I recently shared a couple poems from the 1985 illustrated edition of Pablo Neruda’s poetry collection Art of Birds. I guess I got lucky last year, scoring an old library copy for less than $20, because prices on any edition of this book are now pretty steep. Here are four of Jack Unruh‘s bird drawings that accompany Jack Schmitt’s translations of the poems.
It looks like several people enjoyed the previous post featuring a poem about a bird from Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds. I mentioned that all but the first and last poems in the collection are about one specific species of bird, but the second-to-last poem takes a liberty with that idea. In it, having painted dozens of magically expressive verbal portraits of birds, Neruda considers himself as a bird.
MeBird (Pablo insulidae nigra)
I am the Pablo Bird,
bird of a single feather,
a flier in the clear shadow
and obscure clarity,
my wings are unseen,
my ears resound
when I walk among the trees
or beneath the tombstones
like an unlucky umbrella
or a naked sword,
stretched like a bow
or round like a grape,
I fly on and on not knowing,
wounded in the dark night,
who is waiting for me,
who does not want my song,
who desires my death,
who will not know I’m arriving,
who will not come to subdue me,
to bleed me, to twist me,
or to kiss my clothes,
torn by the shrieking wind.
That’s why I come and go,
fly and don’t fly but sing:
I am the furious bird
of the calm storm.
Last year, I got an illustrated hardcover edition of Pablo Neruda’s book, Art of Birds, translated by Jack Schmitt with drawings by Jack Unruh. It was a bit of an accident, since I thought I was ordering a bilingual edition, and I wish this volume included the original Spanish. But even without the originals, this is a very cool addition to my Neruda collection. Every poem (with the exception of the first and last) is about one specific species of bird, and many of them are right up there with Neruda’s best and more well-known poems.
The following poem is about the austral blackbird, which I had never heard of before, so here is a link to read a little more about this bird, see a picture, and listen to 30 seconds of its unique song.
Austral Blackbird (curaeus curaeus)
Whoever looks at me face-to-face
I shall kill with two knives,
with two furious lightning bolts:
with two icy black eyes.
I was not born for captivity.
I have a wild army,
a militant militia,
a battalion of black bullets:
no seeded field can withstand.
I fly, devour, screech, and move on,
rise and fall with a thousand wings:
nothing can stop my determination,
the black order of my feathers.
My soul is a burned log,
my plumage pure coal:
my soul and suit are black:
that’s why I dance in the white sky.
ideas and emotions are seeds
longing to sprout
unfurling green to capture the sun
they might live for centuries
or be wrapped in fire
presented as gifts to the blackening sky
they might become medicine or poison
they might drink their fill or die of thirst
they might flourish in obscurity
or wither under the attention of millions
they might fill a forest like soldiers
marching in chaotic ranks to the coast
or stand isolated on the cliff edge
where no one sleeps in their branches
seeds neither know nor care for any of this
gravity tugs their roots
the sun summons leaves
the stalk joins earth to heaven
the seedling wants to grow
yet desires nothing
seeking light
without ever looking
words we create together
for each other
lavender-scented and improvised
bloom like wild roses in a field
untidy and free
scattered in summer sunlight
delicate as lace
our blossoms want to stay
unplucked from our stems
we cover this field
in a scent we share
embracing bees
who drink from us
we hold them close within our petals
for moments we never recapture
but always remember
giving grains of pollen like gifts
paper-thin wings
carry our presents
to distant lovers we never meet
flowers who want to taste and touch us
to grow as we have grown
and fill this place
with creations of their own
While organizing my writing files today, I found my collection of blackout poems from a few years ago. Some were eventually combined or otherwise transformed into poems I published in Anything Sounds Like a Symphony. If you’re looking for off-beat inspiration for your own poetry adventures, give this method a shot. I didn’t invent it. It came to me through a friend of Austin Kleon, who made a name for himself doing this to pages of newspapers and launched a successful series of books including Newspaper Blackout and the New York Times Bestseller Steal Like an Artist.
I didn’t use newspapers, but a stack of National Geographic and old Playboy magazines, and odds and ends like an issue of Seattle’s Stranger.
You can do it with anything! In a writing course I took last January from Joanne Fedler, we did a similar exercise with our own material. We started with free-writing based on our recent dreams, just filling the pages with anything that came to mind, and then we highlighted only the most captivating words or short phrases. We used those as prompts for additional writing, like new starting points, but my highlighted pages resembled a blackout poem. Anyway, here’s the lot of them, from the archives.
let us remain weightless
high above earth’s orbit
intangible spirits
untroubled by time
and its disasters
do you see how they scurry below us
frightened by storms that find them
terrified by a future they cannot predict
but arrives in solid armor
crushing everything in its path
is that what you wish for us
to be physical and real
to empty every drinking glass eventually
to wither away and become nothing
untraceable specks in a landscape
no one remembers
not even our children
consider
my counteroffer
let us remain weightless
and only touch them in their dreams
where we do and say what we please
let our only gravity be emotions
they remember for moments in the morning
then disregard
let us live more lives than one
an endless stream of biographies
we shape and redefine
only temporarily imprisoned
in a parade of faces
and memories
that never happened
let us meet them
in gardens untended
in buildings unconstructed
never becoming as real
as those we encounter
let us remain weightless
only touching life at its edges
like tourists who long to see a country
without immersing
in its wars or politics
when you and i become dreams
we will swim vast oceans
with no more commitment
than dipping our toes in the surf
without ever leaving
this place beyond it all
where we are forever unknowable
always seen
and never
ever
touched
An hour-long reading of fifty original poems selected from Anything Sounds Like a Symphony, Animal Inside You, and Never See the Night, along with two previously uncollected poems. Narrated by the author. This audiobook is now available on Audible, Amazon, and iTunes. Plus, the text comes in a Kindle edition so you can read along!
