Punk > Recent Status Updates

Chiyo-ni's most famous haiku:

morning glory–
the well-bucket entangled
I ask for water

the mosquito net
with a corner untied—
ah, the moon

I don't care what this poem is really about, something zen, I'm sure, or that there's some question of whether Chiyo-ni even wrote it, I just love how it sounds like the moon's snuck inside the netting.

And "These Mornings," written in 1944, is still chillingly relevant today:

https://worldliteraturetoday.org/blog...

"At the Bomb Testing Site" is one of my favorite Stafford poems. It's all about the lizard elbows.

change of kimono:
showing only her back
to the blossom's fragrance

cool breeze–
enclosed in my kimono sleeves
till falling asleep

the coolness–
of the bottom of her kimono
in the bamboo grove

Darnielle on "Going to Wisconsin": It seems like a lot of nonsense, but I would defend it in court—"the boat wasn't real, and this is how I feel. / You don't know where you're going until you arrive" is practically a precis for my method for the next, what, thirty years? Some of these early songs get me into a dreamy state where I imagine nothing, nothing of my work surviving, except this.

keeping cool–
in the deep night
strangers on the bridge

touching
the fishing line–
the summer moon

butterfly–
you also get mad
some days

among a field
of horsetail weeds–
temple ruins

I like the way this is structured, that by putting the horsetails first it suggests they were there first and the ruins are just incidental. Happily I can confirm that this feeling is even stronger in the original:

tsukutsukushi
kokora ni tera no
ato mo ari

And my own quick and dirty literal translation:

horsetail plants
around here temple's
ruins also here

Libby remembered where I was, but not my highlights. :(

Hey, this came back to me early! The other borrower must have given up on it.

"you never heard so deep a sound, / moss on rock, and years."

On "New Star Song": "This, again, is the working ethos of the early lyrics. Set a scene and put some ghosts in it, then get excited about the ghosts."

So far none of these songs are familiar to me—the furthest back my Mountain Goats collection goes is 2002* and we're in the early 1990s here—but I'm loving the near rhyme of forgetting/Redding in "New Star Song."

* Which was basically yesterday, I feel. Not very long ago at all. However, basic math reveals it was nearly 30 years ago.

Darnielle includes Miron Białoszewski's poem "And Even, Even if They Take Away the Stove / My Inexhaustible Ode to Joy, which he cites as formative for him, reading it at seventeen, and it just explains so much about what he's trying to do with the Mountain Goats.

"Pure Milk" is the first of these earlier songs where I can see the same things that draw me to Darnielle's songwriting today–the intense narrator, the weird circumstances, a whiff of the apocalyptic–and it's clearly a song rather than a poem. Wonderfully, he says it's one of his absolute favorites among his earlier songs because it's still opaque to him and he wants to know more about the story.

Old mistakes come calling: no life / happens just once.

I was away from this for a couple of days and have totally lost track of all these clones.

John Darnielle: "What more fortunate situation could there be, for a person, than to be glad of having been wrong?"

Oh no, this is huuuuuuuuge.

This went back to the library and since they only have one copy and two people are ahead of me, it'll be a while before I see it again.

woman's desire
deeply rooted–
the wild violets

even falling down
it still smiles--
the festival doll

“—but some Orthodox rabbi ruled that digitally reconstituted personalities are ghosts, not golems, and therefore entitled to all the rights and privileges of their originals under Halakhic law.”

"And if his grasp of basic cognitive theory was correct, then he was now being laughed at by the closest thing he’d ever see in his entomologist’s life to a sentient ant swarm."

evening temple bell
stopped in the sky
by cherry blossoms

"The plum blossom was transplanted from China and was Japan's favorite flower until nationalism grew in the eighth century and the sakura (cherry blossom), which is native to Japan, took its place."