In Certain Situations I’m Very Much Against Bird Song

When poets put the sound of bird song in poems it’s a form of baby talk that gives me the creeps. What do you think? Chirr-reep, chirr-reep.

Do you remember the well-known poet who used to wear a chicken outfit? He wasn’t advertising fast food. He wasn’t a school mascot. What was he? Cock-a-doodle-do!

There are all kinds of things to describe about birds but to phonetisize their songs? Try writing the sound a hummingbird makes trapped behind plastic stapled over a window.

One time a bird flew into a window and after a while got up. (I’ve written a poem about it.) Another time a bird flew into a window and broke its neck. I took its picture and then buried it.

Hush little baby, don’t say a word, Papa’s going to buy youa mockingbird, was a song I sang to my young sons endlessly. And if that mockingbird won’t sing, Papa’s going to buy you a diamond ring.

And every time I sang it lines from Randall Jarrell’s “The Mockingbird” ran through my head, i.e., A mockingbird can sound like anything. Or: The bats squeak: “Night is here”; the birds cheep: “Day is gone.”

Jarrell’s birds talk in Marianne Moore’s American English, which catsand dogs can read. Sometimes singing to my sons, I’d fall asleep in the middle of a phrase and they would wake me mercilessly,

Papa, Papa, sing! About bird song, I’m not one to talk or, for that matter, sing. And singing is something Wallace Stevens’s blackbird never does, not a note, not an inflection or innuendo, although in another poem

he says: The birds are singing in the yellow patios and From orioleTo crow, note the decline/ In music and For all his purple, the purple bird must have/Notes for his comfort. Poetry, Stevens told us, is a finikin thing of air.