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Chapter Six: Notes
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115 Chapter Six Notes Poetry is what I start to hear when I concede the world’s ability to manage and understand itself. It is the language of the world: something humans overhear if they are willing to pay attention. – Robert Bringhurst, “Poetry and Thinking” (192) If bird flight has inspired revolutionary moments in ornithology, physics, and engineering, not to mention poetry, birdsong has perhaps played a greater role in the growth of birding as a popular activity for experts and amateurs alike.There are few places on the planet where humans cannot hear birds singing for at least part of the year (and part of the day). In the next three chapters, I examine the differing ways birdsong has been interpreted by poets, scientists, and philosophers. Positioning McKay’s writing about birdsong alongside and against the lyric tradition, I argue that McKay’s attention to aural wilderness, particularly birdsong, iterates an attentive relation to the nonhuman world by modelling an active, respectful style of listening. The ability to listen well, as any birder will insist, informs the act of birding: many sightings begin with—indeed, some consist entirely of—hearing a call or a song and locating the source. Unlike field ornithology, though, literary criticism has not developed a theoretical mode of listening to the natural world. Early ecocritics’preference for“realistic”texts as the best indicators of human–nonhuman relations privileges sight over other sensory experiences. Masami Raker Yuki acknowledges this historical and theoretical lacuna and seeks to rectify it in her doctoral dissertation, “Towards a Literary Theory of Acoustic Ecology: Soundscapes in Contemporary Environmental Literature .” My discussion of soundscape and acoustic ecology in the remaining chapters, while indebted to Yuki’s main theoretical tenets regarding acoustic ecology’s capacity to offer “an antidote to the vision-dominant worldview 116 • Chapter Six of modern societies”(ii), focuses on how listening functions metaphorically in McKay’s writing as “receptivity to others’ natures and histories” and as “an escape from both egotism in the human realm and anthropocentrism in a broader context” (Bartlett “Two Pianos” 8–9). Rather than reproducing a sonic environment for purely aesthetic reasons, McKay enacts a listening on the page through the combination of form and content, particularly by employing a specific mode of linguistic play that cultural anthropologist Donna Haraway calls “metaplasm.” Equal parts anagram, palindrome, and pun—abide, abode; listen, glisten; underneath, underearth; loop, pool; earth, hear; owning, knowing—metaplasm, according to Haraway, refers to “a change in a word … by adding, omitting, inverting, or transposing its letters, syllables, or sounds” (20). In several poems about birdsong—from poems in which birdsong can be heard as one sound among many in a constructed soundscape to poems devoted to the songs of individual species—McKay simultaneously pays homage to avian singers and measures the distance— the difference—between their songs and his literary response to them. Birdsong’s mixture of familiarity and strangeness distinguishes birds from other animals, as does the ability to fly. Moreover, birdsong sounds, to human ears,“almost like speech, even expressive of human feelings, and yet it is a communication stranger than speech and not quite the same as music” (Lutwack xi). Poets, to be sure, have tended to find the human aspects of birdsong appealing: the connection between the music of the woods and the music of the lyre is an ancient one. The story, recounted by Leonard Nathan, of Vālmīki inventing poetry after hearing kraunchas and witnessing their murder at the hands of a low-caste hunter provides one example of the ancient link between birdsong and poetry. The answer to the question of which came first, birdsong or human music, according to Don Stap,“is less important than the question”itself, since the long list of references to singing birds in ancient literature—including the Sumerian Tilmun myth and “the oldest secular English music, ‘Sumer Is Icumen In’”—supports the notion “that some kind of relationship exists” (138). Even Donald Kroodsma, one of the leading experts in avian bioacoustics—the scientific study of birdsong, which often requires creating and studying sonograms—admits to sharing a history with songbirds “dating back not just 30 years” to Kroodsma’s first recordings of Bewick’s wrens in his backyard“but to the origins of life itself” (22). In this chapter, I trace some of the more well-known poetic treatments of such singing birds as the nightingale in England and the mockingbird in North America, emphasizing the...