Lisa Sewell

In my work, I explore the conflict between felt experience and the mediated nature of the self, focusing on questions of authority and speech, perception and knowledge, and the body as a source of solace and terror. My starting point is usually a specific confounding experience that I then try to make sense of by placing it alongside other stories, whether from history, mythology, literature or the social world. Recently, I have been interested in disruptions, from the profound to the mundane, from broken watches, fractured bones and narrative disunity, to break-ups, shattered dreams, incomplete memories and geological shifts that divide the earth's surface. In writing about this theme, I have begun to take more of an interest in the relationship between form and content, attempting to make the structural components of the poem -- the syntax, the line, the sentence -- bear some of the weight of accurately reflecting the ideas in the poem.
 

ORNITHOLOGY II

You want to know what kind of bird
has built a nest in the tree
beside my window but I'm tired of diligence
and tireless activity, the indifferent
beak, the singer everyone has heard.
His mechanical racket has terrorized the crows--
now they're on the run or wing
to scour another grassy patch. Song
is a secondary sex character
generally restricted to the male
but all birds have a calling, a heart
in hiding, even those black hangers-on
who gather like menace
wherever the ground-life flowers.
Don't expect them to regulate
mosquito populations, sing full-
or half-hearted of joy illimited.
Open their gullets and find a few bees,
many grasshoppers, streaks of blood
and meat in the lucky ones, extended
wings. They're as common as the breeze
that carries death in our direction.
Who cares which car or truck
shattered the groundhog's logic
as long as his side has split. They seem one note,
but the guidebook praises their extensive
vocabulary: caw, a hundred subtle variations.
Call them what you will, what you would never
in a million years, they have a sense
of decency, flying off as we
come round the bend and that small innocent
whose steely chatter taunts and obsesses
is an Eastern Kingbird. It's Latin name,
I looked it up, is Tyrannus tyrannus.