Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson
“Foreign Object Damage,” a poem about an eighth of the way through Failures of the Poets , begins: “We are not driven to belief by sadness, / but to sadness by belief.” Rather than belief offering consolation for sadness (redemption), the sadness comes simply because you believe. While these lines may be read religiously, the way I heard them was worldly in nature. If you didn’t believe in the world being something other than it is, you wouldn’t be sad. The world Robinson describes in “Foreign Object Damage” is a world “of coffee cups, zip drives, // & too many fighter jets.” Lest that diagnosis be read as indication of a particular stance about consumption, technology, and war, the poem immediately changes course, with Robinson writing: “Or not enough fighter / jets,” at which point he confesses that it’s become so hard to tell: to tell anything anymore is a grave & heavy program. Rather than sadness borne o...