The other short poem I'll read, and then I'll
get out to a normal one and see how my time is.
Here's another poem I wrote up at the MacDowell Colony.
It is a rather characteristic MacDowell Colony poem,
because it's about birds.
Now, when you have the poet out in the woods, he has a choice.
He can either stare at that blank wall all day,
which is what I was talking about,
and that's very depressing, or you can look outside
and look at all these birds.
And I did, and I got myself a bird book and went at it.
[LAUGHING]
Somewhere in the bird book when I was getting discouraged,
I ran across this remarkable statement.
This is a Roger Tory Peterson book, an Eastern version,
a field guide for birds.
He's talk about the Philadelphia Vireo.
I've seen a lot of little birds in my place and--
[LAUGHING]
--I-- I was trying to analyze some of them.
Meanwhile, I had, as the poem indicates,
a larger bird on my porch, which I called a Phoebe.
Although since then, someone has told me that Phoebes never
build nests on porches.
I still think I had a Phoebe on my porch.
But it was there a long time.
But anyway, Roger Tory Peterson was talking
about the Philadelphia Vireo.
And he said, "anyone unable to tell a Vireo from a Warbler is
hardly ready to recognize this species."
[LAUGHTER]
And I agree with him.
[LAUGHTER]
So here's the poem about the Philadelphia Vireo,
although it's really about my Phoebe.
[LAUGHTER]
One can't do much in these woods without a bird book.
Right on my porch sits a busy, light-breasted thing I name
phoebe building a nest.
And the pines by the house are held by a reddish brown thrush
and its reddish brown mate, along with the smallest
bird on the planet, some warbler or finch,
who struts down below on the needles on matchstick legs.
Far out and high, I hear what I think is mockingbird.
Then there are crows, robins, jays, a few pheasants, what-all.
I march up and down with my bird book, scholarly,
interested in the variety of sounds, shapes,
amused by my own insufficiencies as stalker of wildlife,
but otherwise little disposed to be
moved, to commune, to identify.
Tolstoy described the Greeks as a half savage,
slave-holding people.
He was angry, not at the slavery, or the savagery,
sculptering nudes, or even the Greeks themselves
who made pretty temples, but at Christians,
who, in hundreds of years on their own,
had thought up no basic aesthetic of their own.
He should have sniped at the birds,
too, while he was at it, little pagans,
for putting so many poets in bushes with bird books.
[LAUGHTER]
It's a bad day and I feel like a fool out here with the birds.
[LAUGHTER]
And now I'm writing these lines, dissonant things,
and thinking bird things, because I'm
a bloody professional bird and must damn well sing.
So I sing.
Chrrrk, chrrrk.
[LAUGHTER]
Yet one can hardly dislike birds.
They have energy.
They are strange.
There is wonder in energy, strangeness.
Art needs that.
Man needs that.
And I seemed to be in these woods for that,
though writing a man book.
So, I say to my phoebe, the one on the porch,
the busy one who is flying in sticks
to her nest like a drunken west wind: bird, man
thinks, though he thinks much too much for all
he knows of thee, well of thee.