Stirred for a Bird

Welcome, friend.

Hello! and welcome to The Close Read, a newsletter of words about words. Does that description sound amorphous? You betcha. Is that what we like about poetry? Heck yeah.

I hope to use this newsletter as a home for little slices of poetic joy, selected to serve as the dark chocolate to the moist cardboard of your inbox. Together, we'll learn about some poetry, wander through my Notes App, and hopefully, even write some things. Let's give it a whirl.

Is it a prayer?

Someone behind me has just begun to read in a language that sounds like a combination of Russian and Italian. The vowels are Italian, the consonants are Russian. The pacing is poetry, and though I understand none of it, I can hear the way the language spools out: the same words are repeated, then stretched to longer phrases, then stressed on new syllables. Is it a prayer?

I’m in the heated Covid-shack of an Upper East Side coffeeshop. Inside the shop, patrons cozy next to a fake fire and yellowy plants. Outside, for the same price, I’m mainly experiencing the smell of rat piss. And this man, perhaps praying. Perhaps reading poetry.

Last week, I was given the recommendation to start a poetry newsletter.

I love the idea of holding myself accountable to sharing poetry. But more, I love the idea of writing a newsletter with the audience of Aunts. It feels like an achievable goal: writing miscellany for an audience of those already waiting with two thumbs up before the email’s marked “read.” After all, what I want is not a new project, but just a happy little dumping-ground for the joys and detritus of my reading and seeing in New York: the overheards, observeds, and delighted-ins of this city. If that receptacle is a goofy lumpy newsletter, then perhaps I’ll be better for it.

Recently, I’ve been leaning hard on ChatGPT. Cover letters, LinkedIn posts, emails—they’ve all been slowly outsourced from my lyrical little brain to The Big Computer to be cut and to be dried. Maybe this means I’m a terrible writer. Maybe it means that when a friend suggests a newsletter, I better go for it so I can remind myself of what words are, and so I can remind all of us of what words written by humans can do.

So, let’s anticipate this thing to be lyrical, even decadent. Let’s anticipate some poetry, or not. Let’s anticipate moments of New York joy, or at least intrigue. And let’s not worry too much about how often this lands in your inbox, okay?

With that, a poem.

Note for the friends I'm bribing to subscribe to this newsletter but who don't actually like poetry: Don't let this language spook you. We're just getting started. If you don’t “understand” this poem, you’re not “bad” at poetry. Start by hearing this poem, like listening to Italian/Russian—feel the pace of it, the repeated sounds, the shifts in volume, and the breaks.

Thoughts

Oh, Gerard. Gerard wants everything—to say everything, to do everything, to dance some huge beautiful dance with the entire world stitched on his cape and to be a flower and a bird and to swallow oceans and to explode with every passing moment. He also wants to want nothing: Hopkins was a Jesuit priest and an ascetic. Throughout his short life, sweet Gerard struggled to mediate his love for religious stoicism with the decadence he found in poetry. At one point, he burned all of his work and swore off poetry for years. He did the same with water—he once attempted to forgo drinking all liquids for a week, and was sent home for collapsing during a school drill.

Can’t you feel this tension in his work? This feeling that words hold the same power to him as water? That, like a man who’s sworn off sugar, he’s suddenly stolen into the kitchen by refrigerator-light and gorged himself on all the fudges, cookies, cakes he could find?

I mean, just note the ‘and’s in this line: “Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here / Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion / Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!” Note that last AND! How he’s capitalized it—as if to open his mouth even wider to somehow pack just another brilliant detail into the bite! This man is a poetry junky in its most literal sense.

A close reading reveals a mirror of form to content. The first stanza gives us a hawk (a windhover) flying in the morning. Then, the turn comes with that “heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird.” In other words, the beautiful view of the bird has awakened the speaker’s heart. The rest of the poem expands on this concept: So, too, does air and brute beauty “buckle” into flame. So, too, does a plough make soil (sillion) freshly shine. So, too, does a fallen ember blaze into vermilion. In each of these cases, some force has elicited a bright reaction from the interior. This bird has acted as a pinprick on the heart, causing it to burst with exultant language.

This is a poem of a man trying so hard to be cold to the pleasures of the world, only to verbosely (and verbously) melt at the flick of a wing. Isn’t this what we all want for ourselves? Little moments of joy that drop like embers into our souls and catch flame? Oh, may our hearts be as flammable as Gerard’s. Oh, may we attempt to be as tough as Gerard on the school yard, and then collapse into love.

It’s tempting to see the lofty language, sonnet structure (5 points to anyone who spotted that!), and imposed accents aigus, and to think “old.” Don’t be fooled! This loose but distinct rhythm, this line break chopping up "king-/doms," this searching sense of interiority—these were ideas that bloomed in the cold light of *Modernism*! Hopkins’ work was mostly published posthumously, in 1918—three years after The Voyage Out, four years before The Waste Land. This is just to say: everything good has something to do with Virginia Woolf.

Want a deeper reading? Here’s a great poem guide from Poetry Foundation.

Quote of the Week:

Child on the 6 Train: "What's a relative?"

Caretaker: “A relative is someone’s someone’s someone’s someone.“

After Sabotage: A Writing Prompt

• Today, I came across the following headline on Upper East Site, a spooky Instagram news source for the UES: “Rare Owl Escapes Central Park Zoo After Sabotage, Spotted on the UES.” It made my heart swoon. The mystery!!!! The photo of the owl, startled—but in a witchy way—on a New York city sidewalk!!!! The word choice of SABOTAGE?! (There had been a plan, someone had been wronged, and perhaps the owl was in on it.)

• Okay, okay, the prompt: Write something that starts “After sabotage…”

• If you do it, send it to me! Maybe someday something will come of us. Or this.

So, I think we’re good here! Man, I love Hopkins.

Please feel free to respond with your feedback, counter-analyses, poem requests, or Notes App creations. I'd love to hear from you.

May your heart in hiding [be] stirred for a bird,

Robiny

Also: Croissant of the Week

Boulangerie at the Tin Building

• Freshness: 9

• External Texture: 7

• Internal Texture: 9.5

• Flavor: 9

• Overall: 8.625