The words and music of the Mountain Goats

Jim Fisher over at the Paris Review blog has put together an appreciation of John Darnielle (impresario behind the best little death-metal-folk-rock band The Mountain Goats) and his sometimes-sung, sometimes-written poetry:

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—meter, which is a requirement of rhythm and of what most Westerners consider song.

It's a missed opportunity, because for metrical verse to work, it doesn't much matter how the stresses—or pulses—in 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.

So I call Darnielle a poet, and I proselytize.