I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: ATOMS FOR PEACE-“What the Eyeballs Did” (2013)

This is a secret track that you can download from the Atoms for Peace website (well some people can, I don’t seem to be able to) or you can listen to it on NPR.

Atoms for Peace is Thom York’s band (with Flea from RHCP on bass). This song sounds a lot like Radiohead.  So much so that it could easily be a Radiohead song (one of those newer more electronic ones).  The bass is cool and while Flea does a great job playing it, it sees like it should be a little dull for him to play a rather repetitive bit over and over.

And yet the song works very well in the electronic, claustrophobic way that Yorke has.

I love just about anything that Yorke and Co do, and I like this as well, it just doesn’t seem all that much different–why not use Flea for all of his manic intensity?

[READ: April 1, 2013] Fragile Acts

After yesterday’s poetry book, I wasn’t quite prepared for this one.  Zubair Ahmed is a young writer (a wunderkind as he is described).  Allan Peterson is a much older writer.  He is retired and has clearly had a lot more experiences from which to draw.  I also found his poems to be much more profound and lyrical, much more beautiful and evocative.

Yes, it could be because his poems are longer (that’s a terrible quality to judge a poem by, and it’s certainly not always true, but those shorty ones do tend to lack a bit of substance).  Of course, the poems that were really long (he had three that were multi-part and multi-page) didn’t hold together all that well for me.  So length doesn’t have much to do with it.

Many of these poems were amazing and they really reminded me of what good poetry can do.  Poetry that is not just a sentence with line breaks, poetry that doesn’t call out to be read in a sing-song voice.  To the point: poetry that sings on its own.

Peterson uses imagery of plants and animals beautifully and unexpectedly like in “Needless”: “But today a Spanish Dancer nudibranch and angels appeared in the newspaper.”

There’s some other examples of great lines:

• “A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound and nothing can be learned by more analysis”
• “Blue jays visit the dog chow because they are big enough then drink and the reflecting face changes to glitter stew”
• “That Ruth means compassion and ruthless is without and brutal as we expected”

The premise of “Eight Presidents” is that the presidential terms are used as a measure of time–what a great idea.

And I love all of the ideas in “Frequent Flyer” a poem I could quote here almost in its entirety.

Peterson also has a great way with words–not forced puns, but genuinely interesting takes on words like the final line of “No Wonder” “It’s no wonder one could be confused/whether the quavers were music or fear”

So what is it about these poems that I like so much?  They are not about an incident or a scene–they evoke a memory or an image or ideas–and even when I can’t appreciate them exactly I can feel what they are doing.  And for me that’s when a poem really works.