Put a Bird On It: or “why are the magpies in the poem?”
Contributor’s Marginalia: Rebecca Morgan Frank on “A Response” by Claire Eder
Why do birds fly in to so many of our poems, spreading their wings, landing, or just passing through on the periphery? We are taught to be wary of them: has the [bird], we are asked/ask, earned its keep in the poem? The epigraph to Claire Eder’s beautifully crafted ten-line “A Response” grounds us in the occasion of the poem with such an instructor comment, one probing with leading adjectives and gendered questions, and of course, a query about the bird: “helpless female / domineering male / is he significantly older? / why are the magpies in the poem?”
The instructor comments and interrogates as if working like the bouncer checking IDs at an exclusive nightclub or a TSA screener telling us to pour out our water and throw out our shampoo. They/we are all just doing their jobs. Right?
But in response, Eder executes a powerful conceit, one in which the magpie does its work: to carry. And what a wonder that the bird—that old exquisite workhorse!—can so beautifully do its job here and be made new and essential.
Oh magpie, with your bad reputation, your actual hunger for songbirds is much worse than your profile—somewhat wrongly accused!—of relentless thief. Magpie, magpie, magpie: those that kill the maker of the song. Why would the speaker want to dwell on the character the instructor wants more of? This is not their narrative, but the speaker’s.
Instead, the speaker, like the songbird, sings back and will not be silenced, devoured. The magpie stays in this song of swift closed couplets, the repetitions carrying us through the emotion of the poem: Name, name, name, name. Magpie, magpie, magpie.
The magpie who so perfectly lives in this poem, who takes on “what happened.” Who carries the weight of naming itself.
It is not that a magpie has flown into this poem. Rather, this poem has flown into the magpie.
Rebecca Morgan Frank is the author of Sometimes We’re All Living in a Foreign Country and The Spokes of Venus, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press, and Little Murders Everywhere, a finalist for the Kate Tufts Discovery Award. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, American Poetry Review, Ploughshares, Orion, and elsewhere. She is the co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Memorious and the 2019/2020 Distinguished Visiting Writer at Bowling Green State University.