I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SIGUR RÓS-“Brennisteinn” (2013).

What is that sound?  Low end electronic…noise?  Coming from a Sigur Rós song?  Typically you get a band in the ether, but here’s the band with loud pounding drums and almost glitchy music.  Of course, Jonsi’s voice tells you you’ve got Sigur Rós.  And yet, he’s not singing in his otherworldly falsetto–it seems like an almost human voice.

There’s a very distinctive chorus which is actually catchy in an almost poppy way.  And then, after four minutes, the Sigur Rós of old comes in–Jonsi’s voice soars, and the music reaches for the heavens (but with drums and some crazy sound effects) added in.

And then it grows haunting as the song slows down and distant horns come swelling in, keeping that soundtrack feel that the band does so well.  The video is creepy/cool interspersed with the band playing live.  I love watching them make the sounds they make (there’s a bowed guitar at some point).  I really like this a lot, and can’t wait for the rest of the album.

[READ: March 30, 2013] City of Rivers

I have said before that I don’t really like poetry.  It makes me feel stupid.  This is mostly because I have taken poetry classes and I know what good poetry should be, and yet I see so much poetry published which I think is not very good.  And yet, if it has been published, doesn’t that mean it’s good?  Have I missed something?

I’m not a total old school poetry boor, I don’t need my poetry to be in iambic pentameter, nor does it even need to rhyme, and yet sometimes a lot of contemporary poetry seems like a sentence, not really a poem.  I also suspect that the ascendance of flash fiction has made the ascendance of this flash poetry acceptable too.  Don’t get me wrong, I know a haiku is short as well, but there are lots of constrictions to haiku, whereas some free verse short poems really lack in the substance department.

I am also nonobjective about poetry because of all of the poetry slams that I have witnessed in college and since, in which basically anything is  poem if you e-nun-ci-ate it interestingly (something I doubt Keats was doing).

In an attempt to appreciate new poetry more, I decided to get a few books from the McSweeney’s poetry series.

I’m starting with Zubair Ahmed’s City of Rivers, which came in the mail a few days ago.  This is the description of the book from the web site (and I know you can never trust a publisher’s description, but…).  “Grounded in his childhood in Bangladesh, Ahmed’s spare, evocative poems cast a knowing eye on the wider world, telling us what it’s like to be displaced and replaced, relocated and dislocated. His poems are suffused with a graceful, mysterious pathos—and also with joy, humor, and longing—with the full range of human emotions.”

Now, I didn’t actually read that blurb until after reading the book and so maybe that would have helped me somewhat.  Although really, where the specifics of his poems are concerned, not knowing anything about Bangladesh shouldn’t make a difference.

For me the problem with some of these poems is that they are not terribly evocative.  They are interesting in that they reference another place, but they don’t feel like powerful statements.  They feel like observations with line breaks.

It’s not that I didn’t like the poetry, because I thought some of it was great, especially the longer pieces.  There were some interesting ideas and images in the longer poems.  I really liked “Measuring the Strength of a Sparrow’s Thigh” especially, “When I was young/My brother became a mountain, always closer/To the sky than me,/Always large in the distance.”  I also liked this from “Shaving”: “I cut myself while shaving/And see my grandfather in the blood.”

But some of the shorter ones are so elliptical as to be more ideas than poems.  “Catacombs” seems like the introduction to a really interesting poem, but at six lines it feels utterly unfinished.  And “We’re Almost There” doesn’t feel like a poem to me:

I’m sitting beside a sleeping man and a dead man
On this bus heading north.

Outside I see the disappearing forests of Bangladesh
And the gray fingers of my father.

The seats smell like black snow.

It just feels like a snapshot of an idea.  Like “The Gift” which in its entirety reads:

Eighteen years ago I gave you what I thought was a piece of diamond.
Why did you give it back to me in your will?

I just can’t buy that as a poem.

I’m confused by a poem like “Rayarbazaar” because while I think of poems as metaphor, a final line like “I drink from a bucket of dead mosquitoes” could be literal, especially given the rest of the poem.  If it’s literal then it becomes more of a snapshot.  If it’s metaphorical, it’s a great image.

But again, the longer poems have some great phrases.  Like “To a Friend” which starts “I am zero point nine-zeroes six six gigainches tall/According to the equation we derived as children,” and ends with “I wish you had eaten the food I cooked/On top of Mount Everest using a stove with striking similarities/To the mud stoves we made as children.”

Overall I liked this collection more than I didn’t like it.  I may have burnt myself out by reading it all in a short time frame–there were a lot of samey images.  Although I found when looking through it again now that the random pieces I looked at packed more of a punch when read alone.

Maybe that’s the secret
Of poetry.