Jamaal May's "There Are Birds Here"
The Daily Poem
Goldberry Studios
4.6 • 729 Ratings
🗓️ 15 November 2021
⏱️ 7 minutes
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Summary
Jamaal May is an American poet from Detroit.[1][2] May was included in the Best American Poetry anthology from 2014. May lived in Detroit, where he taught poetry in public schools. He received an MFA from Warren Wilson College.[3] May has taught at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, and was a fellow at the Kenyon Review between 2014 and 2016.[4][5] May cites Vievee Francis, another poet from Detroit, as an influence and mentor. His work has appeared in The Believer, Poetry, and Ploughshares.[1][6] His debut book, Hum, was favorably reviewed by HTML Giant and other publications.[7][8]
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to the Daily Poem. I'm Heidi White, and today is Monday, November 15th. |
| 0:07.6 | Today I'm going to read for you a poem by American poet Jamal May. He was born in 1982. He's a contemporary poet, born and raised in Detroit. |
| 0:17.6 | And his poetry collections have won numerous awards, and he's taught poetry in public schools in |
| 0:24.1 | Detroit, and also at the Vermont College of Fine Arts. |
| 0:29.5 | And so today's poem is called There Are Birds Here, and this is how it goes. |
| 0:36.2 | For Detroit, there are birds here. So many birds here is what I was |
| 0:42.4 | trying to say when they said those birds were metaphors for what is trapped between buildings |
| 0:47.1 | and buildings. No, the birds are here to root around for bread the little girl's hands tear and toss like confetti. |
| 0:56.0 | No, I don't mean the bread is torn like cotton. I said confetti. And no, not the confetti a tank |
| 1:03.9 | can make of a building. I mean the confetti a boy can't stop smiling about. And no, his smile |
| 1:10.5 | isn't much like a skeleton at all. And no, |
| 1:13.8 | his neighborhood is not like a war zone. I am trying to say his neighborhood is as tattered and |
| 1:19.8 | feathered as anything else, as shadow pierced my son and light parted by shadow dance as |
| 1:26.5 | anything else. But they won't stop saying how lovely |
| 1:30.4 | the ruins, how ruins the lovely children must be in that birdless city. I'm absolutely crazy |
| 1:40.0 | about this poem. I love this poem so, so much. And there's lots and lots to say about it, |
| 1:45.9 | but I'm going to hone in on just a couple of ideas. Of course, at the center of this poem is the |
| 1:52.1 | image of birds. And so it behooves us then to ask, what do birds represent? It's clearly |
| 1:58.6 | symbolic in this poem. And I think there's a couple |
| 2:02.4 | of possible interpretations, and I'm going to hone in on just two. The first is that birds are |
| 2:08.3 | natural presences, right? They come out of nature. They're not manufactured by humans. They are |
| 2:14.0 | themselves birds from nature. And in general, we don't always associate natural |
... |
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