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 of belief, the poem articulates its uncertainty about what to believe, closing: “Visibility at an all-time nothing / but ‘I told you so,’ and ‘just shut up and hold on.’”

 

Speaking of “just shut up and hold on,” Failures—a collection many years in the making—ranges across many years of Robinson’s life, directly addressing difficult personal experiences, from his father’s death to his divorce and the distance from his young daughter it brought on. In the title poem, he states: “I cannot hold a job, and have / Birthed nothing of significance in this world. I count birds and numbers / Of syllables, but cannot raise my own child.”

 

Rather than make an autobiographical turn, though, Robinson figures these events on a larger trajectory of poets’ “failures.” He mentions failures and hardships endured by Wyatt, Whitman, O’Hara, Dickinson, and Pound, suggesting that the poet’s life is intrinsically characterized by failure, as well as by an ability, just as intrinsic, to create beauty: “I think sometimes my heart / Is full of inert materials, but I still keep making fragile things.” This is supported by a comedown Robinson describes in the same poem, where he sees:

[a] thousand … small white birds colliding furious

In the wind outside [his] front window. Flying and crashing,

And on for hours, making their beauty by falling apart.

Rather than experience sadness over belief, the poet creates fragile beauty in the midst of failure. 

 

Robinson does express a significant amount of weariness about the world (“We won’t save us”) and ribs ambition pretty often (“You are possessed of a large mind and, as a consequence, have many books on your shelf. You will not find the answer in any of them”). I read these sentiments as being in line with an overall distrust of “belief,” rather than expressing cynicism or ironic detachment. If it’s hard to tell anything about the world, it’s not only because of the amount of fighter jets, but also because of all this cynicism, irony, and belief that the world could or should be otherwise. The poet’s perspective, which creates beauty with failure and fragile things, will tell us things when we get over cynicism and irony, when we recognize our sadness to be the effect of belief, when we come back to the present.

 

“Lyric for a Small April” is one poem where Robinson’s mixture of world-weariness and celebration of the beautiful and fragile are particularly on display. Set on a lonely evening while Robinson thinks of his father in a hospital bed, the poem is composed of one sentence starting with “Because” after another. He writes:

 

Because everything including April repeats and the scroll

ends just where it begins, we can now safely conclude 

nothing, really. Because the showers

 

will return next year, and we will all still be alive here,

and there will be no rejoicing, no feasting, no dance,

we will be here, small,

 

smaller than ever before, smaller than this year, but we will

also be full, fuller than yesterday.  […]

 

I mouth this lyric for a small April,

for everything not yet dead, for what’s alive.

 

I would say Failures of the Poets proposes poetry as a rightful way of being in a failed, flawed world, but that might sound too much like belief. What I can say is this is my second time reading it (the first being about a year ago) and that both times I found their way of creating beauty out of failure to be enlivening. 

 

Buy it here.