I’m starting to understand what JD means when he speaks about the difference between poetry and song writing. It’s really difficult to imagine these responses without music. Maybe it’s the form, although I think I’ve switched it around here slightly. It’s funny that where JD says that many of these early works are poems trying to be songs, and now that I know them as songs, my responses feel like songs trying to be poems. Anyway, this is where we meet the Alpha couple for the first time. So I’m trying to write from the perspective where their story is already complete and we know the whole sordid affair. They don’t yet. Or do they? Maybe they can guess.
Writing is hard today. In the wake of the US invasion of Venezuela it feels like the already shaky ground of world relations has turned to sand. What more is there to say? We live in the age of atrocity. In the wake of it, I reiterate: death to all empires, death to all nations. This is imperative for survival. And maybe especially then poetry is too. I don’t know. As for this poem, it feels like a sequel of sorts. I still don’t know who these people are, or if any of them are Cindy, like in the song. I like how this one feels heavy with narrative. For now I’m trying to vaguely stick with the form of JD’s lyrics. For me that meant a repeating but changing chorus, a distinct narrator with a body and a life, and a structure of 3-4-3-4 stanzas with a larger one that caps it off.
Day two! Observing myself respond to these songs to which I do not have as much of an emotional connection is interesting. This song is one that I don’t think I’ve ever listened to before. It’s a lot more abstract than the usual hyper specific situations that the Mountain Goats are so good at portraying. I have a strained relationship to Sigmund, so my skepticism runs very parallel to how I perceive these lyrics.
New year, new projects. Near the end of last year, John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats released the annotated lyric book This Year β A Book of Days. Their music has accompanied me for a large part of my life and I thought it would be a fun project to work my way through this book of days (one song for every day of the year) as a daily writing exercise for poetry. So here it goes.