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Chapter Five: Gravity
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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81 Chapter Five Gravity step outside and let the earth turn underneath, trapdoors, new lungs, missing bits of time, plump familiar pods go pop in your mind you learn not principles of flight but how to fall. – Don McKay, “Kestrels” (B 99) Migration is a widespread biological phenomenon, not simply a trait characteristic of a particular taxon. – Bairlein and Coppack, “Migration in the Life-History of Birds” (121) McKay’s response to the assumption that language constitutes the matter of reality comes prior to Dickinson’s argument, and it comes as a reimagining of traditional, namely Romantic, nature poetry, as my reading of “Close-up on a Sharp-shinned Hawk” attests. Not surprisingly, McKay’s poetic critiques of Romantic verse often respond directly to some of the most famous poems about birds in flight, of which there are many. Shelley, in“To a Skylark,”has the bird flying“Higher still and higher”“In the golden lightning / Of the sunken sun / O’er which the clouds are bright’ning” (ll. 6, 11–13), while Keats, in “Ode to a Nightingale,” imagines his bird a “light-winged Dryad of the trees”(l. 7) in sharp contrast to the poet trapped in “embalmed darkness” (l. 43). But these poems, like Avison’s “The Butter- fly,” are more about what the nonhuman means to the human—indeed, what it means to be human at all. Sir Edward Grey acknowledges as much in his assessment of Keats’s avian ode, which he rates second only to his “Ode to Autumn.”“Ode to a Nightingale,” Grey writes, “touches heights of poetry that the lines of Wordsworth on the nightingale [in “O Nightingale, Thou Surely Art”] do not attempt; but the ode is less close to the bird”(71). 82 • Chapter Five In other words, Keats’s ode is fine poetry but poor natural history. Like so many other poems, its distance from the bird itself—a result, in part, of the conventionally formal address/language of the ode1—reinforces a conventional set of avian metaphors. “Poets,” according to Beryl Rowland, “have always envied the divine power of the bird, and some, such as the Romantics, believed they could acquire it for themselves” (xv). Critics, by extension, often identify flight with poetry’s capacity—or power—to discover truth, a Platonic argument that follows from what Lutwack calls a “shamanistic identification with flying birds that enables human beings to make their escape from earth and move through space and time like gods”(52). I do not wish with my reading of McKay’s avian poetics to set aside the rich tradition of avian symbolism and metaphor that continues in poetry to this day, or to stifle the ability of poets and critics to imagine. I do, however, want to highlight the critic’s inability at times simply to listen to certain poems“and be satisfied”because he feels compelled“to find out about persons, places, and things”evoked by the poet (Bringhurst and Ricou 95). This strikes me as a useful inability, one that is likely responsible, at least in part, for the development of ecocriticism and that is necessary for ecocriticism to remain relevant within increasingly interdisciplinary and political and social contexts. Lutwack also effectively dampens the dream of the speaker in Keats’s ode by referring to Daedalus and Icarus, who have proven, ostensibly, “that the exercise of the imagination is not free like the flight of a bird, but uncertain and full of perils”(53). A sharp-shinned hawk’s wings will not, having flown too close to the sun, fall off because the wax holding them together melts, but bird flight is not particularly free; it frees birds (that can fly) from earth, though they are still restricted by gravity; and it is also full of such real perils as hunters (avian and human), poor weather conditions, airplanes, and lighted windows along migration routes. McKay addresses many of these concerns in Another Gravity (2000), a collection that develops a sustained avian poetic of flight. The book begins with a poem that is not about birds at all. In fact, of the thirty-two poems included in Another Gravity, only sixteen mention specific birds. The opening poem, “Sometimes a Voice (1)” (3–4), begins in contradiction, which, true to the necessarily opposing forces required to achieve flight (and which I’ve discussed in Chapter Four), recurs throughout the collection: Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? – wants not to be...