For National Poetry Day: A poem from my new collection

Thirteen ways of listening to a blackbird

Photo by Crawford Jolly on Unsplash

Happy National Poetry Day to all those who worship at the altar of words. This year’s theme is ‘counting’.

In November my new poetry collection, Blackbird Singing at Dusk, will be published by Nine Arches Press. I can’t wait to share it with you.

Blackbird Singing at Dusk by Wendy Pratt is a bold exploration of place within nature through themes of rural working-class identity and the female body, alongside explorations of loss and the repetitive nature of time. 

Cover artwork: ‘Hidden in the Crab Apples' © Gary and Heather Ramskill www.littleramstudio.etsy.com

Today I want to share with you one of the poems from the collection.

As the theme of the day is ‘counting’ I’m sharing a poem called ‘Thirteen Ways of Listening to a Blackbird’.

My intention with this particular poem was to embed myself within a group of poetic observers, poets in particular, who had written ‘thirteen…blackbird’ poems, and other series of polaroid-like observations of nature. Poets such as Wallace Stevens, who wrote Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird, which influenced RS Thomas’s ‘Thirteen Blackbirds Look at a Man’, which used to be available to view online but doesn’t seem to be there anymore.

There’s an interesting article here, if you can access it, about that connection between Wallace and Thomas: An Abstraction Blooded. I’d be interested in your thoughts around that connection, and other poems that you think fit into this observed, short poem canon.

Both the poems play with the idea of observation and perception. Both of the poems play with haiku style poems rooted perhaps in the Japanese artist Hokusai’s ‘Thirty Six Views of Mount Fuji’. Hokusai was influenced by other artists viewing landscape from different perspectives, and he in turn influenced future artists to do the same. I wanted to be influenced by these artists and in a very small way take up space in that lineage. I wanted to add to the observed stances around nature and landscape. The beginning of that process was looking back through my life to times both significant (the blackbird at the hospital window) and seemingly insignificant, to build a picture of the blackbirds existing, living, dying, singing around me oblivious to whether I was experiencing a significant life moment or not. I wanted to capture these tiny moments of interconnectedness, of noticing. And to recognise that the lives of animals are not significant because they are attached to our lives. They are significant in their own right.

The first tiny stanza alludes to a famous song by The Beatles, of course. Another space in which the song of the bird becomes something metaphorical, another artistic view of the blackbird, another allusion to interconnectedness, though when I first heard the song, as a child, playing my mum’s old Beatles records on our orange box record player, I didn’t really understand the significance of the lyrics. It’s interesting to see what McCartney was influenced by in his writing of the song.

I had been doing some [poetry readings] in the last year or so because I've got a poetry book out called Blackbird Singing, and when I would read "Blackbird", I would always try and think of some explanation to tell the people … So, I was doing explanations, and I actually just remembered why I'd written "Blackbird", you know, that I'd been, I was in Scotland playing on my guitar, and I remembered this whole idea of "you were only waiting for this moment to arise" was about, you know, the black people's struggle in the southern states, and I was using the symbolism of a blackbird. It's not really about a blackbird whose wings are broken, you know, it's a bit more symbolic.

Art doesn’t happen in a vacuum. There is a web of creativity, and I find that comforting. There is growth, always in art, and perhaps I was trying to connect back to those moments of growth in my own life. Poetry is a bit like that, isn’t it.

I often tell my mentees that if you have to explain a poem before you read it, then it’s probably not doing its job. But I hope this little deep dive into the way the poem came together is useful to you, if you are a reader, if you are a writer.

Thirteen ways of listening to a blackbird

I
on broken wings
for two minutes and nineteen seconds.

II
A leucistic blackbird
is unable to deposit
pigment correctly into its plumage.
It is always recognisable.
It can never blend in.
It sings like it doesn’t care.

III
The chutt-chutt of a blackbird
sifting through last year’s leaves
as if it had a dozen things to do at home
but can’t find its house keys.

IV
Terrible beauty of the blackbird
singing at the hospital window.

V
In a slip of early morning light
a female, the colour of turned earth
appears as a black note on the stave
of a telephone line.

VI
In the cathedral of a beech copse
two blackbirds echo each other
their songs arcing away as ripples
in a tiny mirroring of time and place
within the universe.

VII
After the underground conveyer belts
and the dull beat of the factory
a blackbird singing its heart out
in the 4am sunlight.



VIII
For four years
my bones were hollow, my cavities
stuffed with blackbird feathers. All my sounds
were dulled and yet, in the nest of my heart;
the chipped flint alarm call of a blackbird.

IX
Sound of dad’s car
pulling into the drive, radio so loud
I can hear every word clearly.
Sudden silence.
House door opening.
Blackbird filling the quiet.

X
The sparrow hawk
forces the blackbird
to contract
like a sonic boom

XI
Twelve thousand years ago
a blackbird was singing
while the lake people
set up their camp.

XII
The air was heavy with heat.
The wine was a cold fire.
We counted the repetitions
of the blackbird’s song.

XIII
Saintly death of the blackbird
wings spread; eyes tight shut
one speck of blood on the yellow beak
but even in the silence that comes
after the sudden stopping of motion
I am carrying its song in my head.

Paid subscribers, don’t forget the October course: Ghost Lake Rising begins tomorrow!

You don’t have to do anything, course notes will arrive in your inbox if you are a paid subscriber.

Until next time

x