The Learn’d Astronomer
How long must we hymn the twinkling stars
before we admit they are no more distant
than the glow-in-the-dark stickers adorning
the ceiling of my first girlfriend’s boudoir?
Teenage planet swimming into my ken!
Even then, I was so skillful a lover
that when I said ‘Life is wasted on the living’,
the rivers ran for days with suicides.
Even then, I knew the stars to be empty cans.
There is the great Red Bull, watcher over
fevered gamers. To make me sixteen again –
I’d loose adders on the man who claimed such power.
No, you virgins, blessed in your ignorance,
for whom the night sky holds such romance,
the art of love is less mysterious than you suppose:
a plastic toy in a rubble of caramel corn.
These love poets couldn’t write their way
out of a bag of kitty litter. The genitals, the heart,
the burning fantastical heavens themselves –
just junk in a Safeway cart I’m pushing
down to the recycling center.
****
Some of the pleasure of reading work by the American poet Michael Robbins comes from hearing novelty strike familiar notes. Robert Lowell and Paul Muldoon are among the tutelary presences: hints of the New York School are mixed with the thrum of popular song, country and the Beatles included. The Learn’d Astronomer, like other Robbins poems, makes the present participate in a “learn’d” but direct conversation across cultures and periods through humour, intellectual range and the compression of its form.
The poem’s opening rhetorical question may implicate everyone, not only poets, in the romantic fallacy (“How long must we hymn the twinkling stars”). In a comic-relativist proposition that the stars “are no more distant/than the glow-in-the-dark stickers adorning/the ceiling of my first girlfriend’s boudoir”, the vagueness is a studied impudence against both the measurer of distance and the meditator on vastness. Distance, after all, can refer to time as well as space. Try turning the idea the other way round: imagine Robbins’s speaker had said that the glowing stickers of a girlfriend’s “boudoir” were no more distant than the stars. It would become a conventional, if hopefully understated, romantic plaint about lost love or youth.
Robbins is positioning “the twinkling stars” of the popular poetic imagination as no more than verbal cliche – but the original “learn’d astronomer” who, with his charts and maths, drove Walt Whitman out of the lecture room to commune directly with the starry, starry night, is clearly not this poem’s hero, either. The sceptical intelligence seems to see science as a contributor to the transcendental fallacy.
From the irony of “boudoir”, the poem skips over the stanza break to give us what might seem more heartfelt, the sighting of the “teenage planet”. This is the cue for the second subject of the sonata-like structure. Engagingly, Robbins complicates the critique by presenting his speaker as a crazily precocious teenager. The anaphora is insistent across the stanza break:
Even then, I was so skillful a lover
that when I said ‘Life is wasted on the living,’
the rivers ran for days with suicides.
Even then, I knew the stars to be empty cans.
An extended non-sequitur, apparently connecting an outbreak of mass suicide to the teenager’s brilliance as a lover and his quotation from Douglas Adams, may give the game away. The speaker is quarrelling with an earlier self.
Teenage self-aggrandisement is seen off in the third stanza: there’s no appetite for a reincarnation of the 16-year-old Red Bull-addicted gamer: “I’d loose adders on the man who claimed such power.” (Adders are snakes, of course, but perhaps the word alludes here to the arithmetical addition mentioned by Whitman.) A nihilist who exaggerates his nihilism risks losing credibility, risks the nihilism itself. But the poem pushes on with the project: after the demolition of the constellations there’s another cosmic shock in store for us regarding “the art of love”. Robbins is a precise writer: he means “plastic” in its several adjectival meanings in “plastic toy” (not only “made of plastic”, but malleable, and fake) and, in “caramel corn”, combines two meanings of “corn”. But note the oddity: it’s not love that’s buried in the sticky conglomeration, but “the art of love”. We might need to think about Ovid (and/or Neil Diamond?) as well as bad, fumbling sex before we move on. Rhyme, a subtle, flickering presence in parts of the poem, indicts intellectual clumsiness here in the judicious pairing of “ignorance” and “romance”.
The address to “you virgins” echoes the old carpe diem motif but strongly implies that there is no day worth plucking. The last stanza is played at first for comedy: it’s great fun to imagine love poets who “couldn’t write their way out of a bag of kitty litter” (an image that might relate distantly to that of the plastic toy in the tub of popcorn). The verse grows unruly and acquires an extra line, as if to accommodate all the “junk”. That bodies and stars are one substance provides the reverse of consolation. The final lines perhaps equate the Safeway trolley with the poem, and the creation of the poem with acts of wheeling and recycling. In this case, “I’m pushing” becomes a performative statement. It reminds us that we humans manipulate our material, whether it’s poems and stars. They can, at least temporarily, become what the writer wants them to be, his comfort, his joke, his terror.
- Michael Robbins is the author of two collections, Alien vs Predator and The Second Sex. The Learn’d Astronomer appears in Penguin Modern Poets #2, published on 27 October, priced £8.99. It will be available from the Guardian bookshop for £7.37.