Birds are all around us. In today’s Poetry on the Page, Northern Illinois University English Professor Amy Newman discusses a poem that highlights these creatures with WNIJ’s Art and Culture reporter Yvonne Boose.
Yvonne:
Hi, Amy, how are you today?
Amy:
I'm fine. Yvonne, how are you doing?
Yvonne:
I’m well. And thank you for joining me for another episode of Poetry on the Page. So, what do you have for me today?
Amy:
Hey, Yvonne. I'm wondering, do you like birds?
Yvonne:
I do like to watch birds when I'm walking and... but you know what, Amy? I hate when they fly in front of my car. And that's the worst thing — to run over a bird.
Amy:
I don't know why they do that. They do fly right in front of the grill, but I think they're playing a game with us. Birds are... well, you know, you won't be surprised to know that I'm thinking about birds now. Because it's a summer, and poets do tend to obsess over birds, and why? It's anybody's guess why we do.
Maybe it's that they have this great ability to sing while they breathe that makes us so envious of them. I was thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins, his poem “The Windhover.” It's so taken with the energy of a bird flying, that his language is practically embroidered onto the page. My students call this “crazy language.” The poem opens with a line about a hawk in the sky that catches his eye, and it goes like this:
“I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
/dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon,”
And it goes on like that for a while. He writes in this energetic, muscular way because he perceives that amazing image of the hawk in the sky, as representative of his creator’s power and love.
There's also Keats's “[Ode to a] Nightingale,” who
“/Singest of summer in full-throated ease.”
This bird song makes him so happy. He wants to end his life right then in there. Keats says he's not envious of the bird but as a poet, how could you not be? Birds have a voice box called the syrinx, which allows them to create highly complex melodious sounds, declarations into the world. That's an opposition to our voice box, which can produce only one sound at a time. There's got to be some envy there for the small, feathered creature who sings the world so beautifully.
Birds may seem a little magic up there in the sky, but in reality, the live in nature, which is a tough place to survive sometimes. I know they’re often portrayed as delightful. Anyone who's had an encounter with a House Sparrow might say otherwise. These birds are aggressive, not always so nice. And they often displace native birds from nest boxes. They nest in your dryer vents, the house crevices, and even, they steal material from your house, and some consider them the bully of the bird world.
Here's Paula Lambert's poem about one. A House Sparrow who's actually stealing screen, threads from her screens. It’s called:
Invitation: House Sparrow
From the next room, I heard what I couldn’t
identify, a kind of clawing. I found the bird
in the dining room window, beak entrenched
in the threads of the screen, neck wrenching
with determined thrust as she yanked what
she needed for her nest. My own jaw dropped
wide open, so surprised by the perfect square
of the hole that framed her, the strength of her
every twist and pull. I swear, when she saw me
she was angry, eyes flashing black light,
the top of her head dark as a bruise against
the brown of her body: Who are you to intrude?
Mind your business. In another flash, barely
seeming to move at all, she glared at me
from a branch full of blossoms in the pear tree
three feet away, defiant, daring me to stop her.
One house builds another. She offered the gift
of her need. Who was I, indeed, to refuse it?
That’s “Invitation: House Sparrow” by Paula Lambert, from: As If This Did Not Happen Every Day. Just out this year Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.
Yvonne:
Thank you so much for sharing that with me today Amy, now I'm going to look at birds in a whole different way.
Amy:
Thanks, Yvonne, you too.
