{"id":2366,"date":"2010-07-12T11:18:39","date_gmt":"2010-07-12T15:18:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=2366"},"modified":"2018-12-06T16:11:37","modified_gmt":"2018-12-06T21:11:37","slug":"the-mountain-goats","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2010\/07\/12\/the-mountain-goats\/","title":{"rendered":"The Mountain Goats"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ll wake in the middle of a conversation and realize I’m evangelizing. Odd thing is I’m always evangelizing the same man, John Darnielle, or rather the same band, The Mountain Goats, who are to its songwriter and primary vocalist as the primeval fauns, or in Darnielle’s case, fans, are to the spring-horned piper with the cloven hooves.<\/p>\n

Odd, because Darnielle needs no help. From his start as a psychiatric nurse recording songs to cassette on a grinding Panasonic boombox, he’s now a favorite of Stephen Colbert’s, written up in The New Yorker<\/em>, and interviewed by storyteller Tobias Wolff on stage. He’s the avatar of every college-age artist with a bad attitude and nervy vinyl archives.<\/p>\n

But poets don’t quote him. Here’s someone releasing album upon album with alarming namechecks like Transmissions to Horace<\/em> and Songs for Petronius<\/em>, and the poetry machine figures he’s another guy with an acoustic guitar. \u201cI play an acoustic guitar,\u201d Darnielle advises. \u201cBut I am not one of those guys with an acoustic guitar.\u201d<\/p>\n

So he went electric. This was in 2002, the same year I interviewed him before a show at San Francisco’s Bottom of the Hill. <\/p>\n

\u201cGood poetry, for me, should make the reader flinch,\u201d he told me, moving nervously around the rooftop dressing room. Fellow band member and core-collaborator Peter Hughes eyed him from the couch.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot necessarily because of its unpleasant subject matter, but because of its closeness to reality. I don\u2019t think any art form manages to echo what life is like better than poems do, especially poems as songs\u2014which to me are the same things.\u201d<\/p>\n

We poets write a lot about the music of poetry, its roots in oral\/aural traditions, its rhythm and need to be sounded aloud, but very little about the meter of poetry\u2014meter, which is a requirement of rhythm and of what most Westerners consider song.<\/p>\n

It’s a missed opportunity, because for metrical verse to work, it doesn’t much matter how the stresses\u2014or pulses\u2014in each measure are perceived. The beat of 3\/4 or 4\/4 time is as effective a cadence as that of trimeter or tetrameter, and the syncopation of the vocalist as nimble a device for varying those beats as a formal poet’s phrasing. Lyric poetry, after all, was first written for the lyre.<\/p>\n

So I call Darnielle a poet, and I proselytize. Luckily I won’t need to much longer. Since the spring, his influential death metal reviews, posting inexhaustibly to his blog Last Plane To Jakarta ever since his June 10, 2001 salvo, \u201cDeath Metal Rules<\/a>,\u201d have been exclusively in free verse. This extends a mode that Darnielle first experimented with in 2006, in a cycle entitled, \u201cThirty Short Poems About My Favorite Black Metal Band.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read the last, and best, of those thirty poems here<\/a>. Now jump to Darnielle’s opener of April 23, 2010, \u201cGlobed Fruit Central<\/a>.\u201d Yes, he’s name-checking Walt Whitman, though I wouldn’t take his lines about Old Greybeard’s “total victory” too seriously.<\/p>\n

As we hear scream through Darnielle’s five-hundred-plus song-poems to date, he’s been writing in rhyme and meter\u2014which is to say, formal verse\u2014for decades. If you think he plans to stop, you aren’t listening. The Good Grey Goat best give in and hoof it up.<\/p>\n

Jim Fisher’s poetry and prose has appeared in <\/em>Salon, DIAGRAM, and <\/em>The LBJ: Avian Life, Literary Arts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Lately I’ll wake in the middle of a conversation and realize I’m evangelizing. Odd thing is I’m always evangelizing the same man, John Darnielle, or rather the same band, The Mountain Goats, who are to its songwriter and primary vocalist as the primeval fauns, or in Darnielle’s case, fans, are to the spring-horned piper with […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":29,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1187],"tags":[408,165,409,407],"class_list":["post-2366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-music","tag-john-darnielle","tag-poetry","tag-songwriter","tag-the-mountain-goats"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nJohn Darnielle of The Mountain Goats<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"July 12, 2010 \u2013 Lately I'll wake in the middle of a conversation and realize I'm evangelizing. 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