched the stars blink / on with a Mexican girl / who later sent me a letter / I never answered.” The poem shares an operation with pop songs, in which verses range into an aggregate of detail and impressions that don’t hang together (think of Steve Miller, for example), leaving the choruses to do the spiritual lifting. Robbins doesn’t generally use recognizable stanzas that indicate structural breaks, so the epiphanies live unmarked within smaller conversations. Sobriety comes back again—“I never took another drink”—and Robbins writes, “I think / it was a miracle.”

The narrator remembers living in Colorado and drinking from Burger King glasses, momentarily locating readers on the grid of class. “You can’t buy tampons / with food stamps / even if your mother / insists that you try,” reads one line. The poem returns to the grace of the opening and calls it just that, using the same phrase for faith and sobriety: “How / the hell did I become / a Christian? Grace, / I guess. It just sort of / happened.” Christianity is woven into the motion of life here, evenly distributed between listening to rap and riding on buses and working at Kinko’s, where the narrator meets a holy fool who faxes “scribbled warnings / to every news outlet in Denver.” His 2 AM acquaintance “wanted to let people know / that God would punish the area / with natural disasters / if the county succeeded / in evicting him from the land / he was squatting on.” This lunatic is the most carefully drawn character in the poem, which ends not with a return to faith but with another theme: stopping. Just as 20 years ago the drinking suddenly came to an end, the narrator’s Walkman falls out of use in an instant. “Just think: there was a song / that I didn’t know / would be the last song / I would ever play on a Walkman. / I listened to it like it was just / any old song, / because it was.”

Robbins writes here in the tradition of Frank O’Hara, also mentioned in “Walkman,” or anyone who felt invigorated by Coca-Cola and Hollywood in the 20th century. For Robbins, salvation is found more often in music than in any other vernacular construction with access to the transcendent. The temperament of his poems parallels that of his essays, collected in Equipment for Living (2017), which are equally demonstrative and good-natured. Occasionally a skeleton key for Robbins’s own poems, Equipment for Living works best as a way of getting to know his fiercely ecumenical mindset.

In “Visible Republic,” his essay on Dylan winning the Nobel Prize in Literature, Robbins extracts himself from the pro/con squad and tries to isolate the nature of the songwriter (rather than isolate the most literary thing about Dylan because what would that be?). “That’s it, that’s the thing—Dylan isn’t words,” Robbins writes. “He’s words plus [Robbie] Robertson’s uncanny awk, drummer Levon Helm’s cephalopodic clatter, the thin, wild mercury of his voice.” Meaning, one thinks, that by all means win some prizes, who cares, but don’t make one form do another’s work. This exhibits the generosity in both Robbins’s poems and essays. The glittering trash of the world needs itemizing but not sorting. His essay on Charles Simic, whom Robbins loves, begins free of hagiography: “How to write a Charles Simic poem: Go to a café. Wait for something weird to happen. Record mouse activity. Repeat as necessary. (For ‘mouse,’ feel free to substitute ‘cat,’ ‘roach,’ ‘rat,’ ‘chicken,’ ‘donkey,’ etc.)” He notes the “little astonishments” of early Simic and then maps the older poet’s journey into soft routine, in which Simic writes “banal snapshots bewildering in their literality.”

For Robbins, a Pulitzer Prize winner such as Simic is no more important than Joni Mitchell or James Dickey or Taylor Swift. His baseline approach tends away from heroes and their installation toward a larger stadium with more matches, which may be best expressed in “Hooked Up,” an essay about Richard Goldstein’s odd 1967 lyrics anthology, The Poetry of Rock. “Lyrics work best when they aren’t straining to achieve poetic effect (ask Jackson Browne),” Robbins writes. “Springsteen became a great songwriter when he stopped aping Dylan and found the poetry in a ‘sixty-nine Chevy with a 396 / Fuelie heads and a Hurst on the floor.’” The part I like best is a bit of disambiguation in Robbins’s conclusion about poetry: “[A] poem’s hooks are spatial in a way a song’s can’t be—you see its ending coming—unless the song is reduced to its printed lyrics, in which case it’s not a song anymore.”

That, in a felicitous paradox, relates to timekeeping in poetry, seen in the visual notation of a poem’s rendering on the page in letters and white space. Line length is about pacing, and becoming a poet without an interest in tempo would be a strange life decision. In “Past One O’Clock,” from Walkman, Robbins puts his heel on the platter and slows it all down, shunting his poem into a six-beat lane down to the left:

And if I quit smoking
how would I signal you?
The smoke alarm
pings me awake
to tell me it’s dying.
OK! I will get up
to address again
the not‐fire and maybe
all creation. I mean,
as long as I’m up.

Robbins tips his hand and admits that scansion is part of the method here: “Somewhere / along the line / the alternating stresses fall.” He is constricted in this poem, upset in a visceral way, buying umbrellas that don’t work from bodegas and watching TV in “the apartment / where David Attenborough / emotionally manipulates / me.” He doesn’t linger long here before returning to the big bad picture: “The material social / order is a swindle, / cops kill kids, / and I’m writing / bourgeois shit / about prayer flags.” Robbins endorses both church and smoking and then chides a young person on the sidewalk with a clipboard: “It’s not / a world to get so / damn worked up / about leaving.” The poem winnows to four beats and embraces defeat, an uncommon move in Walkman.

To have learned from pop music and absorbed it is very different than mimicking it. A person could read Walkman and not think about music at all. Some of the poems hinge on a single phrase, just as Stevie Nicks, in the song “Dreams,” makes the word freedom sound like failure. In Robbins’s “John Says the Elders Came Over,” for example, the words dance away come across as grim compromise for the kids cruising Circle K. At other times, a Robbins subject simply reads as the main character of a pop hit, one of those juicy abstractions for whom a song is simply somewhere to live. “In Time of Plague” seems to be a nod to the pandemic, though uprooted from its particulars and shrunk down, filtered through the book’s narrative voice so that the risk of contagion seems less menacing than the kids with clipboards:

Outside for the first time
in weeks, an eagle’s wingspan
between me and the enemy.
The most deserted spot
I can find is the lot
behind the dilapidated
Seventh‐day Adventist school.
Kids shoot hoops in front;
out back, dozens of drab
birds study empty plastic
containers of cake frosting.

Most of this passage breaks into smooth, two-syllable hits, floating on longer vowels until the smack of drab and back and cake. These lines are “meticulous and all hooked up,” to quote Roger Miller’s description of Hank Williams’s lyrics, a description Robbins quotes in Equipment for Living.

Toward the center of Walkman is a handful of very short poems that come within spitting distance of standard forms. “Poem” is four lines of catalectic trochaic tetrameter: “Scallop draggers far offshore / pull up tusks where long before / megafauna browsed in grass— / ocean now. This too shall pass.” It feels right that a specific meter, eternal insofar as the numbers will never change, frames a poem about humanity’s larger, general mortality.

“The Seasons” sweeps up the collection into a thrumming finale, very prog-rock in its ambitions and embrace of horizontal elaboration. The lines are slightly longer than those typical of Walkman, and the tone is less everyday, more high mass. It begins: “The star that looks awry upon the sinner / orients the temple. Mother Kate places / the wafer in my hands, a story / about a body.” We leave the spiritual plane to go back to songs and movies: Jeff Goldblum’s “consubstantiation” in The Fly and Gram Parsons's body being stolen by his friends at LAX. I correct myself—we haven’t left the body and the spirit and their dance. This is Robbins running the wires of his church right into the sockets of the pop culture on which we both grew up. If the characters and dilemmas of scripture are verities and averaged probabilities, which a good spiritual text usually provides, then why wouldn’t those same characters and dilemmas show up in songs and movies? As Dylan is not exactly literature but not not, popular song is not a moment of prayer, but neither is it entirely the realm of the sinner.

“I read this piece about / fascism and ecocide / that was like, ‘Despair / is not an option.’ Fuck / you: I’ve opted for it. Yeah, / I hope we rise like lions, live / every day like it’s / Bastille Day. But men / shot all the lions.” The search is on, despairing or not. In “The Seasons,” Robbins is absolutely looking for guidance, imagining Lorca being shot at LAX and O’Hara writing “our tantrum of belief / which isn’t in Lorca / but also sort of is.”

That “tantrum of belief” is what Robbins guides readers through, and, after tapping the actors and singers and poets, he goes for the big fellas: Christ and Marx. “The Orthodox didn’t make / Augustine’s mistake / about original sin. / For Marx the shebang / begins with theft.” He says elsewhere in Walkman that he’s both a Marxist and a Christian, and there are occasional adjustments, quick roadside adjustments, in which Robbins jacks up one side of his beliefs to block readers’ view of the other. Here, though, he evens the plane and puts everything in front of readers on a straightaway.

“Used to be if you wrote / about trees and clouds / you were a nature poet, / floating mistily / above the social. Now / not to speak of trees / is almost a crime.” How will the death of the natural world be represented in the spirit world? The Lascaux cave paintings in Chauvet, threatened by the breath of tourists, have been duplicated three miles away from the original site. This replica, designed by the French government, is made of metal scaffolding and “rock-colored mortar” and even smells like the original. For Robbins, this is a metaphor “for—well, everything.” As is the fact that the writer John Berger, a “big shot,” per Robbins, got to see the original caves before he died.

By the end of “The Seasons,” readers roll through fields of green with Frisbees and dogs and then come to a stop before the crucifixions that Robbins saw in his own lifetime:

Then I’m out of the park
into maximal blare.
It’s always the end of the world
somewhere. Things gear up,
wind down. There’s the Dakota,
John Lennon done in. I was in
Manitou Springs with Sgt. Pepper’s
on 8-track. Yoko still lives there.

Robbins is part of a cohort (as am I) that grew up with a secular cast of saints, a sort of pre-critical Holy Trinity: Elvis, the Beatles, and Dylan. Within three years, we’d lost Elvis and Lennon, but Dylan was a ghost already so, of course, he got a Nobel. That Robbins and I might no longer believe in the structure of the myths, or the myths themselves, would not change the fact that we still live in their weather, where thunder happens only when it’s raining and all the critics love you in New York, as long as the radio’s on.