Peter Davis, Band Names & Other Poems

What Matters

The man was singing to the children

but the children weren’t listening

“Because,” they said, “we are wearing

wet blankets and beyond the ability

to matter.” “What’s that about matter?”

said the man. “About what?” said one

child who was as pink as a balloon.

“I’m worried about the antimatter,” said

the man, “I admit it might be foolish

but the antimatter troubles me deeply.

Similar to a map that is marked up

by a visiting General. He’s drawing arrows

here and drawing arrows there and

lining up battalions and whatnot,

but deep down, in the geography of the

moment, a sense of antimatter is

running down the backs of their throats.”

“Whose throat?” asks a very old song.

“It’s not the throats that concerns me,”

says the General to his saddled horse.

“It’s the antimatter?” says the horse.

“Yes,” the General says, “the antimatter.”

Indiana poet Peter Davis’ fourth full-length poetry title is Band Names & Other Poems (Bloof Books, 2018), a hefty collection at nearly two hundred and forty pages. The pieces that make up Band Names & Other Poems intersperse short lyric narratives with expansive columns of short phrases (for example: “The Cameron Ministry / Speak Hebrew / Bullets That Miss / Soldier Smolder / God Triage / Deathbed Recession / The Bad Guy Patches”), composed and compiled as extended lists of potential “band names.” The sheer amount of names listed is incredibly, and the effect is concurrently expansive, overwhelming and accumulative, and provide both thread and background to the collection as a whole. The more traditionally-constructed poems (the “Other Poems” of the title) are surreal narratives comparable to the work of renowned Canadian surrealist poet Stuart Ross, both poets sharing elements of structure and tone between them. Davis’ pieces might not be as tightly controlled, or even deceptively straightforward, as Ross’, but are more open to chaos and accident; more open to overt absurdity and abstraction. Davis’ poems might open as lyric narratives, short poems with narrative drives and theses, but quickly spiral off, such as the poem “Succeeding in America,” that opens: “It is not as if I can capture the high road simply / by mowing everyone down at the ankles. In fact, / as I try to navigate the crust, I find my desire / to spring forward is held in check my desire / to fall back. It’s like, for each and every Newton / there is an opposite Newton, say, a fig, a Wayne / who is chubby as a tween but a real fucker / on the banjo.”