Paris Mountain

An interview with Michael Robbins

Buju Banton

In your dissertation you argue that 

the poetic self [in poets such as Allen Grossman, Jennifer Moxley, and Paul Muldoon] might serve as a locus for thinking about and working through problems—as, for instance, an allegory for larger social and moral problems—rather than be dismissed a priori as an ideological construct whose only possible function is obfuscation. The poem might then become an arena for thinking through such problems as though they were aesthetic problems.

This idea of the poetic self as an arena—as for a game or even a battle—sets up interesting harmonics with the personae in your poems. 

MR: Quoting a man’s dissertation is a low blow, but I agree with this. I mean, I didn’t want to be all, “Well, if you consider the thesis advanced in my dissertation, you’ll see that my poetic personae are outgrowths of my concerns about the complexities of the poetic subject, and/or vice versa.” But it’s true that I am dissatisfied with prevailing notions of poetic selfhood—bourgeois monad ego! social construction!—and I think they underestimate what sort of thinking is possible in poems, and mistake how that thinking happens. I think it’s fair to say that I intend my poetic I to complicate those notions of selfhood. The risk is that the reader will see only, as a wonderful commenter at HTMLGiant had it, “cleverness and nifty references thrown in, and a sensibility a little too jazzed by the sound of its own voice.” I’d hope for a little more generosity, a little more time on her part, to notice that I’m hardly unaware of the poem’s surface effects and perhaps ask herself what problems I’m trying to address by posing them as aesthetic problems. But as Alexei Karenin says, “In general, passengers’ rights in the choice of seats are rather vague.”

More here, although one wishes the interview had been done in person, and not over email.