How To Be A Cockatoo (After Judith Beveridge)
Raise your ire,
in an opera house coif.
Hang by one knee,
arms hooked and
flailing,
from the clothesline’s lank trapezium.
Tear at the gazebo’s unkempt lace,
with an iron eye,
and a delinquent glee.
Warn the world you are
all here,
in scraped blackboard
oratorios.
Stretch and soar the
way of clouds,
on scattered ice-cream
days.
Bow like sunset divas,
in Tropicana curtain
calls
Yowl
when I am a boy
I will stalk the tops
of narrow fences
in night and death’s
musk camouflage
when I am a boy
with moon-slivered
hooks
I will make rapier
leaps
when I am a boy
I will arch like
palisades
when I am a boy
I will catch
moonshadow from cold
stars
when I am a boy
my mouth’s red cage
will slake silence sly
as fire
when i am a boy
feathers will fly amok
when I am a boy
I will defecate under
too bright stars
in the neighbour’s begonias
and smile knowingly
when I am a boy
I will disdain
gravity and all lesser
laws
when I am a boy
you will know the song
of my fast-spun lives
when I am a boy
this yowl will glow
from my red coal mouth
when I am a boy
I will howl the abandon
of closed-fast doors
when I am a boy
I will sleep
curled with the weight
of six thousand years
against your knees and
chest
when I am a boy
I will watch bright
motes
listening for the sun’s soft golden name
shouldered warm as
laurels
when I am a boy
I will stretch
like the languor of
summer’s final sundown
when i am a boy
I will slink
beneath a hawk-steep
moon
counting the pincushion
heartbeats
of swift, tremulous
lives
when I am a boy
I will scratch
delinquent cuneiform
in the wall’s blank slate
when I am a boy
in flailing oscillation
I will tear the
nightshadow’s
fast fleeing flanks
when I am a boy
I will eat your breath
when I am a boy
I will be
the ink that spills
across your dream
when I am a boy
I will arch and bristle
in your unkempt sleep
when I am a boy
I will bring you ragged
remains
proud as Caesar
when I am a boy I will
with one eye slit open
curl at your feet
when I am a boy
I will love you with
eyes as big as worlds
when I am a boy
I will love you with
the moon’s cold proud disdain
when I am a boy
I will love you
with slow-churning
pinwheel eyes
when I am a boy
I will gleam
still as porcelain
when I am a boy
against the too-bright
glow
I will sleekly yowl
the way a poem is a
cage
hungering for a bird
On The Impossibility
Of A De-Anthropocentric Distance In Poetry
The freedom (despite the many constraints of any particular instance) that defines poetry, is, as poet and scholar David McCooey says, “one of the melancholy privileges of cultural marginality” (2012). Or to put it in the words of another poet, “freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose” (Kristoffersen 1970). Freedom entails a certain ambivalence, a surrender, an equivocation; a tension between seemingly opposing considerations. To grasp freedom, in life and poetry, we must forego everything, become unencumbered, embrace a more essential, a more authentic, a more animalistic nature. These are, of course, romantic and neo-romantic conceptions, I hear the critics say. What of it? Poetry is not a documentary; it is a romantic gesture, in the old sense of romance as a story - irregardless of how quotidian, how reseserved, how distanced, poetry narrativises both the poet and their life.
Attempting to reconcile similar dichotomies, Onno Oerlemans considers how, by rejecting the anthropocentric, the anthropomorphic and similar encumbrances, “something of the actual creaturely reality of the sentient beings that inhabit the planet might be found in or rescued from these cultural constructions” (2018: 13)
As exemplar, Oerlemans goes on to discuss J M Coetzee’s discussion of the jaguar in Ted Hughes’s eponymous poem in which he observes and imagines the beast pacing in its captivity. Somehow in the wild recesses of its instinct, it sees only and achieves the freedom of the savannah;
More than to the visionary his cell:
His stride is wildernesses of
freedom:
The world rolls under the long
thrust of his heel.
Over the cage floor the horizons
come.
(2018: 15)
Oerlemans (through Coetzee) finds the poem “presents an encounter with an actual animal rather than something obviously symbolic,
conceptual, or otherwise artificial” (2018: 17). While far from the simple allegorical use both decry,
the fact that a jaguar is a creature of jungle, forest, wetlands
and scrub, rather than the rolling horizons suggested by the poem, the fact that we,
audience, observers, readers, are brought into the desire of the animal;
As a child at a dream,
a dream so powerful that;
at a jaguar hurrying enraged
Through prison darkness after the
drills of his eyes
On a short fierce fuse. Not in
boredom—
The eye satisfied to be blind in
fire,
By the bang of blood in the brain
deaf to the ear—
He spins from the bars, but there’s no cage to him
(2018: 15)
indicates we are in discourse which while attempting to embody the animal in itself, nevertheless invokes an array of symbols that we cannot help but see as emblematic ofhuman concerns. Visionary, horizons, prison, rage, fuse, boredom, blind in fire, blood -terms almost mythopoeic in their resonance, are projections in which the dialogicalrelationship between author, poem, subject and reader is mediated by the figure of the animal.
If texts are, as Mikhail Bakhtin asserts, informed by a heteroglossia, a stratified and interconnected complex of meanings that evinces the “primacy of context overtext” (1981: 428), as we hunt meaning and sublime feeling through the poem we inevitably engage in both anthropocentric and de-anthropocentric discourse; in intertwined rhythms, meanings, symbols, semblances and observations some will bring us face to face with the creature’s “fearful symmetry” (Blake: n.d.), others inevitably with our own.
In the poem Yowl, preceding familiar and defamiliarising images of catness, their dual nature, emblematic of our dual nature - the sate, domestic, indulgent/the untrammelled, hungering, uncanny - is the anthropomorphic refrain, when I am a boy.
Rather than being concerned with loss and the past, the haunted return we hear in the elegiac, it speaks in a future conditional imperative tense, one of transformation and becoming; it is not only celebratory of catness, it posits the reader to become, to participate, to be. Rather than the repetition of lament, a chorus, a cantata, a paean, a serenade and salutation.
This repetition throws us forward, in repeated imprecation works like a spell, a mesmerisation, an autohypnotic trance. As Freud said, when “what is familiar and agreeable, and on the other, what is concealed and kept out of sight” (1919: 4), merge and return, the wild with the tame, the familiar with the unfamiliar, we experience the uncanny, and, as Rosemary Jackson suggests (after Lacan), our subjectivity, “through violent reversal or rejection of the process of [its] formation” (1981: 53) dis-integrates.
While she argues that the mergings of “the fantastic [are] not metaphorical [they do] not create images which are ‘poetic’’” (1981: 47), the obverse, that the poetic cannot be fantastical, as evinced by examples from Poe’s The Raven, to Tennyson’s The Eagle, (and innumerable others, both classic and modern) is not true. In suggestion, in our heightened state, we become (perhaps), at least in reverie, in the imaginary topia of the poem, a night creature, no longer completely, fixedly human.
Similarly in the poem How To Be A Cockatoo (After Judith Beveridge) through a series of multivalent images we are enjoined in a process of zoomorphism to emulate the cockatoo (as in Beveridge’s poem we are enjoined to emulate the bat), and thereby deepen our sense of a creature that is often pilloried as a destroyer of crops and backyard furnishings. The words may seem anthropocentric, and yet as Birpai Elder and Knowledge Keeper, Aunty Rhonda Radley suggests, through emulation in dance, in song, and in the everyday encounters where a cockatoo flight presages rain, or an individual bird’s noisy presence marks the totem of a newborn child, “we're not separate from the birds, we're not separate from any creature” (Radley: 2023).
Through mimetic and metaphoric representations, Cockatoo, wryly invoking icons of the broader Australian culture, can perhaps build a more empathetic connection. Given the interconnected ways we construct meaning, attempts to divide nature/culture, animal/human to achieve a more authentic representation seem futile. The inverse of anthropomorphism is not zoomorphism, but dehumanisation - dehumanisation in the worst sense; one that others animals while claiming to privilege them, establishing binaries between a debased Anthropocene and an idealised Nature.
Binaries that, despite protestations, inevitably render nature under human dominion, and while, as W H Auden said, “poetry changes nothing” (1991), we should perhaps qualify that with the implications bound up in the elegy to Yeats that is the quote’s source; poetry changes nothing except the poet. Poetry is, of course, as suggested by French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and others, the only literature where the reader, transported into a concomitant reverie, enters, if not a shared consciousness, at least, a parallel one.
Thus, even when that dominion is as marginal as the words of a poem, when we accept our un-rational, our transformative, our mythopoeic, our animal, our hungering nature, when we are all poets, that changes everything.
References
Auden W H (1991) ‘In memory of W B Yeats’, Collected poems, Vintage, New York.
Bakhtin M (1981) The dialogic imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Caryl Emerson, University Of Texas Press, Austin.
Blake W (no date) ‘The tyger’, Poetry Foundation, Accessed 21 September 2023, https://
www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43687/the-tyger
Freud S (1919) The Uncanny, trans. Alix Strachey, accessed 21 September 2023, https://
web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/freud1.pdf
Jackson R (1981) Fantasy: the literature of subversion. Methuen, New York.
Kristofferson K (1970) ‘Me and Bobby McGee’ [song], Kristofferson, BMI.
McCooey D (2012) ‘Fear of music: sounded poetry and the poetry soundtrack’, Axon (2.1).
Accessed 15 September 2023, https://www.axonjournal.com.au/issues/2-1/fear-music-
sounded-poetry-and-poetry-soundtrack
Oerlemanns O (2018) Poetry and animals: blurring the boundaries with the human, Columbia
University Press, New York.
Radley R R (2023) ‘First Nations storytelling: birds of Australia storybox’, Australian Museum.
Accessed 21 September 2023, https://australian.museum/publications/birds-storybox/first-
nations-storytelling/
C S Hughes grew up by the bellow and stink of
cattle yards, and the hollow and roar of dunes. He says he was a hobo in his
youth, and later worked as a spice seller, a book dealer, a clock fixer, and a
trader in junk and assorted detritus.
More recently he has dabbled around the edges of
literature, editing From The Ashes - Poetry In Support Of Bushfire Relief, The Poetry Of John Ashdown-Hill and Somnia Blue, amongst others.
He has been published online and in print
in Blue Pepper, Five 2
One, Weird Tales, Sampietrino, The Blue Nib and various others. He has published several collections of his own
work, including, The Little Book Of Funerals, The Book Of Whimsies, Sound
Never Dies & Other Poems, the short story collection The Book Of
Fables, and the novella in verse, COVID-22.
He currently lives in the Gippsland Lakes region
of Victoria with a cat and an historian, where he (still) studies and dabbles
in story writing, but claims, with a nearly straight face, to still mostly
being a hobo.
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