Mini-Prompt: Birds and Wildlife Watching

We're into the final days of our "official" March prompt at Poets Online which is about "lost and found." I saw in the past week several submissions that address the current COVID-19 pandemic. One was a lost and found poem but the others were just about the pandemic in general. I understand the need for poets to write about what's happening, even if that's not what the prompt asked them to write.

I'm writing more than usual. I'm also continuing my daily walks which are often in my local woods but sometimes just suburban sidewalks where people give each other a wide (at least 6 feet) buffer now. But people are waving, nodding and saying hello more than usual.

Today's poem on The Writer's Almanac is "Look It Over" by Wendell Berry which fits in very nicely with my own walks.

I leave behind even
my walking stick. My knife
is in my pocket, but that
I have forgot. I bring
no car, no cell phone,
no computer, no camera,
no CD player, no fax, no
TV, not even a book. I go
into the woods...

I like watching the chickadees at my feeder. They seem so hyperactive, flitting to and from the feeder while others like the little finches and bully jays hang around and keep eating. The video above finally gave me an explanation of why they feed in that manner.

Poets and Writers sent out its weekly newsletter which always contains writing prompt or poets and prose writers. Their current poetry prompt suggestion is "animal watching," particularly birds, which exist in even the most urban environments. They might be visible from your nearby window or at a bird feeder.

There's a poem by Billy Collins ("Christmas Sparrow") about a bird that gets trapped in his house that he included in a beautifully illustrated anthology of bird poems that he edited, Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds.

...Then a noise in the throat of the cat
who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door...

He is able to capture the sparrow in a shirt and gently carry it outside and free it, but

...For the rest of the day,
I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms...

If you have written your "lost and found" poem (or that prompt isn't inspiring you) and want to try the Poets and Writers prompt on animal watching, please do so - and if you'd like to share the result - please post it as a comment to this post. (*NOTE* All comments to the blog need admin approval. Don't panic and post again.)

I will keep posting occasional prompts in the upcoming month besides our official April prompt. April is National Poetry Month and though events will be few, I think we need things like poetry more than ever right now.

Be well, write, and share your words.

         

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Visit our website at poetsonline.org

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A Gaggle of Bird Poems

In case you are looking for additional poems for this month's prompt, here is the table of contents to Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds. Many of these poems are also available online and in anthologies.

A Gull Goes Up by Leonie Adams
Philomela by Matthew Arnold
Vultures by Margaret Atwood
Bird-language by Wystan Hugh Auden
The Albatross by Charles Baudelaire
Owls by Charles Baudelaire
The Vulture by Hilaire Belloc
Job 39: 13-18 by Old Testament Bible
Sandpiper by Elizabeth Bishop
Three Things To Remember by William Blake
Winter Swan by Louise Bogan
To A Waterfowl by William Cullen Bryant
Woodpecker by Gerald Bullett
Address To The Woodlark by Robert Burns
The Cage by Geoffrey Chaucer
'the Nun's Priest's Tale: Chauntecleer by Geoffrey Chaucer
Rondel by Geoffrey Chaucer
The Kingfisher by Amy Clampitt
A Whippoorwill In The Woods by Amy Clampitt
Birds' Nests (2) by John Clare
Turkeys by John Clare
Storm by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Hundred-sunned Phenix by George Darley
The Dove by Walter John De La Mare
Jenny Wren by Walter John De La Mare
The Owl (3) by Walter John De La Mare
The Jay by Emily Dickinson
The Saddest Noise, The Sweetest Noise by Emily Dickinson
Little Birds Are Playing by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
To A Nightingale by William Drummond Of Hawthornden
A Minor Bird by Robert Frost
Never Again Would Birds' Song Be The Same by Robert Frost
The Oven Bird by Robert Frost
The Silver Swan by Orlando Gibbons
The Penguin Jane Austen by Debora Greger
Short Circuit by Daniel Hall
The Caged Goldfinch by Thomas Hardy
The Darkling Thrush by Thomas Hardy
Turkeys Observed by Seamus Heaney
The Starling by John Heath-stubbs
House Sparrows by Anthony Hecht
On A Peacock by Thomas Heyrick
Owl by John Hollander
The Caged Skylark by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Peacock's Eye by Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Windhover: To Christ Our Lord by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Wild Geese Flying by Barbara Howes
Curlews Lift by Edward James Hughes
Hawk Roosting by Edward James Hughes
Swifts by Edward James Hughes
The Mockingbird by Randall Jarrell
Hurt Hawks by Robinson Jeffers
Ode To A Nightingale by John Keats
Vulture by X. J. Kennedy
The Gray Heron by Galway Kinnell
Cormorants by John Kinsella
Hummingbird by David Herbert Lawrence
The Plumed Serpent: 11 by David Herbert Lawrence
The Owl And The Pussy Cat by Edward Lear
The Bird by Marie Rene Auguste Alexis Saint-leger Leger
The Man-of-war Hawk by Herman Melville
The Peacock by James Ingram Merrill
Fly by William Stanley Merwin
Wild Swans by Edna St. Vincent Millay
To The Nightingale by John Milton
He 'digesteth Harde Yron' by Marianne Moore
The Sea-gull by Ogden Nash
The Blue Swallows by Howard Nemerov
Hawk by Mary Oliver
Owl by Sylvia Plath
The Cranes by Po Chu-yi
The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
The Harpies by Publius Vergilius Maro
The Flamingos by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Swan by Rainer Maria Rilke
The Heron by Theodore Roethke
Pain Or Joy by Christina Georgina Rossetti
A Robin's Nest by Mary Jo Salter
Pigeons by Vikram Seth
The Nightingales by Percy Bysshe Shelley
To A Skylark by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Cock-a-doo by Florence Margaret Smith
Quail In Autumn by William Jay Smith
The Merry Cuckoo by Edmund Spenser
Two Swans, Sels. by Edmund Spenser
Juncos by William Edgar Stafford
Pigeons On The Grass, Fr. Four Saints In Three Acts by Gertrude Stein
Domination Of Black by Wallace Stevens
Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird by Wallace Stevens
One Of The Strangest by May Swenson
The Dying Swan by Alfred Tennyson
The Eagle; A Fragment by Alfred Tennyson
Birds' Nests by Philip Edward Thomas
The Hollow Wood by Philip Edward Thomas
The Owl by Philip Edward Thomas
The Cuckoo Song by Anonymous
The Death And Burial Of Cock Robbin by Anonymous
I Saw A Peacock by Anonymous
The Lark by Anonymous
The Loon Upon The Lake by Anonymous
Magpies by Anonymous
The Twa Corbies by Anonymous
What Do We Geese Wear For Clothes? by Anonymous
Seagulls by John Updike
Mockingbird Month by Mona Van Duyn
Nuthatch by David Wagoner
Peacock Display by David Wagoner
Egyptian Kites by Rex Warner
Evening Hawk by Robert Penn Warren
A Listener's Guide To The Birds by Elwyn Brooks White
Out Of The Cradle Endlessly Rocking by Walt Whitman
The Robin by John Greenleaf Whittier
Impromptu by Samuel Wilberforce
A Black November Turkey by Richard Wilbur
Marche Aux Oiseaux by Richard Wilbur
To A Sparrow by William Carlos Williams
Ecclesiastical Sonnets: Part 1: 16. Persuasion by William Wordsworth
Black Cockatoos by Judith Wright
Pelicans by Judith Wright
Leda And The Swan by William Butler Yeats
Sailing To Byzantium by William Butler Yeats
The Wild Swans At Coole by William Butler Yeats

Bright Wings and Spring

Looking into a new anthology, a new anthology Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds was the inspiration for our March prompt.

Did you notice the new poll on the top right of this blog? I am asking you "What types of prompts inspire you to write?" Topics is a common one.

I used three model poems on the site this month that you should read there to make the point that poets have several takes on our avian topic. Birds appear in the anthology as admirable, terrible, like humans, unlike humans, poetic, mythical, and humorous.

I might caution you to avoid the trap that anthropomorphism offers. (That's the attribution of human characteristics to non-human creatures.) It a well-accepted art and storytelling technique. Animals, plants, and forces of nature are commonly personified in poems. It has ancient roots in most cultures, especially in fable traditions.

Personification is a common ontological metaphor that we all learned in school along with other literary terms in which a thing or abstraction is represented as a person. So, that is one approach you might take for this prompt, but when taken too far, a poem sounds more like a children's story than a poem.

And why have so many poets gone to the birds for inspiration? Song certainly has something to do with it. With poets probably first being singers, birds were natural compatriots.

When I first discovered in some classroom those poetic collective nouns, the avian ones were particularly appealing: a murder of crows, a murmuration of starlings, a parliament of fowls.

Poets.org has a feature that you should also look at called "Thirteen Ways of Looking: Poems About Birds" in honor of the poem "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" by Wallace Stevens.

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

Ted Hughes used birds as symbols in The Hawk in the Rain and in Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow.

Crow realized there were two Gods --
One of them much bigger than the other
Loving his enemies
And having all the weapons.

Hughes does something that William Blake and others did before him - a kind of new Gospel through the Crow. The crow plays an important role as a totem bird in many Native American story traditions.

Emily Dickinson writes that "Hope is the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul" but she also sees another side in her "A Bird Came Down."

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

Elizabeth Bishop's "Sandpiper" is a poor obsessed bird.

The world is a mist. And then the world is
minute and vast and clear. The tide
is higher or lower. He couldn't tell you which.
His beak is focused; he is preoccupied,

looking for something, something, something.

Let's hope that we see a variety of species and approaches this month as Spring returns and probably bring some birds back to your area.


The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson
The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens
The Complete Poems of Elizabeth Bishop