The plight of the ornithologist, captured in Stevens’s teeming scenes, is nothing next to that of the neuroscientist. Stevens has given us many birds, but there are many more perched just off the page, rustling their feathers and shifting on shiny feet.īrains make birds seem manageable. And looking at them one way means, at least for the moment, setting aside other ways of looking. Brains are lumps of flesh or a shorthand for knowledge or the core of the modern self, depending on how you look at them. Bagels can be bread or battleground (just ask someone from New York, or Montreal), a symbol of diaspora or a metaphor for the multiverse. It’s the same for anything else, from bagels to brains. Thirteen ways aren’t nearly enough to capture blackbirds in all their diversity, or even to trace the edges of what they might be. It’s a warning, in other words, not to mistake the kaleidoscope for the universe.Īfter all, any poem - any kaleidoscope - forecloses as many ways of seeing as it enables. Stevens’s poem, on this reading, is less about blackbirds than about the lenses we use to spy on them. But no matter what, we end up seeing patterns that are more a product of the tool in hand than of the world on its other end. Sometimes we’re twisting consciously, sometimes unconsciously. Our minds are like kaleidoscopes, packed with mirrors we twist to see the world anew. Think about anything often enough, from enough angles, and it’s bound to splinter and refract. Glance by glance, the blackbirds multiply. The more ways we look, the more we realize how much there is to see. There are as many birds as there are perspectives, if not more, and as ever, what is true of the poem is true of the world. Whether or not they’re all blackbirds - and, if so, what kind, with what colors? - the singular “a” of Stevens’s title is clearly misdirection. Across the poem’s 13 cantos, birds whirl and whistle, cast their shadows or eye us from the trees. To me, this fuzziness is part of the joke of “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” a poem by Wallace Stevens first published in 1917. Old World blackbirds, many of which are called thrushes, are only distantly related black birds like ravens and most crows aren’t blackbirds at all. Orioles and grackles, with their oranges and iridescence, are part of the family too. And that’s just the members of the family Icteridae called blackbirds. They can be red-winged or red-shouldered, saffron-cowled or tricolored, rusty or yellow-hooded or chestnut-capped.
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