We hierophants, devotees, followers and suitors,
we chatter, chitter and murmur the flight
path to each another, a murmuration
of consensus swooping across the Spiral Galaxy’s
soaring limbs and branches. Our orbits
attuned to coordinate intricate patterning,
crater to ring and wingtip to Jupiter’s Eye,
we flock on this long pilgrimage, when ‘longen
folk to go’ out along the leafy twigs
and sprays of the one Great Slowly
Turning Wheel. We who are initiates
at the court of the Sun King, celebrate with him
the round of any galaxy that flattens time.
Dancers of branches folded inside bud shells,
we leaf out. Why else call us Starlings?
Because we stare. Because we startle.
Which star do we choose? Which star
chooses us in the Great Meadow? Which clearing
do we land in, only to rise again? All.
All. All. All. All. All. All all all, oh, all,
we croak, along with our sister Corvids.
Flowing, fluent, fast influenced,
we choose to hear their light, their light twinkle little bright
little so near and blue and white so far
so good. There is so much to be discerned,
unlearned and spoken, felt as the tongue’s—the wing’s—
touch, so much felt as light as shelter-feather,
“hleów-feder” standing windward, fanning protection
in pulsing tide. Wings are hopeful tongues
and tongues hopeful ears and ears the great conches.
The Great Wheel, sisters, is within us.
We know sors, we source the sorcery within the flow
of long time, brothers, and flowers
rise up every day and, petal to petal, star
to star, shine and rise and flash and fly.
Consider this time inside our constellations.
Harold Rhenisch’s book, The Tree Whisperer, was published in 2022. His fourteenth poetry collection is forthcoming from Oskana Editions.
Poet and playwright Penn Kemp has been acclaimed a foremother of Canadian poetry. See www.pennkemp.wordpress.com.
Questions and Answers
Penn Kemp
Do you use any resources that a young poet would find useful (e.g. books, films, art, websites, etc.)?
Young poets can find inspiration in their own experience, including (as in this poem) their dream life.
As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?
Read as much poetry as you can: your library is a good resource. Read your own poem aloud so that its rhythm speaks through you. Find and build a community of like-minded writers with whom you can confide, share and refine your work. Do not be discouraged by rejection. Take it as a chance to review and edit your poem as necessary. Given the number of poems submitted, the rate of actual publication is very low. You might want to start your own e-magazine to find your audience and your tribe of fellow writers.
What inspired or motivated you to write this poem?
This poem is a collaboration between poet Harold Rhenisch and myself. The work is driven by our response to a world in peril: to the ongoing war in Ukraine as well as ongoing trouble spots like Iran. An allegory that has always intrigued me, “The Conference of the Birds” seemed appropriate in the context of Iran as well. In what is now Iran, the Persian mystic and poet, Attar, wrote his 12th century epic to describe the soul’s journey through human experience. Birds have long been interpreted as messengers, as in “The Conference of the Birds,” where they are pilgrims.
How did your writing process unfold around this poem? How did you write, edit, and refine it?
Our process was collaborative. I would transcribe a dream on the topic and send it to Harold. He would return it in a poetic form, adding his own response. We would edit it back and forth over the internet until we found a form that worked, in this case, a long line in free verse. There are literary references in the poem, to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.” Harold and I play with sound, assonance and alliteration in “The Conference of the Birds,” as we believe sound is primary in poetry.
What did you find particularly challenging in writing this poem?
Poems that derive from dreams are tricky and often difficult, because they might seem important to the dreamer and insignificant or irrelevant to the reader. So, the task is to find the form that will place dream imagery into a poem that will translate effectively to the reader.
Harold Rhenisch
Is there a specific moment that inspired you to pursue poetry?
Poetry has always pursued me. I grew up embedded in the Smelqmex homeland, its mountains, water, birds, and winds, and was raised as much by them as by humans. Poetry as a human art form, however, had to be chosen. I chose it when I was fourteen, after discovering that it made more sense of the world than did science, which I also love.
As a published writer, what are your tips or words of motivation for the aspiring poet?
There is a line that flows through every poem, but not a plot. There is music that flows through every poem, and shows both tongue and ear where to dance. There are points of spiritual intensity or awareness in every sentence. Call them words, if you like. When placed in a bounded space, a walled garden, they create something new together by transforming each other. You are not writing the poem. You are being written by it. You are, however, writing the garden, as the keeper of the language given by your ancestors. They are the ones speaking. You are learning to be spoken. As this goes against the grain of a literature built around novels, it is, at times, not easy going. Do not expect applause.
What poetic techniques did you use in this poem? How much attention do you pay to form and metre?
The poem was written in partnership with Penn Kemp. We were working from a desire to write in what we call “the oracular voice”, a kind of poetry that lives in sound and uses mouth and ear as dance stages. Penn brought her long career as a sound poet. I brought long experience with Robin Skelton’s traditions (drawn from Welsh and Celtic alliterative and sacred forms), and a keen sense of the importance of letting the lines of a poem, as muscular music, determine the music. The result was play. In the fourth stanza, run-on techniques from Theodore Roethke’s poems for children, John Berryman’s dream songs, Austrian experimental poetry and Dick Hugo’s late poems take over the music. The poem holds together because of sound. It is played like a provencal lute. The refined itself through multiple drafts. When it called for specific sounds, I gifted them. Penn added sound from an entirely different tradition, drawn from latin and Old English tradition.
What did you find particularly challenging in writing this poem?
To keep myself out of it, yet not stay out of it myself. To speak in someone else’s voice that is, nonetheless, part mine. It was liberating.