SIDNEY WADE’S “BIRDING AT THE DAIRY”: BEAUTIFUL STARLINGS FROM HELL

Believe it or not, I’ve been trying to shorten my posts, but one thing or another about a good poem teases me into holding the podium. In Sidney Wade’s “Birding at the Dairy,” the lure was the unlikely sum of three references to birds that are in some way “headed,” culminating in a “many-headed” flock. A yellow-headed blackbird, a brown-headed cowbird, and a “many-headed” “congress” of starlings--so much “headed”-ness is surely no accident in a poem as intelligent, faithful in detail and rich in metaphor as “Birding at the Dairy.”  Wade’s witnessing of starlings hooked the minor league birder in me, word count be damned. So, courtesy of the Academy of American Poets website, here it is:

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Poem-A-Day--Birding-at-the-Dairy-by-Sidney-Wade.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=WHZGnzGzZ1Q

Starling

Wade’s speaker is surprised by the birds, maybe a thousand, as they take flight, more or less in unison and in shifting patterns. In the lexicon of birders, a flock of starlings is called a “murmuration," and anyone who’s seen even a small murmuration of starlings rising and then waltzing in the air might agree that they seem a “congress / of wings.” That includes both the chummy accord and the corruption we might hear in the word “congress.” “Commingles,” “Maneuvering,” and “schooling” are also unromantic words that might not smell entirely wonderful; they might even feel close to something sinister in a poem that’s almost mystically positive about the starlings, for the most part. Remember this slight ambivalence as we continue to marvel at the birds' harmony in large waves that “undulate” and “turn liquid” as they rise. 

In fact, when we hear “undulate,” we might think of snakes.  Among birds, starlings (which in the U.S. are invaders from Europe) have a lousy reputation, and surely there’s something spooky about any many-headed animal.

serpent

Mythology supports a feeling we're likely to have about polycephaly (having two or more heads), perhaps because we humans find that our single heads are often more than we can cope with. In any case, having multiple heads is natural as a nightmare trope, in real-life as well as literature and art.

It's no surprise, then, that Wade’s many-headed bird tribe also alludes to ancient monsters.  Wikipedia tells us that antiquity offered different portraits of Cerberus, the dog that guards the gates of Hell to prevent the damned from escaping:   “The most notable difference is the number of its heads:  Most sources describe or depict three heads; others show it with two or even just one; a smaller number of sources show (sic) a variable number, sometimes as many as 50 or even 100.”

Another image from the Ancients is the Hydra monster:  “In Greek mythology, the Lernaean Hydra (Ancient Greek:Λερναία Ὕδρα) was an ancient serpent-like chthonic water beast, with reptilian traits (as its name evinces), that possessed many heads — the poets mention more heads than the vase-painters could paint, and for each head cut off it grew two more — and poisonous breath and blood so virulent even its tracks were deadly.^[1] The Hydra of Lerna was killed by Hercules as the second of his Twelve Labours.” Surely Sidney Wade's undulating body of starlings suggests serpents, and in their sheer numbers and magical formations, perhaps the Hydra in particular. 

serpent

For more headed-ness, here’s Wikipedia on the yellow-headed blackbird, a very handsome creature. “They often migrate in huge flocks with other species of birds,” which is a behavior noted in the poem. Also, “They nest in colonies, often sharing their habitat closely with the Red-winged Blackbird.”  
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6-Pk-VMtZM0

Compared to monsters and magic, the "Dairy" in the poem’s title seems all milk and cheese, a wholesome base for birders. However, in checking up on yellow-headed blackbirds (again, in Wikipedia as well as The Cornell Lab of Ornithology), I learned that they breed as far east and north as Wisconsin, where dairy is king.  Still, it's more reasonable to think of them as a predominantly western and southwestern bird, and thus a bird that seems out of place, or at least unexpected, near a dairy. 

Also, note that it's a marsh bird that (paradoxically?) favors hot, dry climates, but the immediate connotation of “dairy” suggests Midwestern or Northeastern greenness.  So the poem’s title info, “Birding at the Dairy,” might set up a contrast--yellow-headed blackbirds from the high plains and desert appear in the creamy Midwest. Landscape, birds, and relative humidity are all somewhat surprising or twofold in the poem’s world. Is this yen and yang, or a duality that implies conflict? Whatever the answer, surprise, if not unease, is an important feature. 

brown-headed cowbird

As for the brown-headed cowbird, its reputation is almost as bad as the starling’s:  the cowbird “is a brood parasite: it lays its eggs in the nests of other small passerines (perching birds).”  That’s also from Wikipedia, where the information about cowbirds and the other, hosting species is fascinating. I urge readers to spend a few minutes on Wikipedia's discussion of the cowbird’s peculiar, if not evil habits.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown-headed_Cowbird

The cowbirds make a life-and-death mess of things for the other birds that host them, but they’re also just doing what they’re wired to do. Considering the implications of that for humans is another topic, and true, we are not birds. Still, go ahead and consider it. Such exploration is one of the main benefits of poetry. 

Birders seek out new or rare birds—or birds with singular beauty or singular behavior, such as starlings, which really do “swarm” and “undulate.” (See the video below).  Some species carry the brand of scoundrel, yet their appearance and some of their behaviors are stunning. In addition to undulating, and convening as a “congress,” and “murmur”ing as a collective, look what else Sidney Wade’s starlings do. They are a:

            maneuvering

            wave that veers

            and wheels, a fleet

            and schooling swarm 

            in synchronous alarm,

            a bloom radiating 

            in ribbons, in sheets,

            in waterfall,

            a murmuration

            of birds

            that turns

            liquid in air . . . .

It’s a visual symphony. If you doubt it, see the video in the link below. (In fact, please see it, period). Why should we be surprised that such an image suddenly rhymes at the end, as the word “prayer” echoes “air”?

But it’s a  “seething” prayer, which calls up feelings of fury and aggression—appropriate for many-headed animal-monsters, one of whom guards the River Styx at the boundary of Hell. And neither starling nor yellow-headed blackbird nor brown-headed cowbird has a pleasant song. What they issue is closer to a growl, glug and screech than a lullaby, yet Wade calls it a prayer. She catches the paradox or duality or dichotomy—whatever it is—at the heart of so much beauty. 

Beauty wins, but in the wonder of it, it's also foreign and at least vaguely threatening. It's a beauty that is fleeting yet timeless, "fluid" yet suggestive of perfection and eternity, especially if we allow for the role of memory, which preserves our experiences with the gorgeous and the stunning. 

cardinal, snow, ambivalence

In the face of magnificence, we are diminished, dwarfed, threatened by an image so alien and large, so much better than we are. It might even be divine; in the end, the starling's murmuration is 

            the breath

            of a great

            seething prayer.

Surely this sounds like an epiphany, including the original religious overtones of the word. Yet we’re ambivalent about it—its appetites! The glory we witness might overtake us—or it already has. So we are humbled, and we pray. Maybe the starlings are the form of our prayer, and maybe, like them, we are so fervent that we seethe, croak and gurgle as we become our own prayer, in both shape and content.

Is it because the starlings follow each other—I almost said “blindly”—in such majestic patterns of flight that they become a prayer? Whatever the answers, there’s no doubt that these birds are a gathering of disparate beings, and I suggest that this includes not only the individual birds in the murmuration but also all birds and all of nature in a coming together with humanity. Whoever offers that prayer and whoever is that prayer, in all its visual drama, the sound of it is a murmur.

cardinal, snow, humility

To appreciate how spectacular a murmuration of starlings can be, and to read more about them, click below. Oh, please click below and watch the two-minute video. I know it takes time, but it’s a pleasure, and you’ll be a better person afterward.

http://www.birds.cornell.edu/roundrobin/2013/02/21/how-do-starling-flocks-create-those-mesmerizing-murmurations/

My thanks to the Academy of American Poets Poem-A-Day for making me aware of the poem.

http://myemail.constantcontact.com/Poem-A-Day--Birding-at-the-Dairy-by-Sidney-Wade.html?soid=1110705357409&aid=WHZGnzGzZ1Q

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"Ativan" by Laura Kasischke

Ativan by Laura Kasischke : Poetry Magazine

I’m not at all confident that I have a handle on Laura Kasischke’s  (Ka-SHISH-key) “Ativan,” but I like its emotional intensity and vivid, evocative imagery. It has the density and precision I’m always arguing for—when I’m dissatisfied with talk-y, prosy “poems”—so I’ll stick my neck out on its behalf.   

 

Maybe the poem proposes that we take tranquilizers like Ativan because we cannot escape our awareness of the fact that we are doomed by mortality—just as all small, delicate beauty lives in the shadow of a gallows tree and a hanged man’s boots. What’s your take on the poem’s title, as wel as its overall content?   

I hope everyone hears the poem, so please excuse this reminder about meter and music:  an “anapest” is a metric foot whose three syllables are:  unstressed, unstressed, stressed, as in “to a HANGED . . .” bah bah BOOM.  A few anapests in proximity are sometimes called a waltz rhythm. If you weren’t already Strauss-ing around the room, you may now begin.

In the first stanza of “Ativan,” I’m charmed by the musicality of the anapests at the center. It started with a somewhat hard iamb in “That dream” (which could come across as an even harder, stronger spondee (two consecutive stressed syllables), and we finish the stanza with two more iambs:  “-lows TREE.”  But in the middle are some softer minuets, which we can hear as the vulnerability of the cricket:

            in the DARK            of the NIGHT

            at the FOOT

            of the GAL-  lows TREE.

A cricket’s noise might be perceived as somewhat musical, and the poet brackets that little three-four tune with a harder, sharper beat in the iambs of “That DREAM” and “the GAL-lows TREE.”

Red-Bellied Woodpecker, male

Can we conclude that Kasische’s rhythms reflect, and even help to create, the central conflict in the poem:  the perception of delicate beings surrounded and threatened by our awareness of death, which we try to soften with Ativan, among other antidotes.

Like the speaker, we’re likely to identify with creatures like crickets. Like her, we might even call them “virtuous” and “hopeful” and “heart-faced.”  Although science tells us that crickets (and cockroaches and other bugs) will succeed us on the planet, we see the singers as profoundly sweet and profoundly vulnerable—or maybe doomed, more than vulnerable.

 

(As a FWIW aside, in Kasischke’s phrasing and music, I hear an echo of Keats in “Ode to a Nightingale”:  

Darkling I listen; and, for many a time

         I have been half in love with easeful Death,

Call'd him soft names in many a mused rhyme,

         To take into the air my quiet breath;

                Now more than ever seems it rich to die,

         To cease upon the midnight with no pain,

                While thou art pouring forth thy soul abroad

                        In such an ecstasy!

         Still wouldst thou sing, and I have ears in vain—

                   To thy high requiem become a sod.

Kasischke seems at least half in love with her subject, nature’s most fragile creatures; but of course it’s the tiny living things she loves, not the hanged man. Still, I’ll cling to the notion that Kasischke is half in love with crickets and her unconscious might have heard Keats rummaging around in her attic—Wait!   I can’t say that. I’m a quasi New Critic!).

If I had a picture of a cricket, I’d post it. Today’s photos are an attempt to capture additional “Little, hopeful, insistent things,” whether or not their faces are heart-shaped or “lit up by the moon,” and whether or not they knowingly sing to a “hanged man’s boots.” I’m pretty sure the red-bellied woodpecker and the milkweed have not taken the Ativan, yet they seem hopeful enough.

As for the big trees with overhanging branches, let’s not talk about them, neither the autumn orange nor the stripped bare version. 

Ativan by Laura Kasischke : Poetry Magazine

Emily Dickinson, "After great pain . . . "

After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372) by Emily Dickinson : The Poetry Foundation [poem] : Find Poems and Poets. Discover Poetry.

In case I wasn't clear yesterday about the relative simplicity and sweetness of Dickinson's "Hope Is the Thing with Feathers," compare it to one of her darker poems, "After Great Pain a Formal Feeling Comes." Maybe I'm just a downer-guy, or maybe depression, despair, and death are inherently weightier matters than hope. In any case, it seems to me that nothing in "Hope" matches the power and nuance of the imagery and state of mind at the center of "After Great Pain." I'm not sure I've experienced the poem's dark weight of mind, emotion, or spirit, but when Dickinson calmly states, "This is the hour lead," she makes me think I know what she's talking about. She makes me want to flee, except that she seems to know something I need to know, whether I want to or not.

We're probably left with more questions than answers in "Great Pain." Exactly what constitutes "great pain" and a "formal feeling"? What caused them? Or does a little voice then kick in and call us dishonest for pretending we need to ask?

Also, Dickinson tries to make herself clear, but the grey blankness of this state of mind (should we call it layered?) is too amorphous for clarity or logic, even though it has the color, heft, and authority of lead. The best Dickinson can do is offer images that might come close to capturing a condition as elusive as it is definite. It lacks definition; it is definitive. It's been said that paradox is the language of poetry.

In every stanza, if not every line, there's a word, phrase, or concept that stuns me. Who would have thought of this as a "formal" feeling? Less mysterious, but awfully interesting is the fact that it arrives "after" great pain. Wouldn't most of us have chosen pain itself as the subject rather than its aftermath?

Why is this state personified as "He," and how does He become a "bore"? Or is "bore" the past tense of "bear"? If that's the case, what was it that He bore? The formal feeling? How so? And is there a play on the word "boor"? This might be a spot where Dickinson's quirky punctuation and word choice are pushing things at least an inch too far. How can we not wonder if she's simply struggling for rhyme?

A what contentment? "Quartz," you say? And wait, you're associating this aftermath of great pain with some kind of "contentment"? And then those last two lines--what happens, in what order, and how does it amount to a "letting go"?

All of this illustrates one of the great purposes of poetry (and probably all art): to capture experiences rather than talk about them, to use imagery and metaphor to express the inexpressible. I doubt any writer has offered any Message that has the impact of Dickinson's attempt to render an experience here.

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RUSSO’S BRIDGE OF SIGHS: A REVIEW, PART 2

Thomaston, NY???




Like you, I need for Banjo to shut up about Richard Russo’s Bridge of Sighs. Before I can let it go, however, I’ve got to touch on a couple of subjects that have planted themselves in my mind and won’t let go.

My July 22 review was more positive than this addition might sound, but I don’t think there’s a major inconsistency—I still consider the book a notable achievement. However, the introduction of an important new character toward the end, along with the denouement as a whole, raises a question about Russo’s world view as a whole: is it too cheery to fit the facts of setting, plot and characterization he’s given us in the course of 500 pages?

And at the end of this post, I also want to re-address the novel's portrait women--regarding which, I hope you’ll look at the July 22 visitor’s comment here from istop4books.

(By the way, the comments at istop4books are the only other responses to Bridge of Sighs I’ve read, and I saw those shortly after my July 22 post. All other points here are straight out of Banjo Brain, and any resemblance to other reviews, living or dead, is purely coincidental). Now, onward.

In the novel as a whole, I wonder if anyone else hears echoes of Dickens, as Russo offers a realistic, sociopolitical study of an ensemble cast in an economically struggling town. Like Victorian London, it’s a place significantly influenced by industrial issues and class divisions. These characters in upstate New York might have it a little easier than Dickens’s folks, but life in Thomaston, NY is rough enough; the personal and economic struggles feel legitimate.

However, Russo might love this town and its people too much to allow any genuinely menacing darkness to dominate. He tries to see something bright among the litter and loose ends, the poison and disease, the constant psychological complexities and tensions in human experience. Russo’s bottom line, like Dickens’s, insists upon a positive, sympathetic view of human character, human experience, though predators, bad luck, and character flaws rip at souls. Maybe the label optimism fits Russo’s view.

But have the characters earned any hopefulness we might want to bestow upon them? Is there good reason to think they're bigger, better and brighter than the map of their lives or the landscape of Thomaston's citizens as well as buildings and its river and bridges, or do we simply like these people and thus hope for happy outcomes, whether or not such outcomes are likely? I feel affection and respect for these characters, but I don’t trust the legitimacy of my responses or how I’ve been led to them. It might have been a worthy vehicle, but I'm uneasy about it.

Now enter that new character, late in the story. She has charm, perhaps in excess, but she's also flawed and full of baggage, which portends still more complications for the core characters. Yet that whole episode probably feels rather good about itself, perhaps better than our rational selves could explain, and I wonder if Russo is playing fairly.

Still, even as the book winds down, I would not call it saccharine or simplistic. From beginning to end, the losses and serious complexities and traumas in relationships have made me wince with empathy, and I feel the potential for a more wounded future than these folks deserve.

So what troubles me must be the novel’s somewhat sanguine world view in spite of all that, a view that's been seeping in and tugging at me, or has been forced in while I wasn’t looking. It’s a perspective that’s improbably sunny in Thomaston. So are these just Russo’s and my wishes for people, for our prospects, the possibility that our inklings of better angels and good luck are not naïve or downright stupid?

If the novel’s outlook is as mysterious or ambiguous as I’m suggesting, is it a purposeful ambiguity--which I usually like and respect as a realistic, defensible way of seeing human experience. Does the book make a legitimate and satisfying statement that we cannot pin down the way people’s lives or most single actions should be seen?

Or does it imply something like, "There . . . . Got it. Life is more good than bad, more smiling than sad. That may have been several bridges and quite a few sighs, but it's right that we have a genuine, deservedly good feeling about people--at least these people--as they try to cross." Can we say that? Does the novel say that?

Within the ensemble cast, Big Lou and Lou-Lucy Lynch, would say, “Yes, that’s it.” Sarah would probably go along too. Even that cantankerous Tessa—maybe she’s not such a terminally tough cookie, after all. And those good Thomaston folks wouldn’t lie, even to themselves. Would they?

Tomorrow or soon: the women in Bridge of Sighs

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