BirdNote®
Joyce Clement: Birds Punctuate the Days
Written by Mark Bramhill
Mark Bramhill: That is BirdNote.
It is Nationwide Poetry Month within the US, and we’re celebrating by sharing some bird-related work from modern poets. Joyce Clement writes haiku, a conventional Japanese type. Usually regarded as having three strains with 5-7-5 syllables, many English haikus do not observe this sample strictly. There are numerous widespread traits to haiku — they’re typically about nature, a couple of second in time, reference a season — however all good guidelines are made to be damaged. The important half to Joyce:
Joyce Clement: It’s a one breath poem that normally consists of two components: a fraction and a phrase. And people two components are juxtaposed subsequent to one another and type a kind of relationship.
Mark Bramhill: On this sequence of haiku, Joyce juxtaposes punctuation marks with pictures of birds, drawing on their related appearances, in addition to that means and performance. Hear for the way these work collectively:
Birds Punctuate the Days
apostrophe
the nuthatch inserts itself
between feeder and pole
semicolon
two mallards drifting
one dunks for a snail
ellipses
a mourning dove
lifts off
asterisk
a red-eyed vireo catches
the crane fly midair
comma
a down feather
bobs between waves
exclamation level
wren on the railing
takes discover
colon
mergansers paddle towards
morning trout swirl
em sprint
at nightfall a wild goose
heading east
query mark
the size of silence
after a loon’s name
interval
one blue egg all summer time lengthy
now gone
Mark Bramhill: In every haiku within the sequence, you’ll be able to see the totally different sorts of relationships between chook and punctuation. Joyce was initially impressed by the down feather bobbing within the water — its form like a comma, transferring in arcs, with a repetitive, list-like high quality to its movement. Or within the haiku concerning the loon…
Joyce Clement: It is all about asking questions. you have bought a query mark after which that silence that it talks about creates a query, will there be a response? It fosters a way of loneliness. Which, , the loon’s name typically evokes, proper?
Mark Bramhill: Or for the mergansers, it was impressed by her reminiscences seeing them in the summertime within the Adirondacks.
Joyce Clement: And , there was a merganser paddling alongside adopted by, I do not know, , it looks like 100 chicks, however , 10 chicks, all simply in a row, as they do. It is fairly amusing. However that is what made me consider the colon mark, as a result of the colon signifies what to observe goes to be a listing, proper? So there was feminine merganser, adopted by the checklist! Which was all these different, , little, uh, mergansers following alongside. So it needed to be mergansers!
Mark Bramhill: You’ll be able to hold celebrating Poetry Month with extra great writing at our web site, BirdNote.org. I am Mark Bramhill.
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Senior Producer: John Kessler
Content material Director: Allison Wilson
Producer: Mark Bramhill
Managing Producer: Conor Gearin
Bird sounds offered by The Macaulay Library of Pure Sounds on the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, Ithaca, New York. White-breasted Nuthatch ML 176168 recorded by G. Keller, Mourning Dove ML 125320641 recorded by J. McGowan, and Widespread Loon ML 381016291 recorded by D. MacNeal.
BirdNote’s theme was composed and performed by Nancy Rumbel and John Kessler.
© 2022 BirdNote April 2022
Narrator: Mark Bramhill
ID# poetry-03-2022-04-29 poetry-03
