“Approaching poetry as something essential to our survival”: an interview with Sous Les Pavés editor Micah Robbins.

Started in 2010 by poet Micah Robbins, Sous Les Pavés is a bi-monthly zine centered around the poetry world.

A zine, as in print zine, a copied one. The kind with two-sided paper and a staple on the top-left corner. For some reason, it started appearing in my mailbox—I don’t know how that happened, but after I read the first issue, I was glad, even felt cool, to be included in the distribution list. With a refreshingly diverse list of contributors, a retro layout like a punk or fanclub zine from the 80s, Sous Les Pavés is a dim sum meal of what’s going on in politically engaged and experiment-minded American poetry: poems, dialogues, manifestos, oddities.

I wanted to find out more about Sous Les Pavés and the person behind it, Micah Robbins. The following interview comes from emails back and forth over the course of a couple of weeks—I was mostly in my attic office in Delmar, New York, just south of Albany, usually having a “dance party” with two daughters in the early evenings, and Micah Robbins in the “dining room/office” in his home in Dallas, Texas (“don’t believe what they tell you; it’s exactly like the television show”), where he splits time between parenting two young sons, “researching/writing and teaching,” and taking care of a 16-year-old Lhasa Apso named Chino.

As a prose-writing expat from Poetryland, I remain curious about poetry communities, both intentional and ad hoc varieties, and so Robbins’ candor about this subject in particular was refreshing and even surprising. Our first question and answer here, for instance, in which Micah’s feared his answer was too long–I thought it was generous and sincere, and gave me the permission, at least in my head, try to raise the level of my game and engage him more.

If you haven’t been getting copies of Sous Les Pavés in your mailbox, don’t feel left out. Editor Micah Robbins puts up PDFs on their website.

The first question would be: how did you get started doing Sous Les Pavés? Were there specific publications or other inspirations?

When I first began Sous Les Pavés, I imagined it as belonging to the rather diverse tradition of The Floating Bear, Fuck You/ A Magazine of the Arts, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, Rolling Stock, The Realist, The Digger Papers, Internationale Situationniste, The Black Panther Intercommunal News Service, Profane Existence and any number of lo-fi punk zines and community papers. In fact, I included this list in the first issue’s front matter and it’s still posted on the Sous Les Pavés website. I now think, however, that I should revise the list, removing one or two of these titles and replacing them with Klactoveedsedsteen, Damn the Caesars, Hot Gun! and maybe one or two additional publications of the last fifty or so years that have an internationalist sensibility.

But for me what’s more important than any particular title is a general modus operandi: I’ve always been most interested in those publications that cultivate an active sense of community between the editors, the contributors, and whatever interested readership may be available to them, and—in the most effective examples—allow the barriers between these various groups to erode and collapse.

As a teenager and young 20-something in the 90s, before I became meaningfully aware of poetry, I travelled in loose-knit punk circles within the Atlantic City / Philadelphia / New York triangle, and I recall that particular milieu being populated not only by bands and fans-of-bands, but also by writers and readers of zines.  For me, at the time, the music came first, but I’m aware in retrospect of the work these zines did toward keeping the various punk enclaves in the tri-state area connected in a deeply experienced, multi-faceted scene that was occurring all over the place all of the time. So while I was more-than-likely going crazy at a hardcore punk show somewhere in South Jersey, I was always aware of the various other punk scenes—whether they be old school, pop-punk, ska, experimental post-punk, or whatever—that existed throughout the region, and this awareness helped me feel both a sense of belonging to and obligation toward what it was we thought we were doing.

It’s also worth mentioning that most of these zines had a diverse focus: they were great resources for staying in the loop re. shows, records, new bands, etc., but they also placed the punk music scene within a larger context of lifestyle, radical politics, street art, collage and comix, tattooing, fashion, and even—I’m sure—poetry, though I don’t recall paying much attention to whatever poetry may have been there.  This sort of contextualizing is sadly absent from most literary magazines with which I’m familiar, and I partially attribute these magazines’ blandness to the narrowness with which their editors approach poetry.  I suspect that so long as the most pressing issues in poetry remain matters of genre and technique, poetry will continue to stew in the malaise of the current academic situation.

So I imagined Sous Les Pavés as a platform within which poetry would be presented side-by-side with essays/statements written by poets, novelists, and artists (but by no means restricted to this set) about matters that may not be directly related to poetry, narrative, or art (though they often are).  My hope has been that such an arrangement will allow us to see some of the underlying contradictions in our respective cliques and encourage poets to think beyond their doctrinaire aesthetic arrogance and ongoing (poetry) schoolyard scuffles.  I think an essay like Brooks Johnson’s “I Dreamed That I Was Dreaming”—which appeared in Sous Les Pavés no. 4 and attempts to understand the self-immolation of the experimental musician and activist Malachi Ritscher in a fatal act of protest against American Imperial policy—does much to wrest the remainder of the issue’s contents away from the interests of various poetry circles while simultaneously placing them in the context of the problematic and downright frightening circumstances that each of us are forced to confront upon waking up each day.

But I digress! And at length as well!! So let me try to wrap up my answer by saying that I sense a need in the poetry world for a publication that does more than present the latest poetry from within a particular aesthetic community to an insular group of people who have already been initiated into that community.  I also sense a need for a publication that can counterbalance the hypo-schizo geography of the blogosphere where various poetry interests grandstand and congratulate themselves while providing a venue for instantaneous and often regrettable ad hominem attacks within their comment streams. And so I began to imagine a publication that, while maintaining a wide distribution and a democratic spirit (and by ‘democratic’ I mean openly hostile toward institutional systems of control, including the various repressive stages of initiation that our overly-professionalized poetry celebrates), would cultivate a sense of thoughtfulness and care at the same time that it unblinkingly explored and/or confronted a range of issues that its contributors found interesting, provocative, or simply intolerable.

Whew! And to think some of this began in my ancestral homeland of South Jersey. 

This idea of poetic community, or communities, is interesting when it works, but all too often leads to some tragedy of the commons-type situation, where all, as you say, “hypo-schizo” grandstanding not only is the norm, but must be tolerated in some sort of endurance test. There are some dialogues that bring me back to the online, or at least non-zine, aspects of Poetryland. A case in point would be the Peter Davis/Kent Johnson dialogue, in which Kent is asking about Peter’s Poetry! Poetry! Poetry! I read it all the way through, don’t get me wrong, but I also thought how inside baseball it seemed to be getting. Is that a concern for you, since it seems part of your goals is to be a sort of corrective to that?

In a word: no.

I’m not concerned about that particular dialogue—or any dialogue, for that matter, so long as it’s carried out in an open and frank manner—because the conversation between Kent and Peter serves to illustrate just how seductive the increasingly predominant ‘inside baseball’ aspect of poetry has become. Or rather, to be more precise, Kent is taking Peter to task for playing ‘inside baseball.’ I mean, the whole Best American Poetry racket is a gross example of congratulatory practice at its worst. I think both Kent and Peter are aware of this, but whereas Kent sees it as a problematic aspect of contemporary poetry that desperately needs to be highlighted and resisted in order to restore the vitality of the art, Peter doesn’t seem to see an alternative path to artistic fulfillment outside of these sorts of institutional programs. I don’t say this to disparage Peter; striving for incorporation into the officially sanctioned body of poetry has become one of the defining characteristics of contemporary poetry. Peter Davis is no more guilty than the vast majority of US poets (and I want to be careful not to exclude myself, Kent Johnson, or any other contributor to Sous Les Pavés) just because he’s gotten a bit of institutional recognition.

But unless I’m misunderstanding your question, when you mention ‘inside baseball’ you’re referring to an instance of Sous Les Pavés dealing strictly with a close-quartered poetry concern rather than the role of poetry in our larger socio-economic realities. Hmmm. Fair enough. But again, I’m not exactly concerned because institutional forces like Best American Poetry are not entirely divorced from our sad socio-economic/political situation. They actively contribute to the very exclusivity that is death for a politically efficacious poetry, and the void that this creates is detrimental not only for the arts, but also for a conscientious culture in general. Kent is acting politically when he criticizes a poet he clearly admires for so eagerly nuzzling up to institutional powers like Best American Poetry, and I’m happy to provide a venue for such critiques (I’m also happy to provide a venue for their defense). My hope is that this dialogue will encourage poets—especially younger poets just beginning to explore the publishing side of poetry—to think critically about those publications that are propped up by institutional interests as some sort of holy grail of official arrival. I mean, where are the other publications that openly criticize Best American Poetry and its many creepy cousins? Where are the other sites of insurgency against what has become an utterly safe, academically-sheltered bourgeois poetry scene?

That being said, I suppose my only regret re: the conversation between Kent and Peter is that it didn’t provoke a spat of letters for our correspondence section. I would have been very interested to hear (and print) third-party thoughts on Kent’s and Peter’s respective positions.

You answer, to me, sums up a lot of the concern about the so-called institutionalization of American poetry, and I guess the only thing I would add, as kind of skeptical counterweight, is that the counter-movements also turn into a kind of institution, or they become co-opted and institutions in and of themselves. That being said, I appeared in a Best American Poetry once, and there was that feeling that I had somehow made it to some Institutional Big Table, at least for a couple months. That feeling soon went away, not through disillusionment really. Perhaps it was just that no one came knocking on my door to hand me my smoking jacket and pipe, like I expected. Moving on.

Kaya Oakes has a chapter in her book Slanted and Enchanted that talks about how so many aspects of indie culture draw its inspiration and methods of distribution, from the poetry movements of the mid-twentieth century. I find that an interesting idea, and think Sous Les Pavés enacts a lot of that project. One question I have is a more aesthetic one: to what degree do you think making a xeroxed zine and mailing it out to recipients is nostalgic? What I mean is, what the zines of yore accomplished, like you said, were to keep people in the know about upcoming shows, notices for people starting bands, and generally spreading ideas. Sous Les Pavés seems to accomplish something different.

My decision to Xerox, staple, and mail Sous Les Pavés has nothing to do with nostalgia. Unlike—say—retro clothing, which is all about a carefully-cultivated posturing and appearance, the physical makeup of Sous Les Pavés is functional; there is a great practicality in a Xeroxed zine. Not only does it have the immediate effect of paper in hand that demands some sort of sustained attention, it is also relatively cheap to produce and distribute. Virtually all other print modes, including print-on-demand, would require that I sell Sous Les Pavés, and I’m certain that that would diminish our distribution by hundreds of readers. I’m having a hard enough time, with the exception of a small set of generous people, of getting people to donate anything to the effort, and I doubt that even a quarter of the people who read Sous Les Pavés would subscribe if I shifted to book format and slapped a $10 price tag on the cover.

The other thing to consider about a Xeroxed mag is that the ‘nostalgic’ format allows for a powerfully decentralized distribution. I receive emails on a weekly basis from people who have been given a copy of Sous Les Pavés by one of their friends and now want to join the permanent mailing list. People are passing these around, and they’re reproducing them on their own. I’ve had numerous readers tell me that they’ve made a stack of copies to pass out at various readings, events, classes, and even experimental music performances. I’m hard pressed to think of another print format that allows for this sort of wild-fire distribution.

These are, of course, the same reasons people used mimeograph machines back in the mid-twentieth century and then, later, photocopiers in the seventies and eighties. And if you take the time to thumb through your collection of chapbooks, you’ll notice that virtually all of them are Xeroxed pages wrapped in a fancy cover. So the technology worked for earlier generations and it continues to work now. Until something better comes along, I’m comfortable sticking with the sorts of proven methods that are friendly to underground publications.

But you’ve piqued my curiosity! What is it, exactly, that you see Sous Les Pavés accomplishing?

It’s accomplishing a lot of different things. I love getting physical mail, and love how SLP comes in an envelope, obviously overstuffed by a human being. There’s an aura in that kind of packaging. I think it also, for me, slows down the reception of the content that’s there. Reading issues of Sous Les Pavés, I take time with actual paper, like the zines I used to read! And if “nostalgia” isn’t the right word, perhaps “reminder” might work better: I listen to 8-tracks and LPs now as much as mp3 files, in part because I find I need to be reminded to cede control of how I experience music to something less manipulate-able. If that makes sense.

And that Johnson/Davis dialogue, and so many others, is content that I never see in mainstream-y lit-blogs or journals. I do like the inside baseball-edness, I guess is what I am saying in part before.

Is it a concern to what degree the poets in the communities– Sous Les Pavés’, others–need to be politically engaged per se, liberal or progressive? This is an age-old question, but since you mentioned going to punk shows in Jersey and Philly, and I just saw and read American Hardcore lately, it struck me how apolitical the hardcore punks were. They might have been, I don’t know, orthodox? Confrontational? Nihilistic? Granted, we’re talking about Reagan’s second term here, and everything seemed totally fucked. But still.

I am concerned about political engagement within the various communities of poets, though I couldn’t care less about liberals and progressives. I’m much more interested in a radical left—Marxist or Anarchist—and how a far-left political commitment can interact with our commitment to poetry. The two are not mutually exclusive, and we would do well to stop playing around and get on to the real work of approaching poetry as something essential to our survival.

I will say that the hardcore punk scene was exponentially more political than contemporary US poetry, which strikes me as almost unbearably tepid. Some of those punk kids had real commitments to environmentalism, veganism, anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, etc., and they didn’t just wear these commitments as a series of obligatory tokens of belonging viz. so many nice middle-class MFA instructors. I recall these political and lifestyle commitments becoming immediate aspects of these kids’ day-to-day lives, and many of them approached what they perceived as immanent social problems with a militancy that is nowhere to be found in the US poetry community.

But I really don’t want to be an apologist for the punk scene despite the fact that I referenced zines as an inspiration for Sous Les Pavés. What I do want to be, however, is an advocate for a more serious, immediate, and vital role for poetry in our socio-political lives. I think we’ve lost our way in this respect, and the only way forward is to re-imagine the relationship between a meaningful radicalism and artistic expression.

I do recall (old man voice) back in my day, punks and people in bands having a kind of moral clarity I didn’t and don’t have now, that was at once inspirational and frightening. It wasn’t until I found fellow travelers in the writing world that I felt I could find out the best way to commit to being an artist, and often it was by example in how they lead their lives on a day to day basis. As someone who teaches at a college, and loves that kind of work, the only caution I would make is how academia and the world of MFA is often conflated or interchanged. I teach future grade school teachers, and I would like think a lot of what I am teaching them somehow translates to how they will introduce ideas about language and outward-thinking to the kids they will in turn teach. 

I’d love you to expand on this idea of blandness in editors’ approach to poetry. My latest shibboleth—I’d like to run it up the pole here for you and see what you think, and I am sure I am wrong, because I usually am and I’m, like old now—is that we have reached a period of late style, where the already bankrupt aesthetic battles of yore—lyric versus narrative, Ron Silliman’s Post-Avant versus School of Quietude, subjective versus written-for-the-ages—have all been decided on. We’re all to be lyric, subjective, post-avant poets now, and that’s that. Baudelaire used the term “Rococo Romanticism,” and I think American Poetry has entered its Big Hair Phase.

I find this both depressing and hilarious! And I don’t disagree with your assessment. I’m imagining Charles Bernstein, Kenny Goldsmith, Christian Bök, and Ron Silliman in leopard print spandex and frilly boas dancing around to “Rock You Like A Hurricane”! Ahhhhh. No! Someone make them stop!

OK. So what do we do about it?

I can’t pretend to have a simple answer, but I can say that I don’t think US poetry ever enters any stage without the calculated and concerted efforts of various individuals with very specific interests in mind. The 21st century scene seems to be dictated from above by a rather small group of poets with institutional (i.e., financial) connections that are constantly protected by a weirdly bureaucratic fiat (i.e., MFA dogma). The result is that contemporary US poetry has become, perhaps more than ever, part of the ideological state apparatus. It’s really no surprise that the gross capitulation to those approaches that you identify as having been ‘decided on’ has quite literally sucked the vitality out of contemporary poetry. It has also contributed to a proliferation of journals that fall neatly in line with the status quo. And this—the disturbing obedience of editors to what’s been ‘decided on’—is not only bland, but it’s frightening in its conservatism.

So what choice are we left with? We can get in line and smile the mealy-mouthed grin of capitulation, or we can identify our enemies and tear down their houses!

All I can say is: Sheeeeeeeeit. You’re feeding into my Poetryland conspiracy theories now, and I think I like it, or feel somehow less alone hearing it from someone who has attempted to connect more dots than I would even think of connecting. I don’t want to leave the answer to me, but I do think you raise the important questions, ones you attempt to answer in Sous Les Pavés. Mr. Micah Robbins, thank you for your time.

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