![]() That everything is growing in a thousand different ways: Just by looking at the ground where fat is eaten by itselfīecause from where we are now, it seems, really, Now they are cablesĪnd I am going to Alaska, where you can go blind Of last year but then they hadn’t grown so strong,Īnd their limbs were more like wires. There is moaning** in the shifting of the sap, and I see, in them, traces The purple blossoms go pale at the edges Where there’s snow to suck the sound out from the air. It works better with a little guitar.Īnd the heat is a great paintbrush, lending color to our livesĪnd to the air, and to our faces but I’m going to Alaska, I suspect that I submitted this to several poetry journals, who I now thank for rejecting it. Huge credit to Lewis Turco, whose book I had been studying – when I say “studying,” I mean “spending several hours a day with, writing poems and lines in notebooks on the floor of my apartment, doing this to the exclusion of other activity” – the introduction to that book played a huge part in getting me comfortable with rhythm and meter, in getting from the “ok, yes, technically that’s a pentameter line” stage to somewhere near the goal of “these lines sound natural, and they’re also metered.” I was trying, too, to write poems that worked like Browning’s Dramatis Personae (and like the stuff in Norman Dubie’s Groom Falconer, which was new-ish, and which I was freaking out about): where the narrator, who seems to just be talking, tells you a lot about himself (much of it often not very pretty) and tells a story in the process without actually laying down a clear narrative line: puzzles. (I have consigned as much of my poetry from back then to the trash can as I have been able to lay hands to.) One day I was sitting around with this Hawaiian guitar I’d bought for thirty bucks and a heavy steel slide, bottleneck guitar, and I had a progression I liked and wanted to sing something to it, so I sang that poem, and that’s what happened. It began life as a poem, which I’ll transcribe below I’m not 100% sure that I’m getting all the line-stops right, but it’s close. I had written some songs, and I don’t know where in the writing of that first batch I did this, but I still consider this the first Mountain Goats song (or second “The Pieman” also vies for the title). #Pieman meeter of rhyme freeAnyway, I’d gone from free verse crew to meter and rhyme patrol, as many do, and had arrived at a nice synthesis for me, where I was comfortable working in meter but admired writers who could work in variable line-lengths and still have their verse sing: whose poems still felt like verse, like song, which I still felt & feel is the parent tree from which poetry oughtn’t fall too far. When you’re 22 “since I was fourteen” feels like “all my life,” or did to me, though time gives one perspective on this feeling. I had been writing poetry since I was 14: about eight years. People ask me about “the creative process”* and here’s this song, I’ll tell you a little about it: I was living in employee housing in Norwalk. Money lyric: “I’m going to Alaska, where there’s snow to suck the sound out from the air.“ #Pieman meeter of rhyme movieSo I thought I’d share a John Darnielle/Mountain Goats song I love every day from now until July 24th to celebrate the movie and the band. Completely by coincidence, the Mountain Goats are also my favorite band. In the book, the Mountain Goats are Q’s favorite band. The Paper Towns movie comes out in 38 days. 42 Days of the Mountain Goats: Day 5: Going To Alaska ![]()
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