Love Love Love

The point of the song is, you know, that we are fairly well damaged by the legacy of the Romantic poets--that we think of love as this, you know, thing that is accompanied by strings and it's a force for good, and if something bad happens then that's not love. And the therapeutic tradition that I come from--I used to work in therapy--you know, also says that it's not love if it feels bad. I don't know so much about that. I don't know that the Greeks weren't right. I think they were--that love can eat a path through everything--that it will destroy a lot of things on the way to its own objective, which is just its expression of itself, you know. I mean, my stepfather loved his family, right? Now he mistreated us terribly quite often, but he loved us. And, you know, well, that to me is something worth commenting on in the hopes of undoing a lot of what I perceive as terrible damage in the way people talk about this--love is this benign, comfortable force. It's not that. It's wild, you know? - John Darnielle, of The Mountain Goats

Been listening to this song a lot today, every couple songs that shuffle up on my iTunes, I come back to this one, replay it. It's a beautiful song. I think I've been listening to it so much, because this idea has been on my mind the past few days.

I've been working the last month on archiving my poetry, trying to track it all down from various places, various looseleaf sheets in my filing cabinet and notebooks, stagnant internet corners.

So many of the poems I remember writing, and wish that I still had, are lost, or missing, or scribbled out. Looking back, I wish I hadn't at the time. I wish I hadn't thrown them away, or defaced them. They were such an insight into my emotions, small filmstrips of memory and moment.

In all the efforts to conglomerate, I've been contemplating why I write poetry, why it's important to me, something that I've always been compelled to do. Leonard Cohen once said, "Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash."

Poetry for me, is love, is evidence of life. That if you live, you love, and that poetry is the expression of life, of love, and that even the sad poems, the hard poems, the ones that don't seem to be anything but dark or miserable, they're all about love.

Every poem is a love poem, every song is a love song. Every emotion is an expression of love, is a consequence of love, is the way that love moves through us, or the way we move through things without it, in search of it.

This is a song about poetry, and life, and the things - the thing - that makes either of those important, and more importantly, that makes them true.

Some things you'll do for money, and some you'll do for fun...some moments last forever, and some flare out with love, love, love.