ANGELFLIES IN MY IDIOTSOUP

By Christopher Robin

Platonic 3 Way Press, 2007,27 pages

www.platonic3waypress.com

It takes real courage and not mere chutzpah to publish one’s musings under the name of Christopher Robin.  Not only does one risk incurring the collective wrath of the A.E. Milne fan club, but also a few generations worth of literary and identity escapists raising their eyebrows and blurting out “who the fuck does this poet think he is?”

While he may be better known as the publisher of Zen Baby (the Maximum Rock & Roll of the indie press) Chris Robin is a great minimalist storyteller in his own right, whose poems serve as a mirror to those types of critics, asking them in turn, “just who the fuck do you think you are?”

                   A drunk who thought I wasn’t homeless enough

                   heckled me in the middle of my set

                   He’d read the interview

                   he wanted blood…

                   I haven’t carried a bedroll in years

                   He claimed Bukowski lost his talent

                   when he got off the park bench

                   so I yelled into the Mic:

                   “What do you want me to do, vomit?

                   You want me to die?

                   I live in a low-income housing project

                   I’m quite comfortable

                   I hope to get out someday

                   if I get well’

                   rattled and nervous

                   I read Wide Open Fool,

                   the angriest I have ever read it

                   said “Buy my shit,” and sat down

                   It felt like a bomb

                   I wasn’t getting the laughs I’m used to,

                   They didn’t want my levity

-      From “Heckled in Las Vegas (The Idiot Prevails)

Robin channels a lot of his friend William Taylor Jr., but with a kind of Denis Johnson (think Jesus Son era D.J.) runaway street kid ethos worked into the plain spoken lines.  In particular, he captures the wide prism that is the Tenderknob (Anti 3 a.m. Poem, Fool at The Old Hotel.) Distinguishing his work from Taylor’s however, is a lot less Romance (of the tragic, doomed variety) and a great deal more morbidity shot through with downright hilarious barbs:

                   Nicole hands me a stack of her school papers to grade

                   as if I have nothing to do

                   I notice the kids are cynical or completely lacking in imagination

                   Do they copy this stuff off the internet? I ask

                   She nods and heads upstairs

                   After ten hours of staring into space and obsessing about why the

                   cast of Full House

                   were never massacred in a hail of gunfire

                   she returns

                   at 6 am

                   asking eagerly “did anything HAPPEN?” uh no, I tell her

                   unless you include me wondering if I let that crazy looking guy in

                   after visiting hours

                   would he talk to me?

                   But I don’t tell the last part

-      From “Anti 3 a.m. Poem”(w/apologies to WTJ)

The poems here are also a reflection of the larger purpose of Zen Baby, which is not so much to glorify the small, indie press or its participants, but to serve as a way to connect misfits and outsiders to one another, to find the potential in continuing to fly one’s freak flag so to speak, without having to sell out or give in to Dr. Phil and his all to ready acolytes.

Make no mistake, there is a LOT of death, violence and madness to be found in the pages of Angelflies (Coward, Love’s Dead Road, and Who We Kill being good examples) but these serve to create a fertile base for rebuilding redemption within one’s own life, and in doing so, Christopher Robin, with much savvy, displays one of the real purposes of literature outside the commodities market.

                   She carries a small bird between her breasts

                   The news told her that an asteroid would hit the earth

                   in exactly 22 years

                   She doesn’t plan to be alive that long

                   One day it is culture and marriage she craves-

                   safety

                   Another day it’s abortion

                   going to Police Academy

                   or dancing with the Reggae boys

                   in a nice house in the suburbs

                   When she asked me to critique her story,

                   I did-

                   When I saw her at the reading, she said:

                   I won a car with that story-

                   I didn’t know what to say-

                   Stupid white boy-

                   We made her the bouncer

                   of the Open Mic

                   Tells me childhood stories of hitch hiking

                   up and down Highway 9

                   All of them riding in separate cars-

                   She had a big family

                   Over to the church of “stupid white men” for food

                   Every year her father stole the neighbor’s Xmas tree…

                   Once she told me not to steal her stories-

                   they were hers and only hers

                   but I’m a stupid white boy

                   and I have no history

                   All we have is Border’s

                   And Starbucks-

                   Are any of our buildings over 100 years old?

                   Most of us don’t know how to dance at Reggae parties

                   And you know Bea, all white men are thieves

-      “Thief”

• • -Paul Corman-Roberts