I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: THE KNIFE-“Heartbeats” (2002).

I learned of this song from the José González cover that was featured in the (very cool) Sony video with the bouncing balls.  The song turned me on to González, but not necessarily the song itself.  I knew The Knife did the original  and I remember when I first heard it, I didn’t like it nearly as much as the González version.

It’s been a few years and there’s a new The Knife album out and in the New Yorker review of it Sasha Frere-Jones mentioned this song again.  So I wanted to listen to it without the cover so prominent.  And indeed, the González cover is quite straightforward (acoustic guitar rather than mega synth, but otherwise pretty spot on). The Knife’s version is very retro synth-sounding .  It reminds me of a wacky 80s song.  Or perhaps a 2000’s Europop song.

The vocals are high-pitched and a wee bit over the top, but all in all it’s very catchy.  Frere-Jones said that The Knife version was very popular but evidently I didn’t travel in those circles because I don’t recognize it as being huge.

And I still like José’s version better.

I know it’s not really cool to show the video of the cover version when I’m talking about the original, and it’s really not that cool to use a commercial as a video, but it is still very fun to watch.

[READ: April 30, 2013] Burn This House

For the last day of April, the last day of poetry month, I read a new book of poetry that came across my desk today.  This is Kelly Davio’s first collection.  She is an MFA and quite an accomplished poet (managing editor and Pushcart nominee).  I also thought that I would see if she was a “modern, weird” poet or a more traditional one (I secretly hoped for more traditional as I’d burnt out on wacky ones).  For the most part she is more traditional and I liked most of her poems quite a lot.

The book was divided into five sections.  And I have to admit that the final few sections contained poems which seems a little forced to me (more on that later).  For it was in the early pages that I thought the poetry was most magnificent.

Although when I first started reading I was afraid that the poetry was going to be ponderous without enough concrete detail.  Like in “auguries” which showed a series of potential omens (Davio seems to have a thing with birds crashing into windows) which were effective, but I didn’t like the ending: “To what /significance such eroded things?” It seemed too vague to be powerful.

But the poems that came right after were just wonderful with detail like in “The First Lines” which had this description of a scarecrow:

Flannel shirt, mud-smeared gloves,
a pair of boots worn out by some farmer’s toes:
tattered standards of a child’s spook.  But the head’s
been eaten by club moss, a fern’s hooked fingers
unrolling from divot eyes.

And it was “The Way I Remember” which I thought was one of the best poems I’ve read this month.  It was a simple premise–misremembering something that happened in her childhood, but it was exquisitely written and wonderfully detailed.  I liked that each of the verses was three lines (something which Davio does a lot–she is a master of the powerful line break).  I would rather quote this one in its entirety than excerpt it, it is so good (but you’ll have to find it yourself).

Davio opens section two with a four-part poem (I don’t typically care for multipart poems), this one was pretty good, since at least two sections related to each other.  But it was the “I Come to You, Thirty-Six Hours by Train” that I found more powerful, the way this wonderful evocative poem showcased a trip by train, the people you encounter, the manners (or lack thereof)

near the Oregon border, Shorty won’t look at me,
slams his Samsonite against my knee,

leaves me with a dark–fisted bruise.

and I loved the way it ends:

I run hands through my own hair, tug
at knots.  You’re still five hours north.  I turn back,
careful not to brush knees with the man beside me.

And while I enjoyed the story in “Chanter and Drone” (a guy playing bagpipes in the neighborhood) I enjoyed more the power of “Maybe I am Gold” in which the narrator is teaching a student English.  He likes the word “exhibit.”

lifting his chin
to earlobe-level, he says maybe I am gold,

I can exhibit my body.  Giggling he stands,
limbs perpendicular, imagining himself as museum
display.  I suggest to him he’s misthought,
but the corner of my lip twists.

I mentioned earlier that i loved her line breaks.  They are magical in “Burned By Salt” a poem that I didn’t love but whose verse breaks blew me away:

the fig trees lining every road
worried me.  With paper bags

of pollen wasps stapled
to their trunks, these gnarled,
squat chessmen looked ready

to strike after long thought,
to sting the tires in their dust paths.
I feared a curved limb

might fly out, smack the car
across the windshield the way
my mother’s arm hit my chest

when she braked for a red
too quickly.  She always asked
if I was all right, swore it was

a mother’s instinct

I didn’t really like the fourth and fifth sections Sin and Virtue.  With poems titled “Sorrow,” “Anger,” “Envy,” Gluttony” and “Charity,”Humility” “Patience” “Industry” they seemed a little too literal for my tastes.  Although I did enjoy Sin’s “Greed” which was about buying boots–the last pair was “the price the sum/of my other pairs’ combined.”

But even in the poems I didn’t like, the details and images that Davio wrote were really beautiful and evocative.  She has a really gift at description and her poetry, when more concrete, is really effective and enjoyable.

For ease of searching, I include: Jose Gonzalez