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Chapter Eight: Listening
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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147 Chapter Eight Listening by the porch a flock of Cedar waxwings has occurred to the cedars like their lost tribe, deft and excited, seep seep seeping from the frontiers of the audible. – Don McKay, “Little Rivers” (SD 28) The closing moments of “Little Rivers” (SD 28) resonate clearly with McKavian listening. Presenting an early version of his idea that “[t]he porch is the ear of the house”(DW 19), McKay in“Little Rivers”emphasizes the importance of edge effect when paying attention to the world outside the home. The image of the birder-poet standing on a porch and craning to hear the relatively quiet song notes of cedar waxwings fittingly articulates what it means to pay attention in the McKavian sense. Because of the colonial legacies of the English language and the Western human desire for ownership, the birder-poet and the ecocritic must position themselves at the edge and crane toward the more-than-human world, which is always only “seeping from the frontiers of the audible,” and listen. The porch offers an apt spot for the birder-poet to experience the outside while comfortably within the house’s interior. In “Song for the Song of the Sandhill Crane” (P 7), McKay interrogates his own trope—but this time, the porch exists between domestic /wild space and between domesticated/wild time. The crane’s song pushes at the limits of hearing the way heavy bass at a concert thumps inside chests: “It eschews the ear,” says the birder-poet,“with its toolshed, its lab, its Centre for Advanced / Studies in Hermeneutics and Gossip, / to boom exactly in my thorax” (61). The act of listening, important though it is for poetic attention, relies upon a set of cultural markers that more or less distort sounds. The search for meaning and the associations we make when hearing sounds ultimately maintain a distance between us and the sound’s source. 148 • Chapter Eight The crane’s song bypasses the birder-poet’s cultural processes, embodying millennia of evolutionary stability while he hovers safely between, a point that forms the poem’s crux: Why am I standing on this frigid porch in my pajamas, peering into the mist which rises in little spirals from the pond? Where they call from the blue has nearly thinned to no-colourclear . Where they call from hominids haven’t yet happened. Garroo: (61) The question applies to the poem’s speaker as well as to the birder-poet— and all birders, all poets, perhaps—more generally. Unlike the waxwings “seeping from the frontiers of the audible,” the cranes have been inhabiting the audible since long before the present, booming from beyond and before human language. In eschewing the ear, the crane’s song communicates nothing other than its ancientness, its wilderness inviting curious introspection from the edges. The porch and the pond, the latter of which, McKay writes elsewhere, “gathers in its edge” such things as “pollen, heron, leaves, larvae, greater / and lesser scaup” (S/S 12), receive the crane’s guttural “Garroo,” hold it, and don’t know what else to do. “[W]ho can bear those star-river distances?” the speaker ponders, referring to the Milky Way’s cosmic aloofness . What the listening ear wants is to get closer. Craning from the edge between mist and kitchen, it wants to get closer. One of McKay’s earlier poems, “Listen at the Edge” (B 123), succinctly posits listening on a threshold between human language and the more-thanhuman song that the poet can only gesture toward onomatopoeically. The onomatopoeia, as metaphorical gesture, is a common recourse for the writers of field guides“when attempting descriptions of songs and calls,”despite their tendency to consider the language of field guides and reference books “as clinically awe-free”with their“terse asyntactical bursts of fact”(V 85). To the contrary, McKay suggests such descriptions—the call of the Swainson’s thrush, for example, compared to “the sound of a drop of water in a barrel ”: whoit (85)—are“mini-poems”that often contain“the point of greatest descriptive accuracy”in their ability to stick in the reader’s memory; to help him become a better listener (85). In “Listen at the Edge,” both poet and reader stand “At the edge of firelight ,” where [34.237.245.80] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 05:19 GMT) Listening • 149 every word is shadowed by its animal, our ears are empty auditoria for scritch scritch scritch rr-ronk...