WEBVTT

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The other short poem
I'll read, and then I'll

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get out to a normal one
and see how my time is.

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Here's another poem I wrote
up at the MacDowell Colony.

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It is a rather characteristic
MacDowell Colony poem,

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because it's about birds.

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Now, when you have the poet out
in the woods, he has a choice.

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He can either stare at
that blank wall all day,

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which is what I
was talking about,

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and that's very depressing,
or you can look outside

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and look at all these birds.

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And I did, and I got myself
a bird book and went at it.

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[LAUGHING]

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Somewhere in the bird book
when I was getting discouraged,

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I ran across this
remarkable statement.

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This is a Roger Tory Peterson
book, an Eastern version,

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a field guide for birds.

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He's talk about the
Philadelphia Vireo.

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I've seen a lot of little
birds in my place and--

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[LAUGHING]

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--I-- I was trying to
analyze some of them.

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Meanwhile, I had, as
the poem indicates,

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a larger bird on my porch,
which I called a Phoebe.

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Although since then, someone
has told me that Phoebes never

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build nests on porches.

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I still think I had
a Phoebe on my porch.

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But it was there a long time.

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But anyway, Roger Tory
Peterson was talking

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about the Philadelphia Vireo.

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And he said, "anyone unable to
tell a Vireo from a Warbler is

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hardly ready to
recognize this species."

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[LAUGHTER]

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And I agree with him.

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[LAUGHTER]

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So here's the poem about
the Philadelphia Vireo,

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although it's really
about my Phoebe.

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[LAUGHTER]

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One can't do much in these
woods without a bird book.

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Right on my porch sits a busy,
light-breasted thing I name

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phoebe building a nest.

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And the pines by the house are
held by a reddish brown thrush

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and its reddish brown mate,
along with the smallest

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bird on the planet,
some warbler or finch,

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who struts down below on the
needles on matchstick legs.

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Far out and high, I hear
what I think is mockingbird.

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Then there are crows, robins,
jays, a few pheasants, what-all.

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I march up and down with
my bird book, scholarly,

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interested in the variety
of sounds, shapes,

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amused by my own insufficiencies
as stalker of wildlife,

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but otherwise little
disposed to be

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moved, to commune, to identify.

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Tolstoy described the
Greeks as a half savage,

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slave-holding people.

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He was angry, not at the
slavery, or the savagery,

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sculptering nudes, or
even the Greeks themselves

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who made pretty temples,
but at Christians,

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who, in hundreds of
years on their own,

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had thought up no basic
aesthetic of their own.

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He should have
sniped at the birds,

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too, while he was at
it, little pagans,

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for putting so many poets
in bushes with bird books.

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[LAUGHTER]

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It's a bad day and I feel like
a fool out here with the birds.

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[LAUGHTER]

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And now I'm writing these
lines, dissonant things,

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and thinking bird
things, because I'm

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a bloody professional bird
and must damn well sing.

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So I sing.

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Chrrrk, chrrrk.

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[LAUGHTER]

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Yet one can hardly
dislike birds.

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They have energy.

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They are strange.

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There is wonder in
energy, strangeness.

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Art needs that.

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Man needs that.

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And I seemed to be in
these woods for that,

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though writing a man book.

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So, I say to my phoebe,
the one on the porch,

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the busy one who
is flying in sticks

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to her nest like a drunken
west wind: bird, man

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thinks, though he thinks
much too much for all

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he knows of thee, well of thee.

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