"The Life of a Hunter"

One poem begins with someone discussing how to make cocaine in a bathtub and ends with Shakespeare.

In “The Life of a Hunter,” her first poetry collection, M. Michelle Robinson ’01 juxtaposes detective novel slang and modern art, literary references and questions inspired by computer science.

Robinson, also a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, is now working towards her Ph.D. in American studies at Boston University. But many of the poems in her book were written in the Harvard creative writing classes Robinson took as a graduate and undergraduate. Boylston Professor of Oratory and Rhetoric Jorie Graham was one of Robinson’s teachers, and Graham, who won the 1996 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, helped Robinson begin to organize her poetry into book form.

“I don’t think I write biographical poems at all…the poems are [about] characters, not me,” Robinson says. She adds “I don’t write poetry to write about my life, but it ends up there anyway,” and Harvard readers will recognize references to English Professor Leo Damrosch and the T subway.

Her poetic voice is compelling enough to bind these disparate elements together, but their union is sometimes mysterious: despite their confident language and intriguing contents, some of the poems are opaque and difficult to understand.

The title poem, “The Life of a Hunter,” is inspired not by the film “The Night of the Hunter,” but by a kitschy Currier and Ives print of the same name, Robinson says. The poem contrasts the humorous Adirondack event the print depicts (a bear sitting on a hunter’s rifle) with the psychoanalysis of the hunter once he returns to the city.

Robinson says that this poem, like many of hers, is about art. But on my own I could not have been confident in that conclusion: I am unsure of how to connect the hunter’s “dreams of Lichenstein” with the psychiatrist’s desire to “seek other places to hide.”

Nonetheless, the wittiness of lines like “Gelman blundered his way / into your heart. You found him irredeemably / wealthy. You were both post minimalist,” is enjoyable in or out of context.

Other poems are more approachable. “Keith,” the bathtub-cocaine-and-Shakespeare poem, succeeds through sheer force of whimsy. It’s hard not to like a poem that ends with the lines “who did you sleep with last night I say this guy named / Shakespeare.”

Robinson explains that she wrote this poem while taking a computer science class that explored the question “How do you name things?” Robinson approaches this theme from different directions: with a quote from a “Henry IV” scene about identity, a reference to a book called “The Snarkout Boys and the Avocado of Death,” and the technical language, “Nick was the name Nick gave when the name Nick / gave was a variable assignment for Nick.”

The diversity of reference is matched by a delightful variety of diction. The poem’s narrator babbles out initial exposition in a long stanza, then pauses, takes a breath, and recaps in a single line: “There is a note in my pocket.”

In this and other poems, Robinson’s syntax is the best part of her style. The pacing of her language is exquisite. Lines that are formal and decorously slow contrast with punctuation-less lines that rush into one another.

Robinson can sustain the tension of a phrase over several lines, even through self-interruption. In “From this miserable mutineer a stutter, / for when we are reading Dostoevsky in caves,” the narrator starts to grandly exclaim “My—” but breaks it with a wistful aside “(Has it been a hoax? The man on Belton Street selling poetry…)” before concluding, with a subtly shifted emphasis, “My fellows!” The phrasing is both interestingly complex and fraught with emotion.

Admiring Robinson’s power of technique, however, does not guarantee understanding her significance. Some of her poems are narratives, but many are made up of quotes, observations, anecdotes, snatches of speech.

“Everything I say is a trembling non sequitur,” Robinson writes in “Pepper,” and this is an accurate description of her style. Discerning the theme that unites her non sequiturs, however, can be difficult.