Trails of the Winter Storm

Hello from the distant shores of Spring Break!  I have been hoping to spend some substantial time writing for this blog but other items on my massive to-do list have been coming first.  Still so much to do!  The first item on the list, however, is to "REST," and I am making sure to do that.  Today feels like it has been (or will stand to be) a kind of turning point.  Fitting that it is the Wednesday in the middle of it all.

Today¹ is also marked by the official release of a new album by a band near and dear to the incommunicable in my heart.  Hymn to the Immortal Wind by Mono, a Japanese post-rock group of sorts, is on the whole a triumph, altbeit not the band's best.  Yet still, the "songs without words" seem to unlock secrets within—and without.  A quote I just stumbled upon by the composer of the classical Songs Without Words:

What the music I love expresses to me, is not thought too indefinite to put into words, but on the contrary, too definite. - Felix Mandelssohn

Mono's latest album's cover. Image from emusic.com (eyelash and all...ew).

After a bike ride to the park earlier today I relaxed by watching a recording of a PBS program.  NewsHour had Poet Laureate Kay Ryan for a brief while to talk about her duties as Laureate and to offer the reading of poems applicable to the times. (link)  I know that I have seen and heard her before somewhere, but can't think of it.  On air she read "It's Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn," one of her poems that "combat cliches," deepening and expanding upon a common meaning.  The following really struck me as a good fit for recent times.

 

Kay Ryan in her appearance on PBS's NewsHour.

 

It's Always Darkest Just Before the Dawn

by Kay Ryan (listen to a live reading)

But how dark

is darkest?

Does it get

jet --or tar--

black; does it

glint and increase

in hardness

or turn viscous?

Are there stages

of darkness

and chips

to match against

its increments,

holding them

up to our blindness,

estimating when

we'll have the

night behind us?

That's all for now...have a good day!