Thirteen Ways of Tasting a Blackbird

[Holsety]

Because Deer said the Iolar poem was nice and there was a poem about modern/contemporary American poets, I'm gonna post another...I dunno, mess-around poem I wrote a few years ago in an intro to poetry course.

However, it is worth saying that they probably are kind of mean, XIV-XVIII are just kind of dumb and weird.

As you might guess this is based on Wallace Stevens's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird which you can find here if you want to:
www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/stevens-13ways.html

The first 13 are just rewrites of the first:

I:
Within twenty chilling freezers
The only edible thing
Was the eye of a blackbird.

II:
I was of three minds
Like a stew
In which there are three blackbird brains.

III:
The blackbird's feathers whirled in the microwave's "winds,"
It was a small part of the meal.

IV:
A shell and a crust
Are one pie.
A shell and a crust and baked blackbirds
Are one pie.

V:
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of preparation
Or the beauty of taste,
The blackbird omelet sizzling
Or just after.

VI:
The icing filled the long cake
With barbaric gloss
The stencil of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro
The mood
Traced in chocolatey icing
An indecipherable taste.

VII:
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you eat golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII:
I know noble ingredients,
And lucid, inescapable ingredients*;
And I know, too
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know how to cook.

IX:
When the blackbird pie scalded my tongue**,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X:
At the scent of blackbirds
Cooking in the red light,
Even those abstaining from gluttony
Would slaver disgustingly.

XI:
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once a fear pierced him
In that he mistook
The taste of his meal
For blackbirds.

XII:
The oven is humming.
The blackbird must be cooking.

XIII:
It was dinner all lunchtime.
It was eating time
And it was going to be eating time.
The blackbird sat
On the cedar table.

*You know, flour, water, salt, eggs, the like...it's like you can't make a full meal without involving them somehow!
**Thus causing the sense of taste to deaden temporarily, marking a limit much like the blackbird in the original stanza marks the limits of sight. Also maybe has to do with taste buds (dot-circle like?)

I also wrote in the assignment at this point:
"Stanza VI was the hardest. Stanza IV is obviously the best. Stanza III makes no sense since who would microwave a blackbird breast? Not to mention it would be de-feathered first (I hope). I realize this is less creative than what you wanted so here are now 5 new ways of looking at a blackbird."

XIV:
The blackbird's image reflected
In my eye,
My eyes torn out by its beak,
I couldn't look upon the blackbird

XV:
The blackbird singing in the dead of night
With broken wings
I saw in the song
Though the blackbird was invisible, as black
As the night.

XVI:
I see,
Gazing into your eyes,
A blackbird.

XVII:
Stuffed with rags and cotton,
Skin slicked with arsenic,
I wasn't looking.
I looked in the glass spheres -
The blackbird was gone;
I saw the blackbird.

XVIII:
The egg, obscuring from my sight
A blackbird,
Is why there will someday be
A blackbird.

I do love the phrase "slicked with arsenic,"

[sgt.null]

love the original and enjoyed your version very much.

[Vraith]

Hee, that was fun.
It's amazing the number of things folk have done related to the original.

I wonder [might be scared of] what you'd do with Kate Barnes poem
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Horse"

[Holsety]

Hee, that was fun.
It's amazing the number of things folk have done related to the original.

I wonder [might be scared of] what you'd do with Kate Barnes poem
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Horse"

It's fun for me because I think that the exercise of trying to use the poem as something like a template is really helpful in getting yourself in a mindset towards trying to get something out of the original (which I think is a theme the poem itself plays with).

When I actually looked for Kate Barnes's poem, I found a blogger who had posted "13 ways of looking at a dark horse," some sort of clever commentary on Ron Paul's candidacy.
blogcritics.org/politics/article/ron-pa ... f-looking/
I thought it was pretty damned funny though I miss on some of the references.

If I can remember to I actually will mess with the Kate Barnes poem in the next little bit.

[Vraith]

Hee, that was fun.
It's amazing the number of things folk have done related to the original.

I wonder [might be scared of] what you'd do with Kate Barnes poem
"Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Black Horse"

It's fun for me because I think that the exercise of trying to use the poem as something like a template is really helpful in getting yourself in a mindset towards trying to get something out of the original (which I think is a theme the poem itself plays with).

When I actually looked for Kate Barnes's poem, I found a blogger who had posted "13 ways of looking at a dark horse," some sort of clever commentary on Ron Paul's candidacy.
blogcritics.org/politics/article/ron-pa ... f-looking/
I thought it was pretty damned funny though I miss on some of the references.

If I can remember to I actually will mess with the Kate Barnes poem in the next little bit.

I hope you do mess with the Barnes.
For me it was fun cuz it was fun what you did, but also cuz for a Lit. class. we did both the Wallace and the Barnes and had to respond so I did a thing "13 Ways of looking at 13 Ways" [which I did 169 [13x13] couplets that mentioned both]...but they weren't "creative/poetic" couplets, cuz it was an analysis thing. Yours is more adventure than critique.

[Linna Heartbooger]

II:
I was of three minds
Like a stew
In which there are three blackbird brains.

I was amused...

VI:
The icing filled the long cake
With barbaric gloss
The stencil of the blackbird
Crossed it to and fro
The mood
Traced in chocolatey icing
An indecipherable taste.

This one actually stood out.
Saw the notes you'd put on the assignment.... and wanted to say it also looks like you'd put a lot of effort into that one; that stanza generates a fairly filled-in image of what it's describing; also a "feel" of fancy / possibly ostentatious restaurant/celebration.

And about the microwave one... I agree I'd thought it was odd.
But it does have a certain weird 'feel' to it which is amusing!

....and had to respond so I did a thing "13 Ways of looking at 13 Ways" [which I did 169 [13x13] couplets that mentioned both]

Hahah... a 13x13 matrix of analyses...

[deer of the dawn]

IV:
A shell and a crust
Are one pie.
A shell and a crust and baked blackbirds
Are one pie.

Does this imply that the value of the baked blackbird is nil?

This was actually my favorite, the image was poignant:

III
The blackbird's feathers whirled in the microwave's "winds,"
It was a small part of the meal.

[Holsety]

IV:
A shell and a crust
Are one pie.
A shell and a crust and baked blackbirds
Are one pie.

Does this imply that the value of the baked blackbird is nil?

Haha . I meant it a different way (more ancillary than nil) but when I looked back at what the original poem looks like, I guess that an ending is what was looked for with the addition of the blackbird (it sort of feels like an erotic description followed by the sense of the rest of the world coming back into focus - not sure if I can describe things beyond me better than that).

This one actually stood out.
Saw the notes you'd put on the assignment.... and wanted to say it also looks like you'd put a lot of effort into that one; that stanza generates a fairly filled-in image of what it's describing; also a "feel" of fancy / possibly ostentatious restaurant/celebration.

If it did, my computer-brain just got lucky. I think this is one of the ones where I was just trying to match to the structure of the poems.

My personal favorite is the non-taste related one (i.e. "follow-up" poems) which discusses the stuffed blackbird. But I don't know much about stuffing animals for preservation, which is probably obvious.

I can't seem to find the Barnes poem without purchasing it, but maybe I will take up reading more poetry in dense anthologies at some juncture.

[Cord Hurn]

At the scent of blackbirds
Cooking in the red light,
Even those abstaining from gluttony
Would slaver disgustingly