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Cargando... Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Musicpor Michael Robbins
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. I had a tug of war wanting to like this book and appreciate the author's insights about poetry but was pulled in the other direction being annoyed by author packing so many references into a single sentence it made your head hurt (some sentences seemed like lists of artists and art). On a per word basis he must quote more artists and works of art than any book currently on the market. In other parts of the book, Robbins seemed to play games with the reader --"Poetry makes nothing happen." Next page, "Poetry makes all sorts of things happen." pp 153-4. Maybe I'm not getting the inside joke. Elsewhere he quotes Greek words in the Greek alphabet without translation. I was also distracted by the snarky comments about other poets like Billy Collins not having talent. I’m not sure I learned too much about poetry and pop songs but I learned Michael Robbins knows a lot. ( ) Equipment for Living: On Poetry and Pop Music by Michael Robbins is a look and comparison of pop music and poetry. Robbins is the author of Alien vs. Predator (Penguin, 2012) and The Second Sex (Penguin, 2014). His poems have appeared in the New Yorker, Poetry, Harper's, Boston Review, and elsewhere; his critical work in Harper's, London Review of Books, The New York Observer, the Chicago Tribune, Spin, and several other publications. He earned his Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago and teaches creative writing at Montclair State University. Growing up we all looked at music as if it held some esoteric message that was lost on anyone older. Some of it sticks with us; some of it leaves as we get older. I’ll still quote a Springsteen lyric but not a Van Halen one. We simply outgrow some music and sometimes we outgrow what we read or grow into it. I was in the Marines before I finally sat down and read those books I was supposed to read in high school. Twenty or thirty years ago I would never have expected to have shelves with poetry, Camus, and Virginia Woolf. Robbins looks at his own youth and his infatuation with Journey and tears it down. The lyrics that seemed to be the heart of the music. “Born and raised in South Detroit” was made up by Steve Perry simply because it sounded right. Does writing lyrics make one a writer in the sense of writing literature? Bob Dylan’s Nobel Prize has recently brought this to the forefront. Are the two forms the same or different or just variations on the same. Poetry is visual. We see the lines the stanza formation, the rhymes, and the line breaks. We don’t see this in music. The lyrics make up only part of the music -- guitar, drums, vocalizing. Then, too, before the printing press, poetry and stories were set to music to help memorize them. Musically, Robbins covers a wide range of music from Taylor Swift to Death Metal and Punk to Country. The poetry starts with my rock favorites like Rimbaud and the classics to a detailed examination of poets like Frederick Seidel who made the most rebellious rock lyrics seem tame in comparison. It challenges what we believe is acceptable. It’s not just rock music or even men in dresses like the New York Dolls that spur on rebellion and challenge the social order. Does writing lyrics give a writer insight to other writing? Robbins does use a bit of humor in his writing. Patti Smith thinks the transition to being a writer is the avoidance of contractions and Neil Young… well, is Neil Young. But that is also a two-way street. Poetry sometimes struggles in defining itself. Rhyming, in particular, is it a Western obsession that poetry rhyme and how does the end rhyme make it poetry? I have wondered if Chinese or Arabic rhyme or follow iambic meter. I do know Russian is particularly suited for feminine rhyme, but English is not. Robbins makes the reader think. Think about what we held true. What we find as acceptable. How we view art in our lives. Available July 18, 2017 https://evilcyclist.wordpress.com/2017/02/26/book-review-equipment-for-living-on... I agree with a lot of what Michael Robbins says, I disagree with a lot else, but most of all I deeply disagree with the way he says it. Louis Menand wrote a review of this book in The New Yorker that contains what I thought was a spot-on parody of a certain strain of pop criticism: "It yields sentences like 'I assume that what Burke'—the literary theorist Kenneth Burke—'says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard.'" Ha! Little did I suspect that this gaseous pronouncement is taken directly from the first chapter—except that it's been cleaned up to make it less bloated and irritating. What Robbins actually wrote was: "I assume that what Burke says about poetry applies, mutatis mutandis, to the songs of Def Leppard, though they are hardly alembicated at all." Alembicated: excessively refined, precious. Thanks for that. Robbins is the kind of writer who won't say limited when he can reach for foreclosed. His author bio boasts that he received his Ph.D. (in English) from the University of Chicago, the most academic of universities. I envy anyone who was able to attend the U. of C., but he seems to have gotten the worst of it. As a blurb on the back cover puts it, "Ugh, there should be a law against being as smart as Michael Robbins." No, there shouldn't be a law against being smart, but maybe there should be a law against writing as if you're afraid someone will think you're not. I don't know what Michael Robbins does for a living—poetry and criticism don't pay the bills these days. But if he were my professor, I would be ashamed to get anything but an F from him. Recently a co-worker of mine told me, in what I think was meant as praise, that I had the largest vocabulary of anyone she knew. I was appalled to have let it show. Over a lifetime—I'm roughly the same age as Michael Robbins—I've come to see that the beauty of the English language is in the power of its simplest words. As a poet, Robbins should know that. Instead, he writes turgid crud such as "By not writing in propria persona, Browning builds the politico-ideological problem of agency 'into the very structure of the poem as a problem.'" Ugh. The other irritation in Robbins' style is his way of letting drop an opinion in an aside, and then leaving it there without bothering to support it. This kind of thing has a nudge-nudge-wink-wink, ho-ho, don't-you-and-I-know-it offensiveness to it: "There is a quirkiness to Thomas's disregard for what part of speech a word usually is that at its best recalls Stevens...but at its worst sounds like E. E. Cummings....Of course, Thomas is a better poet than Cummings (who isn't?), but..." I can think of some candidates. But even if I'm wrong, and Cummings is the worst poet ever, respect for the reader demands that the writer back this kind of thing up. Everyone is entitled to an informed opinion. But unless you're God, the king, or a close friend, it's overreaching to just drop condemnations without a word of explanation. Robbins does this over and over, about both poetry and music. Some of this hit-and-run, overly abbreviated criticism owes as much to early rock critics such as Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus, and Robert Christgau as it does to the French intellectual tradition. These guys assumed an air of superiority to combat the idea that all pop culture was disposable fluff: by writing about Elvis in academic style, they implicitly proclaimed that Elvis was as worthy of serious consideration as a highbrow novelist, and by compressing their judgment into enthusiastic one-paragraph hosannas (Marsh) or single-sentence prose poems (Christgau), they had maximum impact for the fewest column inches in Rolling Stone or the Village Voice. This is most apparent in the final chapter, "Playlist," Robbins' catalog of the songs, albums, and poems he likes best. Here's Robbins in his least academic, yet most impenetrable mode: "I don't trust moralists who can't hear Britney Spears over the roar of their prejudices, but this record is the guitar equivalent of the final shoot-out in The Wild Bunch." That's the entire review of a 1987 record by the Chicago punk-metal band Big Black. Enough not said. Yet I read this book all the way through. I hope I haven't given the impression that there are no ideas here. There are, and passion too, however annoyingly both are expressed. I read this book from cover to cover because, like Robbins, I love rock music, and because although much poetry leaves me cold, enough of it has moved me that I'm always eager to learn more about it. I disagree with about half of what Robbins says about music, but he and I love it with the same intensity, and that makes him not just another opinionated gasbag, but that most exasperating of folk: The Insufferable Friend. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
"How can art help us make sense--or nonsense--of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins's mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. He has a singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, to W.B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick's "Cups"). Robbins weaves a discussion on poet Juliana Spahr with the different subsets of Scandinavian black metal, illuminating subjects in ways that few scholars can achieve. Equipment for Living is also a wonderful guide to essential poetry and popular music"--Jacket flap. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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