Ange Mlinko: The Critic Should Never Have A Muse
Michael Robbins has disappointed us in his attempt to make a Scarriet-like, sweeping definition of poetry: “Where Competency Ends, Poetry Begins.”
Robbins has intelligence and wit, and we like his writing, but the jury is still out on whether he will fall into dyspeptic Pound-ism or soar like an Alexander Pope and laugh with silver laughter at the dunces.
We still have high hopes for the critic Michael Robbins—we have no hopes for any poet today—critics need to quiet the noisy poets before poetry can be heard again.
In his latest piece for the Chicago Tribune, Robbins drops the ball—he decries “competency” by selecting for laudation a quintessential piece of competency by Ange Mlinko, a “friend” of his, Robbins confesses to his readers, but a friendship, he insists, based on an “admiration for her work,” and not (as he attempts to drive the stake into the heart of Foetry) the “other way around.”
Since Alan Cordle’s Foetry.com ceased publication and Scarriet sprang up to take its place, we like to think we have kept the flag waving above the beleaguered fort of common sense.
Robbins cannot see how his friendship with Mlinko has blinded him. So it follows he cannot see his tribute to Mlinko is the epitome of competency.
Robbins‘ article begins with that old trope: the view from the “slush pile” from the sneering, condescending poetry editor’s perspective, as if “slush” wasn’t finally published in the editor’s magazine, anyway.
Robbins is doing something clever, though, moving from “slush” to “competency” to the apex of the imagination which is…Mlinko.
This would be funny, but Robbins, blinded by both “slush-pile”-experience professionalism and his “friendship,” is serious. Too bad. Robbins is best when he’s a little silly.
As he is a good critic, Robbins does give us an extra: slush pile poetry is mocked with quotes by Wyndham Lewis.
Wyndham Lewis? If you thought Ezra Pound was an creep who wrote mediocre, Modernistic poetry, wait to you read Wyndham Lewis!
Hemingway thought Lewis the most physically repulsive human being he ever met (with Ford Madox Ford a close second) and we are not surprised.
Robbins’ Mlinko-nod to foetry, his faint damning of MFA “competency,” plus his singling out as ludicrous the same passage of Adam Fitzgerald’s (from a David Kirby review) which we found risible three weeks ago (#81) would seem to indicate Robbins is keeping his finger on the pulse of Po-Biz via Blog Scarriet. Good for him. Lists are currently the rage in po-biz and Scarriet’s Hot 100 series got that started. Anyway, we are flattered.
For Robbins’ argument, a couple passages from the “crushingly banal” “Apple Slices” by Todd Boss is presented, with concessions to its sonic effects, as ‘workshop competent’:
— eaten right
off the jackknife in
moons, half-moons,
quarter-moons and
crescents —
still
summon common
summer afternoons
I spent as my dad’s
jobsite grunt…
*
so many waned and
waxed moons later,
another well-paid,
well-fed, college-
bred paper-pusher, I
wonder that I’ve never
labored harder, nor
eaten better.
And here is the Fitzgerald, which Robbins and Scarriet agree, was over-praised by the excitable David Kirby:
I was shipwrecked on an island of clouds.
The sun’s pillors bored me though, so I
set foot on a small indigo place
below orange falls and hexagonal flowers.
I was able to stay there a fortnight,
restlessly roaming the buttered air
inside tropical rock enclosures,
caves of foliage that canopied darkness.
Robbins calls these lines “unmusical and undistinguished,” but he is being kind. These lines are clumsy, ponderous, free verse Dr. Seuss.
But now Robbins turns to his standard for greatness, Ange Mlinko:
You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel
but it’s an axiom that, sooner or later, a hurricane’ll hit here.
For starters, Mlinko uses “axiom,” incorrectly, a philosophical term; we never say, “It’s an axiom that it rains.” But it seems axiom’s similarity in sound to the mythical “Ixion” was too much for Mlinko to resist.
The rhetoric is wanting: the vagueness of “You never hear of…” How is this dramatically interesting? It is not. It’s a fact-driven idiom. Poets need to be aware of this. And just in terms of pure sound, “tied- to- a- revolving- wheel” is ugly, and even worse is “but- it’s- an- axiom- that,- sooner- or- later…” The logic is not worth pursuing in prose; it’s safe to say it’s not going to do anything for poetry: Because a hurricane will eventually arrive somewhere, it is worth noting that one never hears of Ixion.
Robbins thinks he is praising Mlinko’s poetry. He’s not. He’s simply agreeing with a banal piece of logic: 1) “you never hear of Ixion” 2) Ixion symbolizes the “guests” of our “planet” who have met “their host’s hospitality” with “rapine.” Robbins claims this is not “climate change didacticism” but this is, in fact, all he is admiring—and all one could admire in this passage. Surely it’s not the sonic chiming of Ixion and axiom.
Since rhyme fell from grace among the modernist sophisticates, assonance and alliteration have rushed in to fill the vacuum in all sorts of horrible, excessive and stupid ways.
Here is Robbins explaining to us what hurricanes are:
Mlinko is often delightful: “You never hear of Ixion, tied to a revolving wheel, / but it’s an axiom that, sooner or later, a hurricane’ll hit here.” But there’s more here than a Rube Goldberg spillage of phonemes modifying one another, irresistible as such sonics are. Contrast the insubstantiality of Fitzgerald’s cloud islands with the sense Mlinko packs into this couplet: the story of Ixion, bound to a spinning wheel by Zeus for betraying a guest, reveals an axiom, a self-evident premise, which in this case is that the weather, in its cycles and revolutions, will always, eventually, manifest itself as a revolving wheel of air, which a hurricane is. And hurricanes arrive ever more frequently, deadly to human life and its built environment: in a reversal of the myth, the revolving planet binds its guests, who have met their host’s hospitality with rapine. A little parable of climate change, then, with none of the didacticism you’d expect.
So here is one of the better critics writing today (a published poet, as well) Michael Robbins, and after dismissing “slush” and “competency,” holds up for apotheosis, “sooner or later, a hurricane’ll hit here.”
This is one more example of how bad the world of poetry has become.
And this is why Mark Edmundson was right to attack contemporary poetry. It is has become so bad that any attack is good, by default. And we mean this seriously. Something is wrong: that’s where we have to start. The inarticulate nonsense proffered by professor Edmundson still trumps every weak defense, and they are all weak, by default. They are weak, first of all, because they are making so much of Edmundson’s ludicrous piece in the first place. Secondly, they are weak because they are anxious to show Edmundson is wrong, but in a manner that is even more deluded. Edmundson wants poetry to be socially and politically relevant and the poets cry, “It is!” But social and political relevance isn’t poetry.
We only raise this matter because Robbins, satisfied that Mlinko is the standard, finishes up his piece with a diatribe against Edmundson. Robbins: “Edmundson cites not a single contemporary poet under the age of 59. Think about that for a second.” But unfortunately that says more about the sorry state of American poetry than it does about Edmundson. You see what we mean? The Edmundson of omissions and lapses is truer than Robbins on Mlinko.
Edmundson triumphs without trying. That’s how bad it is.
