“Equipment for Living is funny and smart.”—Louis Menand, The New Yorker
Equipment for Living
On Poetry and Pop Music
Description
“Funny and smart” (The New Yorker) criticism of why we turn to art—specifically to poetry and popular music—and how it serves as an essential tool to understanding life.
How can art help us make sense—or nonsense—of the world? If wrong life cannot be lived rightly, as Theodor Adorno had it, what weapons and strategies for living wrongly can art provide? With the same intelligence that animates his poetry, Michael Robbins addresses this weighty question while contemplating the idea of how strange it is that we need art at all. Ranging from Prince to Def Leppard, Lucille Clifton to Frederick Seidel, Robbins’s mastery of poetry and popular music shines in Equipment for Living. He has a singular ability to illustrate points with seemingly disparate examples (Friedrich Kittler and Taylor Swift, to W.B. Yeats and Anna Kendrick’s “Cups”). Robbins weaves a discussion on poet Juliana Spahr with the different subsets of Scandinavian black metal music, illuminating subjects in ways that few scholars can achieve.
As Dwight Garner said in The New York Times about Robbins: “This man can write.” Equipment for Living is a “freakishly original” (Elle) look at how works of art, specifically poetry and popular music, can help us understand our own lives.
Reviews
"Ugh, there should be a law against being as smart as Michael Robbins. Here he is, interspersing these exhilarating micro-readings of modern poetry and pop music—which he treats, in a moving and 100% convincing way as a single tradition—with an overarching argument for the function of poetry! This book is itself “equipment for living,” not to mention “a sad and angry consolation.” It will depress you and uplift you and fill your head with music."—Elif Batuman, author of The Idiot and The Possessed
“Michael Robbins can deal up and down with Wallace Stevens and Taylor Swift, Gwendolyn Brooks and Def Leppard, Frederick Seidel and Prince. He has done all the reading about the form, function, and economy of art, but also done the feeling about the desire and need of it. Unashamed, he wants to rock. Won't you take a chance on him?”—Ben Ratliff, author of Every Song Ever and Coltrane
"This man can write."—Dwight Garner, The New York Times
