Poetry at the Tipping Point

There is a passage in Theo van Doesburg’s 1930 essay “Towards White Painting” that casts an especially neat pall over the utopian enterprise of modernist architecture:

white is the colour of modern times, the colour which dissipates a whole era; our era is one of perfection, purity and certitude.

white It includes everything.

We have superseded both the “brown” of decadence and classicism and the “blue” of divisionism, the cult of the blue sky, the gods with green beards and the spectrum.

white pure white.¹

From a certain point of view, van Doesburg’s manifesto exemplifies the batty elitism and barely concealed race panic of the great modernist movements: it is a screed against color mobilized, as David Batchelor puts it, against a vast number of discriminatory forms, “some technical, some moral, some racial, some sexual, some social.”² From another point of view, gazing over the bleached expanse of American suburbia, it reads as a dreadful augury of the ruin not only of tints and hues but of brown earth, blue sky, and whatever residue of the sacred clings to the gods’ green beards. In his first, astonishing book of poems, Michael Robbins bestrides this narrow world like a highway overpass, rubbernecking with queasy fascination as color is leached from all that passes before him. Despite its title, which suggests a tug-of-war between different incarnations of postmillennial malaise, Alien vs. Predator is really a series of landscape poems dispatched from the landless territory of “the ionosphere” (“Alien vs. Predator” 3). For Robbins, the word stands not only for a section of Earth’s upper atmosphere but for the hell’s kitchen of Kinkos, Best Buys, secret research facilities, and semipublic bathrooms traversed by his stubbornly lyric “I.” Like the environments it describes, this I is impure to the point of toxicity. It jumps id first into a whirlpool of bad feeling and comes up clutching prophecy in its jaws.

Since “Alien vs. Predator,” the title poem in this collection, was published in The New Yorker in 2009, Robbins has not yet shed his reputation as a bard of the mash-up and Internet meme. In a landslide of positive press, critics have focused invariably on his penchant for referencing pop star Britney Spears in the same breath as John Milton, or for writing short pastorals that cast Stevie Nicks and Mick Fleetwood as their shepherdess and swain. In a poem like “To the Break of Dawn,” Robbins seems to affirm this version of his ars poetica when he boasts, “I take this cadence from the spinning plates / where the DJ plots the needle’s fall” (70). Certainly the exhilaration packed into his quatrains, quintets, and couplets owes much to their contrapuntal whizzing between Top Forty radio and The Norton Anthology of English Literature, with nods to alternative traditions from Sonic Youth to the San Francisco Renaissance. These gestures are successful, in part, due to the deep hedonism of Robbins’s relationship to rhyme, through which what may seem like the lazy enticement of a good pop-cultural allusion emancipates itself in punch lines worthy of Lord Byron’s Don Juan. In “Space Mountain,” Robbins invokes his muse

by the erasable duck, by the wascaly wabbit, by licking the nun and by kicking her habit,

by the brain that I found in the girls’ locker room, by the horrible man-grapes of Fruit of the Loom,

by the bollocks I mind, by the virgin I’m like, by the smell of teen spirit, the punch that I spike,

and so on (49). The pleasures on offer here are diverse. You can delight in the artless rhotacism of “wascaly wabbit” and the childhood ghost of Elmer Fudd, be chuffed to recognize the three albums whose names are folded into the last couplet, or speculate on Robbins’s attitude toward John Ashbery (is Robbins the expungeable “Duck Amuck” to Ashbery’s impish “Daffy Duck in Hollywood?”). You might wonder about the formal labor of the couplet, which sends each line hurtling...