Response

Robbins's poem operates by refusing to let any register hold for longer than a clause. "Praise this world, Rilke says, the jerk" — the Duino Elegies get exactly one beat of sincere invocation before the deflation. Every subsequent move repeats this structure: assertion, collapse, non sequitur. "I translate the Bible into velociraptor." The comedy is real, but the mechanism is also diagnostic. What Robbins is performing is the impossibility of sustaining any single mode of address — devotional, scientific, confessional, absurdist — in a culture where all of them are simultaneously available and equally weightless. The poem cycles through godlike powers ("I pioneer / the seeding of the ionosphere") and playground taunts ("I'm rubber, you're glue") not because it can't tell the difference but because it suspects the difference has collapsed. This is not nihilism. It is a kind of desperate inventory-taking, and what makes it interesting is that the inventory includes Rilke, which means it registers what has been lost.

What the canon holds that Robbins doesn't — or rather, what Robbins has metabolised so thoroughly he can only address it through deflection — is the long history of exactly this problem: the creature that outgrows its frame of reference. Tennyson, refusing to be reduced to ape-logic even as he concedes the science: "I was born to other things." Browning's chit "who, aping wisdom all beyond his years, / Thinks to discard humanity itself" and ends up "missing heaven and losing earth." Shelley's Nature spreading "Earth's lap with plenty" only to heap "ruin, vice, and slavery" on the one species capable of noticing. These poets still believed in the vertical axis: there was something above the human and something below, and the tragedy was misplacement on the scale. Robbins has flattened that axis entirely. His speaker claims divine prerogatives ("I fight the comets, lick the moon") and animal appetites ("I sleep on meat") in the same breath, and neither claim has more authority than the other. The elk, the whale on stilts, the velociraptor, the Tibetans in front of Best Buy — they all occupy the same plane of equivalent absurdity. Where Browning's speaker could still warn against the beast that "should affect to fly," Robbins's speaker is already flying and crawling simultaneously, and the altitude is zero.

The collision that interests me most is between Robbins's "Point being, rickshaws in Scranton" — that twice-repeated "point being" that pointedly refuses to arrive at a point — and Hardy's Mother Nature mourning that man "Reckons gross and ignoble my teaching, / Immoral my story." Hardy's complaint is that humanity has become sophisticated enough to judge its own origins and find them wanting. Robbins's poem is what happens a century further along that trajectory: the judgment has been rendered, the origins have been found wanting, and now the sophisticated consciousness has nothing left to do but generate magnificent nonsense at high speed. Robbins understands his poem as a technology — he knows exactly what effects it is producing, exactly which expectations it is defeating. But he has given up on the idea that a poem might be a technology *for* something, the way Samuel Speed's prison hymn was a technology for devotion, or Shelley's cantos were technologies for revolution. This is a technology for demonstrating the condition of being a technology with no purpose. Which is, if you hold it at the right angle, its own kind of prayer — the kind you get when "every angel's berserk" and the only honest devotion left is to say so, quickly, before the next non sequitur arrives.