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For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds
Literary Nonfiction. Essays. A blend of literary criticism and memoir, Jennifer Moxley's FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, DO NOT DESTROY THE BIRDS recounts a life spent in the company of birds and poems, intimately attuned to the mysteries of singing. These essays trace the poet's calling to sources in birdsong and sacrifice, asking, "Must a woman be sentenced to endless night for a poet to be born?" From the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice to the death of the poet's mother, Moxley explores the losses that underlie poetry, and in turn, poetry's use as a measure for living. "FOR THE GOOD OF ALL, DO NOT DESTROY THE BIRDS opens a magical place of clean-lined prose, scholarly knowledge, and inspiration. The writing is deep and lucid, it cuts to the bone and yet respects the mystery of things. It works by a literary transfiguration. The poet shines with bright rays of thought and skill as she stands on a mount of experience created by the songs of poets and birds --from Sappho and Ovid to Robert Duncan and Anne Carson, from nightingales to lyrebirds --until they appear next to her and converse with her as she writes." --Robert Adamson
- GenresNonfictionPoetry
181 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2021
About the author
Jennifer Moxley
29 books18 followersElectronic Poetry Center Author page:
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/moxley...
http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/moxley...
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
June 28, 2022
Reading this collection of bird-poetry crossed with flash-essays, I look for perches in the sunlight or on the shady, protected side of the street. Birds might alight on the back of a folding chair attached to the patio of the neighborhood cafe where I'm sitting now.
In an ecologically balanced world, birds, like poems, would be ubiquitous. You would only need to know in which direction to look (up) to find them.
In our climate-devasted world, birds, like poetry, are a collection of endangered species. They must be kept alive through intentional dedication & effort.
Moxley has that unique blend of pomo-Marxist skepticism blended with the eloquence of a classical, 19th-century-style belles-lettres. She is a writer who has always been committed to the literature of the ages, and her prose as a result is diligent, precise, and piercing, as well as exceedingly beautiful. She instructs by example, offers the patient, lifelong lesson on how to be a contemporary writer amid the seas of literary infinity.
Reading her, I feel acutely the condition of the poet, or the acute poet’s condition, as one whose solemn aspiration and obligation is to walk amongst the ages and the sages. That this solemn walk should seem strangely incongruous & out of place in the palm-lined scenescapes of Southern California where she grew up, is something I feel I can understand. I too spent an introverted childhood basking in overbaked, sunlit days south of LA. The strangeness & estrangement of being a bookish type amidst the pervasive anti-intellectualism of surf culture, of looking to my local external environment for signposts & encouragement towards my next level of personal development and finding at most the incidental, implied narrative of subdivision street-naming themes gesturing at vague arcana of categorical, encyclopedic knowledge — planets, Shakespearean characters, and styles of shipcraft in my case, the names of birds in Moxley’s case.
The poignant, uphill struggle of the poet keening to draw a connection between the tradition-rich ideas & feelings lodged in the mind and a largely synthetic, ahistoricized external environment.
Which is not to pigeonhole Moxley as a poet of flighty Romantic ideals, by any means. To the contrary, her poetics is firmly grounded in the actual, in real-life personal relationships with feathered avian beings and real-life tragedy. What is the origin story of the poet? is the question she continually asks throughout this collection. Or more precisely (to paraphrase her words), must a woman die in order for the poet to be born?
The tragic premature loss of a beloved female muse — for Orpheus, Eurydice; for Moxley, her mother — is a trauma that afflicts the poet with a singing voice of acute, nearly incomprehensible, nearly inexpressible, nearly inhuman grief. In acute grief, we become somehow irrelevant to the normative human world, or it becomes irrelevant to us. We are thrust back into the primordial emotions of our animal rear-brain, and we must don a different species of skin to match: for Gilgamesh, the skin of a lion; for the poet, the feathers & wings of a vulnerable singing creature. I think of that Greenaway film The Falls, which dances around implied avian personae triggered by a Violent Unexplained Event.
Incidentally, Moxley is one among several fine contemporary female writers who found their literary vocation in the wake of a premature maternal death. Somebody needs to write a study or something about this particular feminist phenomenon of matrilineal muse-inspiration coupled with grief.
Ultimately, this book reminds me that it’s worth it to devote our time & effort to the nourishment & preservation of a fine feathered thing — whether it be hope, a poem, a work of art, or a sand plover. We could each do far worse in our finite span of existence on this troubled, terrestrial planet as it hurtles through the skyward expanses that we wonder & dream so much about.
https://mydarkliterature.com/2022/06/...
In an ecologically balanced world, birds, like poems, would be ubiquitous. You would only need to know in which direction to look (up) to find them.
In our climate-devasted world, birds, like poetry, are a collection of endangered species. They must be kept alive through intentional dedication & effort.
Moxley has that unique blend of pomo-Marxist skepticism blended with the eloquence of a classical, 19th-century-style belles-lettres. She is a writer who has always been committed to the literature of the ages, and her prose as a result is diligent, precise, and piercing, as well as exceedingly beautiful. She instructs by example, offers the patient, lifelong lesson on how to be a contemporary writer amid the seas of literary infinity.
Reading her, I feel acutely the condition of the poet, or the acute poet’s condition, as one whose solemn aspiration and obligation is to walk amongst the ages and the sages. That this solemn walk should seem strangely incongruous & out of place in the palm-lined scenescapes of Southern California where she grew up, is something I feel I can understand. I too spent an introverted childhood basking in overbaked, sunlit days south of LA. The strangeness & estrangement of being a bookish type amidst the pervasive anti-intellectualism of surf culture, of looking to my local external environment for signposts & encouragement towards my next level of personal development and finding at most the incidental, implied narrative of subdivision street-naming themes gesturing at vague arcana of categorical, encyclopedic knowledge — planets, Shakespearean characters, and styles of shipcraft in my case, the names of birds in Moxley’s case.
The poignant, uphill struggle of the poet keening to draw a connection between the tradition-rich ideas & feelings lodged in the mind and a largely synthetic, ahistoricized external environment.
Which is not to pigeonhole Moxley as a poet of flighty Romantic ideals, by any means. To the contrary, her poetics is firmly grounded in the actual, in real-life personal relationships with feathered avian beings and real-life tragedy. What is the origin story of the poet? is the question she continually asks throughout this collection. Or more precisely (to paraphrase her words), must a woman die in order for the poet to be born?
The tragic premature loss of a beloved female muse — for Orpheus, Eurydice; for Moxley, her mother — is a trauma that afflicts the poet with a singing voice of acute, nearly incomprehensible, nearly inexpressible, nearly inhuman grief. In acute grief, we become somehow irrelevant to the normative human world, or it becomes irrelevant to us. We are thrust back into the primordial emotions of our animal rear-brain, and we must don a different species of skin to match: for Gilgamesh, the skin of a lion; for the poet, the feathers & wings of a vulnerable singing creature. I think of that Greenaway film The Falls, which dances around implied avian personae triggered by a Violent Unexplained Event.
Incidentally, Moxley is one among several fine contemporary female writers who found their literary vocation in the wake of a premature maternal death. Somebody needs to write a study or something about this particular feminist phenomenon of matrilineal muse-inspiration coupled with grief.
Ultimately, this book reminds me that it’s worth it to devote our time & effort to the nourishment & preservation of a fine feathered thing — whether it be hope, a poem, a work of art, or a sand plover. We could each do far worse in our finite span of existence on this troubled, terrestrial planet as it hurtles through the skyward expanses that we wonder & dream so much about.
https://mydarkliterature.com/2022/06/...
July 20, 2022
I HAVE NOT read There Are Things We Live Among, but I have a feeling that book is the closest analogue to this one in Moxley's corpus. Each chapter in For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds looks closely at a (usually famous) poem (or other literary text) about a bird, stirring in some of Moxley's own experiences with or observations of birds and a few reflections on her own poetry. Hardy's thrush, Tennyson's swan, Whitman's mocking-bird...but with some surprises, like Félicité's parrot in Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, Creeley's nightingale rather than Keats's, a bird-man out of one of Max Ernst's collages, and an opera or two.
The book may be too literary for people who like to read about birds and too avian-centric to make much dent as literary criticism, but I read it just because I like Jennifer Moxley's writing, so I was quite happy with it.
As apparent also in her memoir The Middle Room, poet Moxley writes great prose. The sensibility and landscape are contemporary, roughly, but the grace and poise in the prose hearken back to a pre-Didion, pre-Hemingway pace and amplitude--like Pater (but not as perfumed) or Ruskin (but lighter on its feet) or Newman. Moxley has, like the rest of us, read her Adorno et al., but she steers well away from anything that sounds like jargon. Her prose breathes a more oxygenated atmosphere than we usually get in lit crit, and I am grateful.
The book may be too literary for people who like to read about birds and too avian-centric to make much dent as literary criticism, but I read it just because I like Jennifer Moxley's writing, so I was quite happy with it.
As apparent also in her memoir The Middle Room, poet Moxley writes great prose. The sensibility and landscape are contemporary, roughly, but the grace and poise in the prose hearken back to a pre-Didion, pre-Hemingway pace and amplitude--like Pater (but not as perfumed) or Ruskin (but lighter on its feet) or Newman. Moxley has, like the rest of us, read her Adorno et al., but she steers well away from anything that sounds like jargon. Her prose breathes a more oxygenated atmosphere than we usually get in lit crit, and I am grateful.
November 20, 2025
very much a sequel to these are the things we live among. the nursing of the pigeon is an amazing sequence & a feat of concision. that's poetry! "there was a sudden sensation of upward motion and, like a shameless thought, my pigeon was gone." i thought the ending was quite stunning too. i think maybe this essay form is even better with birds because they stay as long and as uncaringly gentle as birdsong
July 6, 2022
An interesting combination of literary analysis, personal memoirs, prose, and research. While it made me appreciate birds more, I don’t think I know enough about poetry to really get what the author is going for.
May 19, 2026
Proof that being earnest and deliberate and present in the world doesn’t necessarily mean of quality let alone readable. That reads disparaging, but I wouldn’t take this away from anyone who enjoyed it. Keep it, will you?
December 31, 2022
“When poets speak of birds, they are really talking about themselves,” Jennifer recalls one lecturer saying as she begins her unique literary criticism / memoir / bird obsession/reflection of a book. She dives into stories of the birds in her life during her time becoming and growing as a writer and a reader, and she takes apart and reflects on wherever birds appear in classical poems from Yeats, Whitman, and Dickinson to the stories of Orpheus and Eurydice, Philomela and Procne.
Jennifer shows us how birds help us communicate, court, grieve, and age. They speak to us of longing and loitering. They’re impossible to jail. Like artists and saints, they show us how to live “a simple life, with the full power of your desire pointed in one direction.” It’s an intriguing read, with its reverence for birds. Plus this book has the best title and opens with perhaps my favorite dedication of all time: to someone “kind to books and poets, a friend to all the birds”
“Once the literal birds fly out of the poem, the conundrum of how to sing without them animates the poem’s acquisitive quest.”
“What does it mean to be ‘easy as a Star’?….Or is Dickinson saying that what the ‘they’ can’t understand is that both bird and poet are with the stars—from the Latin con (with) + sidera (stars). They are considerers, subject to none but stellar logics.”
“Where literature is found has less to do with its force than who we are when we find it.” (!!!)
Jennifer shows us how birds help us communicate, court, grieve, and age. They speak to us of longing and loitering. They’re impossible to jail. Like artists and saints, they show us how to live “a simple life, with the full power of your desire pointed in one direction.” It’s an intriguing read, with its reverence for birds. Plus this book has the best title and opens with perhaps my favorite dedication of all time: to someone “kind to books and poets, a friend to all the birds”
“Once the literal birds fly out of the poem, the conundrum of how to sing without them animates the poem’s acquisitive quest.”
“What does it mean to be ‘easy as a Star’?….Or is Dickinson saying that what the ‘they’ can’t understand is that both bird and poet are with the stars—from the Latin con (with) + sidera (stars). They are considerers, subject to none but stellar logics.”
“Where literature is found has less to do with its force than who we are when we find it.” (!!!)
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews