Poetry in America with Elisa New (2018–…): Season 1, Episode 10 - The Gray Heron - full transcript

There's a lot
of shore birds out right now

on these mud flats in the marsh.

What do you see?

- I'm seeing great blue herons.

Oh, there he is.

And he's blue-gray,

turning his head.

It held its head still

while the body and green legs
wobbled

in wide arcs from side to side.

When it stalked
out of sight, I went after it,



but all I could find where I was
expecting to see the bird...

Was a three-foot-long lizard

in ill-fitting skin
and with linear mouth

expressive of the even temper
of the mineral kingdom.

It stopped and tilted its head,

which was much like a fieldstone
with an eye in it,

which was watching me...

To see if I would go
or change into something else.

The mysteries accumulating

through Galway Kinnell's
"The Gray Heron"

are the kind that stir
the curiosity and creativity

of scientists,
visual artists, and poets.

The poem seems simple enough.

A gray heron is there,
and then it's gone.



In place of the bird
the pursuer expected, a lizard.

But what has happened here?

What does this poem see?

Not only looking at a heron
or a lizard,

Galway Kinnell's poem seems
also to be looking at looking.

Exploring the power
and testing the limits

of the scientist's method,

of the photographer's lens,

of the poet's metaphors.

To better understand
"The Gray Heron,"

I gathered some observers
of the natural world:

celebrated evolutionary
biologist E.O. Wilson;

poet Robert Hass;

photographer Laura McPhee;

and a naturalist
and some junior naturalists

at a wildlife sanctuary

on Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

When I first read this poem,

I had just been reading
Ed Wilson.

I think it's in Biophilia
that he says,

thinking about what we can know
about other creatures,

"Every creature lives
in its own sensory world."

I felt like when I read that,
that it opened avenues

into the way we look
at the natural world.

The best scientists
are always on the hunt.

Mm-hmm.

- They're looking
for something new.

I would like to simply sit back
and watch my grey heron

and just enjoy it in the embrace
of its context, a lovely marsh.

But no, I'm on the hunt.

I want to see what I can see
about this bird

that is different from what
other scientists have seen.

I want to make a discovery.

Just what discovery
the poem may be making

is more ambiguous, as we see
in its title, "The Gray Heron,"

spelled with an "A"
in the American way.

Grey herons, as a species,
are distributed

across Europe and Asia
and not...

...in the United States.
- In the United States.

I've come upon a grey heron.

Let's say it's in Massachusetts.

Good Lord, there are no
grey herons in Massachusetts.

This must be an inventive heron.

I don't know if Kinnell
was mistaking a grey heron

for a great blue heron,

or he's thinking about
just the color of the heron,

which is gray.

Just by describing it
as the "gray heron,"

it's making it less of a report
of what you've been seeing

and sticking to the strict
scientific species name,

saying, "Yes,
I observed a great blue heron,"

but it's kind of going past it

and describing things
he noticed about the bird.

It held its head still
while its body and green legs

wobbled in wide arcs
from side to side.

I think this poem
is about observation,

that it starts out
in this very precise,

kind of, concise way of saying,
"Here's this animal,

here's its movements."

It's not a very graceful bird,

it's just kind of, like,

walking out of the water,
kind of, like, I don't know,

like you'd imagine a bird.

See, like, it doesn't hop,

but it just sort of walks
kind of awkwardly,

like a turkey or something.

Like, one going this way and the
other going this way, wobbling.

"While its body and green
legs wobbled in wide arcs

"from side to side,

when it stalked out of sight."

He's trying to get something
of that.

I don't know what you call
the camera technique where...

There's something about the way
herons move

that is jerky motion sped up.

The language,
the way that it's laid out

and where the line breaks occur,

and the unwinding of the rhythm
of that sentence,

it's trying to be the physical
rhythm of the thing, you know?

It's that essential thing
that poetry does,

is to try to be the motion.

I was thinking
that what the line breaks did

was try to be the motion
of the observer's eyes.

And there's something that isn't
all together that we get

from the way this one glance,
actually, is broken up.

Yeah.

And the separation of the
adjective from the noun there

is a reminder of some slowness
of perception.

It's doing two kind of contrary
things with the physical motion.

On the one hand, trying to do
what poems do,

and what Kinnell does
so beautifully

in so many of his poems,

is really capture that movement.

And on the other hand,
almost analytically break it up.

And to remind us that our eyes
are always composing

and bringing together
disparate things.

You say that what you love is
"a jumble of glittering data."

- That's right.

Scientists think
in a jumbled manner.

Even the best ones proceed
into unknown territory

in a very erratic
and random manner,

processing large amounts of data
that may or may not be relevant

and come together
according to the vicissitudes

of a very imperfect
rational process in the brain.

Poetry is very interesting

as an analogue for photography,

because it's distilling
and condensing things,

and it has syntax and grammar,

and we have a visual world
with four sides around it,

in which something will happen.

That's an eight-by-ten
view camera.

It was actually made
in the 1980s,

but it's 19th-century
technology.

There's a quality that you get
from that film

that is still unequaled,

especially in landscape,

where you're working hard
with what you can see.

The eight-by-ten film
is so large

that it contains
much more information

than my eye can see.

So how do you make
something precise,

but also mysterious?

Something that has a clarity
of purpose and meaning,

but also something that you can
think about repeatedly

and that offers itself
to open interpretation?

When it stalked
out of sight, I went after it.

He's going after it,
trying to learn more about it,

trying to hunt it down,
not to catch it,

but to understand it.

There's nothing more exciting

than to see something
and to say,

"God, that's something
that I don't think

anyone has seen
or thought of before."

And it creates
what I like to call

"the aesthetic surprise."

There's a lot of elements
of surprise in this poem.

He says,
the whole expecting thing,

he wants to see something else,

or he thinks he's going to see
something else,

and he's surprised

by what he sees.

If you go out expecting,

then that's what
you're looking for,

and you're not looking
for the unexpected.

And that's something

that I always hold true is, if
I'm going out in the morning,

especially here in Wellfleet,

or some place where I bird
every single day,

I'm not saying to myself,
"I'm going to see this,

I'm going to see this."

I'm going out and experiencing
what that day holds.

Sometimes, the thing that
you didn't expect to find

is actually better than
the thing you wanted to find.

Like, if you are looking
for a cool type of rock

and you actually find a turtle,

a turtle's, like, cooler
than a rock.

He might not have been
paying full attention.

And this could've been, like,
out of the corner of his eye,

and he might not have been

really paying attention
to what he's looking at

and thought it might have been
a heron walking

and then looked back
and it was a lizard.

Some of them are the same size.

They sometimes are in,
like, the same habitats.

I assumed that Galway Kinnell

was operating
inside the universe

as we understand it.

Of science.

- And the...

And that he went around a bend

looking for this bird

and the bird was gone.

And there's the lizard.

This whole idea

that you have an expectation,

and that your expectations
are generally defied.

We're getting less
about this creature

the speaker's presumably
in pursuit of,

than about him.

"When it stalked out of sight,

"I went after it,
but all I could find

where I was expecting
to see the bird..."

He uses "I" a lot
for an observer.

He's talking about his own
experience with it a lot,

more than what's going on
in front of him.

"Ill-fitting skin."

Who is this observer to say

whether the skin fits
well or ill?

That's the one piece
that really doesn't fit,

because most lizards
have beautiful skin.

Because they have to have
a perfectly designed skin

for the environment
they live in.

The one thing that
Darwin taught us

is that if that skin
is that way,

must've had some evolutionary...

It's supposed to be that way.

It's supposed to be that way.

However, geckos have taut skin,

monitor lizards have loose skin.

The loose skin looks, to us,

like someone wearing
a rumpled suit,

so we say "ill-fitting skin."

"When it stalked
out of sight, I went after it,

"but all I could find where
I was expecting to see the bird

"was a three-foot-long lizard
in ill-fitting skin,

"and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper

of the mineral kingdom."

When I've shown this poem
to students,

who often assume that anything
could happen in a poem,

some of them, maybe a third,

think that the heron's
turned into a lizard.

A heron is nothing
like a lizard,

although we know they're
descended from reptiles,

ultimately.

To add the dimension of time...
That's evolutionary biology.

For a fleeting moment,
he was thinking of the ancestry,

this ancient history,
going all the way back,

he says "lizards," metaphor for
reptiles, feathered dinosaurs.

So he was thinking
like a biologist.

And so it's possible that
even though, in this poem,

we're seeing the image
of a bird,

and the image of a lizard,

and we assume that they're
in one space and one time.

Yes.

It's possible that
this poem has now delivered us

into deeper time
and into evolutionary time.

I often say, when we see
a great blue heron flying,

I'll say it looks like
a pterodactyl when it flies.

There have been times
where I'm in my kayak,

and I can be four feet away
from a great blue heron.

You can hear
the heavy wing beats

and then just tucking its neck
into its body.

"A three-foot-long lizard
in ill-fitting skin,

"and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper

of the mineral kingdom."

We're moving backwards,
even to the older world,

to rocks.

You thought you were
just there looking at a heron,

and all of a sudden,
you're time-traveling.

Exactly.

The humor in the description

of the lizard's mouth,

raising the idea
of the mineral kingdom

also puts us in the world
of Earth-making and change.

I guess I think about
that as geologic time.

As time that feels literally
stopped to us.

So you have the bird
that has disappeared,

you have the lizard that's just
moving at a very slow rate,

and then you have geologic time,
which just seems still,

because we are just a flash
in that.

I think this poem's about

a bird turning into a lizard,
then he's thinking

it's going to turn into stone

with one eye.

Poetry since Darwin

has been partly in revolt

against a scientific,
mechanistic view of nature.

All of this just so we could
eat each other

or wither and grow old and die?

And it's been the effort
of poetry, since Darwin,

to say what imagination is
and what it does.

"It stopped and tilted its head,

"which was much like
a fieldstone,

"with an eye in it,

which was watching me."

I thought a lot
about those few lines.

They were a little confusing
at first,

and I immediately thought
maybe it was

about a change of character.

If he would change, just change
into something else.

There's a theme of change
and surprise here.

The great poem
that kind of sums up

all of classical polytheism,

that animist way
of imagining the world,

was Ovid's "Metamorphoses."

Right.

Ovid's "Metamorphoses"
is a Roman narrative poem

that shows men and women
transformed into birds

and rocks and trees.

I think it's a call
to see nature in another way,

to see it as fluid and mutable.

We're now observing the world

morphing from one thing
into another almost magically,

that it becomes
an imaginative world

rather than a fixed nature.

Buried in the poem
is the magical and metaphorical,

the most ancient way
of saying things.

You think of 100,000 years
of human evolution

in which hunters
just told stories to each other

and to the families
around fires,

imitating the motions of animals

and trying to imagine their way
into the lives of animals,

so the gods that ruled over the
animals would not punish them

for taking the lives
of the animals.

All of that ended up
in this imaginative tradition

of everything changes
into everything else.

Intelligence evolved

around the campsites
of pre-humans

and ancient human species.

Namely, the development of
language to grasp more and more,

and then the development
of metaphor to capture attention

and improve memory and the
quality of emotional response.

Scientists are always searching
for metaphors,

explaining new phenomena
by comparisons with objects

and processes that all people
are familiar with.

What we're doing is trying
to make a precise description,

but we don't try to open
new vistas

of thinking about the object,
as the poet does.

The metamorphosis of bird
to lizard in Kinnell's poem

may itself be a metaphor
for those forces

of evolution and change

that connect all life forms
and all forms of knowledge.

Why would you say that the
mineral kingdom had an even...

What was...

It keeps it alive.

So the mineral kingdom we think
of, it's dead, it's inanimate,

but he's giving it life
by giving it an even temper.

I think he meant... 'cause
"even tempter," "temper"

is, like, calm,

and then "mineral kingdom"
is, like, a rock,

and rocks don't move,
so they're basically calm.

That seems to belong
to another moment

in our understanding
of the world.

Not a world of physics,
but a world of gods.

A pantheistic world

where the rocks themselves
have a spirit.

"It stopped and tilted its head,

"which was much like a
fieldstone with an eye in it,

"which was watching me
to see if I would go

or change into something else."

"Which was watching me
to see if I would go."

That's looking at not only
your perception of other things,

but how they perceive you.

"Which was watching me
to see if I would go

or change into something else."

Going back to the surprise
thing, you think the entire time

the only, like, constant thing
in the poem is the narrator.

He doesn't change
into anything else...

Everything around him
seems to be changing.

And then the poem ends
on the note

of, maybe he will change, change
into something else,

and it's a little bit
of a surprise ending.

"Which was watching me
to see if I would go

or change into something else."

He's thinking into sort of
the lizard's mind and thinking,

"Oh, I'm guessing
since I'm thinking

"that he's going to change into
something, I'm definitely...

"he thinks I'm going to change
into something different, also,

like everything around me is."

Human beings have been

projecting human attitudes
onto animals forever.

Yes.

And one of the
achievements of modern science

was to peel that away.

Instead of saying

lions clearly stand
for regal pride and rage,

and snakes stand for this,
and this stands for that,

they said, "How does a lion
make its living?"

Mostly poetry didn't go there.

It continued to think
the birds were singing

because the poet
was in a good mood.

I know, from reading a lot
of Galway Kinnell's work,

that it's occurring to him
that he shouldn't be projecting

our stuff onto animals.

When I look out at a bird
and it looks back at me,

I'm so curious
in what it's thinking.

"Why is this person
watching me?"

"What is it getting
out of this?"

"Am I in trouble?"

Because that contradicts
every instinct they have,

to go near something
that's unknown to them

and potentially dangerous.

It's impossible to even start
to guess

what it actually is thinking,

and that's one of the things

that's so special about
bird watching and birding.

You're very much on their court.

Human beings have become
immensely clever

at studying animal behavior,

but we're never going to have
a dog's sense of smell.

- Right.

- We're never going
to inhabit that universe.

And that universe
is as real as ours.

Kinnell is describing
the natural world as it exists.

But also,
he finds the opportunity

to imagine something
in order to make meaning.

This poem takes on,

in many ways,
the whole universe,

the history of the universe,

and yet it's so precise
and specific.

The speaker has
the sensation of the bird

having turned into a lizard.

Yes.

In his rational brain,
he knows...

That doesn't happen.

Birds don't turn into lizards.

But he doesn't know,
when he looks at the lizard,

he realizes he doesn't know
whether the lizard

has that kind of rational brain
or not.

So the poem ends in the mystery
of the final unreadableness.

And for me, the joy of the poem

is escaping a naturalistic
explanation of the world

by understanding that we...

Finally, there's so much
we don't know.

"It held its head still
while the body and green legs

wobbled in wide arcs
from side to side..."

"When it stalked out of sight,

"I went after it,

"but all I could find
where I was expecting

to see the bird..."

"Was a three-foot-long
lizard in ill-fitting skin

"and with linear mouth
expressive of the even temper

of the mineral kingdom."

"It stopped and tilted its head,

"which was much like
a fieldstone with an eye in it,

which was watching me..."

"To see if I would go
or change into something else."