Let’s get this out front from the beginning: as I
read Anthony Robinson’s 2006 chapbook, Brief Weather & I Guess a Sort of Vision, I grew increasingly annoyed. Which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I found myself surprised by his run-along lines and mode of fractured
journaling. He succeeds, magnificently at times, in creating a busted
travelogue documenting drunken visits to friends, the vast atmosphere of Texas
longing, a grittiness experienced only around sun-shot barbecues and, of
course, heartbreak: the riddled hearts that seem perpetually breaking all over
grimy window panes and kitchen tables in New York City. He moves fluidly between painting the textured spaces of his roaming life and
funny lines evoking the absurdity of a human being trying, grasping at
everything akin to love and the universal quest for momentary personal dignity.
These are good poems and at times great poems. Let me illustrate (I will quote
this poem in full because it is short and provides a taste of the collection):
Writing for cities, the yellow Austin air,
morning in my beard, falling on the cracked high sidewalks,
I promised 100 poems.
Writing for cracked mattresses and one dirty towel,
dusk falls, plunges: we make terrestrial pacts.
(In the bird-stuffed summer past.)
Loving was like a crossword, putting numbers
into boxes, filling the grid as a stretch of dotted skin.
Across, down. My long-limbed nine by nine.
I love the first line for its marriage of a specific goal/obligation ("writing
for cities") with the vague and roomy description of a setting ("the yellow
Austin air") that invokes an inability to completely escape momentary settings.
Then we’re given an image that grafts physicality upon a time of day and leaves me
wanting to find a few chunks of afternoon still dropping from the maples at
sunset. Beautiful. Next, we move to a displaced commitment ("I promised 100 poems") within the
yellow and meaty Texas portrayed in the first stanza. Robinson has worked up to
this seemingly random insertion perfectly by already spinning our expectations
of reality out of whack and it adds an anxious layer of failed assurances. These are poems that, set in what appears superficially as a journal (many of
the poems are even dated), thrive upon parenthetical additions and slightly
off-kilter jumps from thought to thought. It is a book in which my mind is poised perfectly to create its own realities
within and between each line. The end of the above poem introduces either the speaker or someone close to him
as "my long-limbed nine by nine." Set up by mention of grids, crosswords, and numbers placed in boxes, this
heartfelt ("my") designation is flavored by newspaper games and the difficult
playfulness associated with them. I revisit moments like "(in the bird-stuffed summer past)" and "I promised 100
poems" as details of a more specific relationship. The simple use of the possessive makes me sad for something once owned and now,
in the least, moving in a seemingly uncontrollable manner throughout a
crossword or sudoku puzzle.
The rest of Robinson's book progresses similarly to the poem I've quoted, though
it is no less interesting (even if there are perhaps a few too many references
to drinking and partying). He uses white space, enjambment, and short sentences that are sometimes
descriptions, sometimes statements and sometimes both (!) to create a halting,
airy pace that compels me to fill in thoughts and concepts before getting to
his often surprising conclusion. In [That tree's so fucking white. It has no business] I found the following
lines simultaneously hilarious and disarming:
Some day, helpless. Some day, spring has fallen &
it can't get up. Fuck dignity, let's eat.
He is by turns sincere and hopeless, then joking and playing with idioms as he
describes both a mood and rudimentary fact of the seasons and finally ends up
retreating on all of it with a transparent bravado that reveals more
hopelessness than any of the previous statements. This is a quotable book. The idea of someone being called a "lazy snaky fuck" will forever be kept in my
mind as one of the most penetrating insults I've ever heard. And these are the kinds of things Robinson tells us about. This guy actually told me his ex-girlfriend called him a "lazy, snaky fuck." Wonderful. It feels like a long, if one-sided, conversation with someone bent dangerously
upon telling me the truth about his life.
Obviously, I really like this book. Why, then, did I begin this review by citing my annoyance with it? What bothers me is Robinson’s formal choice of including notes on the backside of every poem. They
over-explain and, occasionally, provide the only justification for parts of the
poems. Mention of a grid and crossword do not necessitate an overblown note
about doing sudoku puzzles on an airplane and the certainty of love's demise to
allow them life within a poem. Unlike Matt Hart’s notes at the end of Sonnet or Dan Beachy-Quick’s introduction to Mulberry these factoids--these guides to the poems--were
disruptive and often constricting. My imagination wanted them to go away as
much as my eyes and ears. So, I would say that you should read this book. Do.
It’s good. And if Anthony Robinson happens to read this, I would like to say: Why,
man? I just don’t think you needed them.
