I was working earlier this year on a project called Letter-winged Kite, a collection which uses world bird names as “found” material for new poetic contexts. It was only when I reached the final draft that I realised that this is in a sense the concluding part of a trilogy of projects that have birds and vocabulary as their basis.
The first was An A-Z of Bird Song, a joint publication in 1995 by Coracle and St Paulinus. The vocabulary here was the one found in field guides to birds, where the identifying features of the song or call are rendered onomatopoeically: meeoo peeoo for the Buzzard, tswee for the Greenfinch, and so on. I thought these were interesting as a set of words that generally don’t make it into the dictionary and therefore have an offset, provisional status as a kind of street-slang of the natural world. I began to collect them from various sources, jotting the words down on file cards, one card for each species on the British list, a task that kept me happily occupied on what was then my weekly commute between Wolverhampton and London. When I’d reached the last-listed bird (Corn Bunting: chip, zeep and kwit) in the last of my reliable reference books, I went through the file cards, underlining the words for which there was some concordance, making choices between, say, chit and chip where there were different spellings for the same sound, and discarding any words that were not suggested by more than one source. The final act was to put them into alphabetical order, crucially not by species but by sound. One could, theoretically, hear a bird call, verbalise it as, perhaps, chichichichit, look it up and find that the bird was a Linnet.
A much-expanded and revised new edition of this was published in 2010 by MIT Press as Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds, which included separate lexicons of the bird sounds for Great Britain & Europe, and for North America.
Some Alternatives to Flock was the title poem of a collection published, again by Coracle, in 2008. The poem was suggested by a chance conversation on a birdwatching trip in Devon some years previously. Collective nouns, from a murder of crows to an exaltation of larks, are familiar quirks of the English language, the stuff of pub quizzes. As their application seems so lacking in purpose or necessity, and their substance so often fanciful, I couldn’t help wondering at their derivation. My guess was that they were the product of the parlour games of romantic poets. I was a few centuries out: in fact, as I learnt from Chloe Rhodes’s An Unkindness of Ravens: A Book of Collective Nouns, they were coined and published in the Middle Ages in handbooks for the nobility “as a means of marking out the aristocracy from the less well-bred masses”. I hope that my own interpolations, from “a haberdashery of flycatchers” to “a reliance of robins” may have done something to swing the balance the other way.
My most recent project, Letter-winged Kite, began with the discovery that every bird in the world has a common English name. I knew, or assumed, that every species – all 10,331 of them – would long have been classified and catalogued with a taxonomical label, a latiny-greeky binomial: Passer domesticus, etc. But a common, English, name for even the uncommonest and least English of the clan? No other group of organisms can say the same. I made two databases from the IOC World Bird List, one in the original species order, the second alphabetical. I read through the lists, marking and highlighting, looking for ways in which groups of names were derived, and ways in which I could jinx the system and try to use the names, in fresh association, to create new rhythms and suggest new meanings. Some of the poems create a narrative, some a soundscape, some tell little quips and jokes. I hope they all retain some sense of birdness. Some examples:
Weather lore
Rain quail
Shining Sunbeam
Shining Sunbeam
Cloud Cisticola
Rainforest Scops Owl
Rain quail
Shining Sunbeam
Rainbow Starfrontlet
Lullaby
Buffy Tuftedcheek
Little Bee-eater
Rosy Pipit
Little Buttonquail
Blue Noddy
Spangled Boobook
Sooty Swift
Zanzibar Boubou
Bagobo Babbler
Buffy Hummingbird
Speckled Tinkerbird
Pringle’s Puffback
Little Buttonquail
Rosy Pipit
Little Bee-eater
Buffy Tuftedcheek
Haiku
Summer Tanager
Purple-throated Mountaingem
Wandering Tattler
*
An A-Z of Bird Song. Norfolk: Coracle, & Yorkshire: St Paulinus, 1995. Out of print.
Some Alternatives to Flock. Clonmel: Coracle, 2008. http://coracle.ie/some-alternatives-to-flock/
Aaaaw to Zzzzzd: The Words of Birds. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2010. https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/aaaaw-zzzzzd-words-birds
Letter-winged Kite. Not yet published.