Michael Robbins really hates living in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. The poet, whose book Alien vs. Predator was recently released by Penguin, is teaching there until June, and then he’s getting out of dodge. “Hattiesburg smells like a sewer,” he emphatically told me in the middle of our conversation. “You can go online and Google the Hattiesburg smell, it’s an actual thing. I think they actually have wooden water wheels to aerate the sewage. There’s just way too much sewage to properly aerate everything.” Robbins needs to be in a bigger city, and reading his poems it’s easy to see why. His work is energetic and irreverent, giving equal space to Rilke and Buju Banton in the same poem. Even though each line is heavy with allusions, a few of which he admits will be lost on almost everyone who reads him, the tone of Robbins’ work is actually at odds with obscurantism. There are references and jokes and meaning in there for everyone, from a casual hip hop fan to the student of 20th century poetry to the fastidious obsessives who have memorized every word of Dylan pre-Desire. We talked about TV, boring rap, Occupy, and countless other topics, always returning to the contradictions in what we like and why.

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