Output details

Bird Bird

This is a sequence of prose poems focussing on British birds. With a few exceptions, it is organised around a constraint in that I permitted myself to write only about birds on the “British list” with a repeated Latin binomial (Troglodytes troglodytes – Wren; Anser anser – Greylag Goose, etc), a pragmatic and aesthetic constraint that set the length of the book and forced me to write about birds that I would not ordinarily have considered or seen. The prose poem, a form that the North American L=A=N=G=U=G=E poets have redeployed to foreground linguistic disjunction and dislocation, seemed a fitting vehicle for these elusive creatures and I have used disjunctive processes throughout to underline their often indeterminate status. I have also employed the discrepancy between the Latin and vernacular names to show up the historically competing languages used to write about birds, from the scientific, taxonomic and empirical discourses of ornithology and bird-watching to the irrational and strangely alluring language of bird lore. Utilising bird guides, ornithological texts and books of bird lore as research tools, I aimed to bring these opposing discourses together in the poems to produce a pleasing clash of registers as well as to produce an impossible ‘version’ of each bird which can only exist in print. Not unlike the plants in Louis Zukofsky’s 80 Flowers or the places in Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, the birds are ultimately textual beings, products of reading as much as seeing. However, I have not altogether ignored their natural habitat. Although I wanted to defamiliarise the birds, making them difficult to see as they often are in our world, and to retain their sense of otherness, I have also been careful not to render them so alien as to destroy the reasons they remain such a compelling subject.