Man with Head Removed by Sam Robinson

Man with Head Removed is a volume of “new and collected” poetry. Comprising New Age Self-Help (chapbook), Nature Poems (full length), Boston Spleen (chapbook—prose poems), and Man with Head Removed (recent poems), it possesses the weight and variety necessitated by a “collected” volume. Indeed, if there is a critique that can be leveled against the book it is simply that it is so long, its weight and variety at times overpowering the power each book has on its own. 

That said, there is a clear through-line articulated by the book/s, explicitly addressed in the first poem:

The “being” of a flickering flame is a dance (occurance), the so instantaneous as to almost not have happened growth and decay of which is captured by caesurae in the line “decay growth and decay—again growth! // at the same time! it decays!” Here, Robinson uses the flickering flame as an almost Transcendental symbol (in the sense of words being signs of natural facts, and natural facts being a type of the divine Flow) not only of how being’s true nature is becoming but of how our own ideas about things are just parts of an endless process of becoming (“how many things it is to us everything”). The flame is many things because our thoughts constantly change, and our thoughts about the flame—in the poem, if not in experience as such—are part of the life of the flame.  

There are several ways to critique this last thought philosophically. One would be to decry the projection of manmade ideas onto natural facts. Another would be to point out that language is intrinsically abstract, and therefore incapable of having any relationship with the material present (fields aflame) whatsoever. While there is evidence throughout Man with Head Removed that agrees with both these perspectives, the poems are at their strongest when they instead, as it’s put in one poem, “AFFIRM / nature’s signal” and allow Nature and mind to sync up in the process of becoming in the poem itself. Affirming that language itself falls short of fully mediating that marriage, Robinson nevertheless doesn’t run away into full-on abstraction/surrealism/disaffection but writes poems full of gold, eating, smiling, and genuine weight that express the unity of all things in “nature”:

All my thoughts express one

single thing— Nature

becoming all there is

in the mind of man, see all

ornament is just part of a monument 

and would fall forever to the center without it

I can speak of nothing else

It’s important to note that Robinson’s “nature” is more capacious than you might expect. Indeed, he “can speak of nothing else” because, as he writes in “Thirty-Eight Affirmations,” nature is a process that includes everything: 

AFFIRM

all vital information has been discovered

forgotten a thousand times over—

the task is to remember

AFFIRM

there is plastic in my body

AFFIRM

plastic is a part of nature

AFFIRM

the internet is real

AFFIRM

the internet is part of nature

AFFIRM

no technology is alien but latent in the animal and its

capabilities

AFFIRM

that animal is domesticated, perhaps fatally but not

terminally

AFFIRM

wild animals still exist

AFFIRM

wild animals kill, eat others, and commit

evil acts to be beautiful 

AFFIRM

society is the wrinkled and sour

fruit of a civilization process

AFFIRM

a civilized animal is live stock

AFFIRM

the Sun will swallow the Earth

AFFIRM

it has done so before and we remain

AFFIRM

the flickering flame lights our world

The entirety of New Age Self-Help’s second half is made up of these poems, which take their name from a simple calculation of the number of (usually) one-line affirmations that follow the word “AFFIRM.” Individual affirmations can be a bit off-putting at first glance, prompting one to question the kind of “man” that would be created through making such affirmations: 

AFFIRM

necessity of the predator

AFFIRM

necessity of the prey

However, another way of thinking about them is as expressions of what I would call the book’s natural-, as opposed to world-, historical bent. The world-historical perspective might say that affirming necessity of the predator-prey relationship endorses violence. However, the natural-historical way of reading the lines affirms interdependence, in which the ten thousand and more things are involved in an endless, dynamic process that would not be itself without the predators, without prey, and so on. The world-historical sweep implies the possibility of resistance, whereas you can’t resist becoming:

AFFIRM

you do not exist, you are not

AFFIRM

you are constantly chaotically

becoming in accord with necessity

In this sense, the affirmations are not about “you,” “me,” or “I” at all, but ecstatic voicings of processes it is not possible to take a “stand” against. Refusing to be disaffected, or to take a righteous stance about states of affairs, the affirmations preach staying with the flow of becoming, in fact suggesting that the only proper “response” to (or “stance” about) becoming is to affirm, affirm. 

Speaking of predator and prey, Robinson at several points in Man with Head Removed glorifies an abandonment of human projects in the name of returning to animal nature, one notable example of which closes this fantastical poem:

the unveiling of things— all revealed, turnt out

every apartment like so many pockets spilling

all and sundry into the street— every garment,

book, furniture, appliance, every pantry emptied and spread 

on the sidewalk— I have the keys to Franklin Park Zoo and after

stopping by a pharmacy that is my destination, (phàrmakon—

some poison endowing strength), I am letting a lion

and tiger wild on Newbury St— multicolored fabrics

receive deeper reds in rents, fire sale, EVERYTHING MUST GO

UP IN FLAMES— there are no more reservations art La Voile,

so I will prepare us

sole meunière and we will eat it complete with bones and eggs

What I learned being away for 3 days— 9 months— approaching 30 years

We cannot make the animals men but maybe

men can be made back into animals with graceful teeth and luscious skin

Robinson does not uncritically celebrate a “return” to more prehistoric urges (cf. “wolf-pack” image from “Moving”). What’s celebrated about animals, instead, is the practice of perceiving “DIRECTLY” (viz. Rilke’s “Open”), experience and the feeling of one’s body that is not instantly being converted into a “dead concept”:

Language is posited as the enemy of unthinking and/or empty mind, the latter being the state of, perhaps, “man with head removed.” However, the true enemy is not language as such but uses of language step outside of becoming to ask questions about why or wherefore, as if such an answer existed apart immediate experience of the flux: 

— fire was stolen

from the gods and punished we

cooked food and made the brain a ruling 

parasite that posed the most

disturbing question— “Why?”

There should be a way of using language naturally, in which mind as part of the process of becoming can be expressed. The act of poetry itself would be a formal method of reconnecting with the movement of becoming, its use of caesurae and line breaks able to “frame” that flow. In Robinson’s poetry, moments of such reconnection feel as well as directly name this as “religious experience”:

The “religious experience” described here is an ordinary day of sitting in the sun on the beach turned mystical, a style Robinson also deploys in this poem about a laundromat: 

The Jaguar Sleeps at my Feet with a Gift

Once again the Chinese laundry serves

Me as a not-so-silent house of worship

Humming old machines intoning plangent

Songs of wear disintegrating fabric

Catholically pagan is this cyclic house 

Agitants acknowledge and efface the worldly stains

By struggle signs of struggle are erased

The way prepared for resurrection, clean & violet lace

Yielding to the sound of the machines, Robinson meditates on the struggle involved in achieving a natural state of union with the flux. Affirmation isn’t easy, after all. 

Readers will find that it is not all just being burned alive by the sun in Man with Head Removed, though moments in which physical struggle is combined with philosophical searching in a somewhat “heavy” manner are those I will remember:

Heavy Objects to Failure

Negative rep while building the pyramids

Lowering limestone as slowly as possible

holding tension through the movement, conscious of my form

Into a perfect fitted space, cut beyond

understanding— there will be no sound,

nothing escapes slabs joined in matrimony forever by gravity

And I cannot reverse the tide but only slow

the inevitable— going to failure grows you

and nothing else does— every overcoming is a down-going

Here, “to failure” references lifting weights, specifically taking a set to the point where you can’t lift anymore—what it takes to “grow you.” Robinson turns this intense but easily available activity into a meditation on eternal return and a means of connection with ancient forces. The space between the plates is as tight as the slabs that built the pyramids. Speaking of lifting weights and building the pyramids may be read as a celebration of “man’s” achievement, whereby the pyramids’ eternal matrimony of stone on stone is a monument resisting decay. However, Robinson is more about becoming; I therefore read the actual effect of this line as an attempt to demonstrate an active, ongoing synthesis of material weight, history, and language in the movement of becoming. Put another way, “nothing escapes slabs joined in matrimony forever by gravity” says that everything is becoming according to nature’s signal: mind, language, stone. “Lifting” that into the poetry with novelty, complexity, and style is no small accomplishment.

Introducing him to the crowd at a Boxx Press reading, Corey Qureshi described Robinson as a “visionary poet.” Man with Head Removed justifies that name with its attendant mix of mysticism,  impropriety, and philosophical searching. The work is also visionary in that it reveals something, a spiritual “vision” for poetry that is rare nowadays. It will be exciting to see how future volumes track that visionary quality in its “becoming.” In the meantime, we have the weight and variety of Man with Head Removed to deal with. 

Buy it here.