The Mountains Grow Unnoticed

757 The Mountains—grow unnoticed— Their Purple figures rise Without attempt—Exhaustion— Assistance—or Applause— In Their Eternal Faces The Sun—with just delight Looks long—and last—and golden— For fellowship—at night—

-Emily Dickinson

In my pantheon of personal heroes, Emily has a special seat of honor for her lyrical brilliance, her uncompromising vision as a poet. None of her contemporaries wrote about the BIG themes with such clarity, concision—and with such blatant disregard for the poetic conventions of her time.

Which speaks to the another main reason I revere her. Emily’s poems were written for herself and for the Eternal—not for fickle Applause and accolades. When I first came across this poem, I typed it up on my Smith Corona and taped it to the windowsill above my writing desk, where I can just see Greenfield Mountain poking up over trees and the signs for fast food restaurants at the rotary. At 300’ tall, it’s not much as mountains go, but it seems perfectly content with its lot.

The long, difficult process of writing poems and songs that you love, that give words to the deepest parts of yourself, this is its own reward, and it’s the most important one there is for an artist. I’m not ready just yet to become a hermit. It still stings when I put something I labored over for years, something I love, out into the world, and it gets no recognition (or worse: it gets a lukewarm or damned-by-faint-praise response). At times like that, when my ego is hungry, and I try to fill it with the validation of other people, I look at this poem. I look at Greenfield Mountain.

There’s not much I feel moved to say about the recording of this song. I’m guessing that the androgyny of the pitch-shifted lead vocal will rub some people the wrong way. I wanted the vocals to reach a height, a peak, if you will, that my voice can’t naturally attain. The “otherness” of that voice comforts me. Knowing it’s my voice and yet not my voice singing Emily’s words to me, reminding me of these Eternal truths.

The cricket that lends its backing vocal was a resident of my basement window well for most of the summer of 2016: a window well about three feet away from my recording desk. Attempts to “shoo” it were fruitless. It seemed to live in some crevice inside the window well that I couldn’t get to. I can still remember the day I realized that, rather than try and further insulate that window and move the microphone further away, I should instead prop open the window, stick the mic out, and add the cricket to the song I was working on. That instead of interrupting the song, it was offering it “Assistance” and a kind of “Applause.”