Pigeon Poetics: The Ingenuity of Nothing New
(1)
Pigeons: Where our droppings fall, there is potential for either enriching the soil or soiling the encroachment of asphalt and gas guzzlers. A dropping on a car windshield is a reminder that nature is not hidden, not innocuous, and never fully controlled.
Poets: Spatter the world with unasked-for poems. If they don’t find receptive listeners, they can at least call attention to the contrast between mental blockade and nature’s creative persistence.
(2)
Pigeons: Metal spikes along building ledges can’t keep us out. We make our nests there.
Poets: Poetry adapts/thrives not by restricting itself to the rules of what an authority considers “the accessible.” Poetry adapts/thrives by accessing what is off limits yet deeply instinctual.
(3)
Pigeons: Taken for granted. Seen as redundant. Considered pest. Ejected for trespassing. Charged with spreading disease. Disabled. Poisoned. Shot. Mocked. We ingest the processed crumbs available in lieu of fruiting forests. We lose our feet to fishing line. Still we persist on bound stumps.
And we are: Curious, exploratory, opportunistic. Skittishly alert to danger yet boldly mixing with the chaos of city life. Strutting and pecking among the littered absurdities and hypocrisies of human traffic. Sleeping in parks alongside the homeless. Sheltering below freeway overpass. Billing and breeding on piers and bridges. Sunbathing at playgrounds. Perching on fake owls meant to scare us off suburban rooftops. Eating leftovers and handouts. Then nurturing our young with milk. Taking flight in whirling flocks of solidarity.
Poets: Under-published. Under-supported. Unsellable. Unmarketable. Unread. Relegated to the fringe and ignored when the fringe is made vocal. Feeling the encroachment of canned media and corporate war machine. Lost online in a sea of chatter. Made to call calling a hobby. Deemed dangerous and invasive and so labeled sentimental and ineffectual. Yet still we congregate and collaborate. And still we take our audiences across bewildering geographies and down to ocean trenches where the first forms still thrive without the sun.
In poetry, make use of everything despite everything. Investigate. Call attention—even via humility and quiet, introversion and painful sensitivity. “Make it strange” to recall the forgotten familiar. Diversify. Defy. Demand. Transform. Transport. Take flight. Take care. Make the invisible visible. Make the unheard echo. Play hide-in-the-sun and seek-in-the-shadows. Make humorous and compassionate incongruity. Make a mess. Make wild juxtaposition when the expected is a convenient cover-up for complexity. Make simple connection when the expected is distracting hype. Make space. Build community. Question. Doubt. Disidentify. Deconstruct out of love. Live in flux. Breathe.
(4)
Pigeons: And yet, there’s nothing wrong with the musicality of cooing for instrumentally wooing.
Poets: Sound carries sense beyond that of onomatopoeia. Where verb meets its own foggy signifying outskirts, word music takes action to move the metaphor toward generative communion.
(5)
Pigeons and Poets: Use us to carry your messages, and we return home. Let us deliver our own messages, and you return home.
