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Conversations with Birds: The Metaphysics of Bird and Human Communication
An exploration of communicating with birds and the lessons they can teach us
• Discusses specific birdtalk techniques and offers insights into many species
• Looks at the long-standing tradition of “avitherapy” throughout history and in literature and the arts
• Explains how song-talk with birds restores peace, calms anxiety, and enhances health
For decades Alan Powers has studied bird vocalizations, developing the remarkable ability to imitate birds’ songs and get them to respond and even change tunes. Through his years of study, he has discovered that birds can teach us important lessons about the world and about ourselves. As Powers explains, by communing cross-species we reach out to the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present--what Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus , the “Whole turned into One.”
Sharing his journey to learn birdtalk and his profound observations about the poetic, spiritual, and healing influences of birdsong, Powers explores the ancient language of birds and the depth of meaning birds convey. He explains how bird speech sounds like song to us, but birdtalk is urgent and nuanced, whether about predators or the weather. He details how he began learning birdtalk, listening to one bird each summer, learning their many vocalizations and variations. Discussing specific techniques, he shares insights into the birdtalk of many species, including the complex and intelligent speech of Crows, the emotional depths of Loons, the mimicry of Blue Jays, and the beautiful song of the Wood Thrush.
Exploring the intertwined metaphysics of bird and human languages, Powers looks at the long-standing tradition of “avitherapy” throughout history, literature, and the arts. He shares insights into birds from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, reveals how birds appear in love songs throughout the world, and examines how famous writers such as Keats, Catullus, St. Francis of Assisi, and the French historian Jules Michelet found that talking to birds improved their state of mind. He also explores how song-talk with birds restores peace, calms anxiety, and enhances health.
• Discusses specific birdtalk techniques and offers insights into many species
• Looks at the long-standing tradition of “avitherapy” throughout history and in literature and the arts
• Explains how song-talk with birds restores peace, calms anxiety, and enhances health
For decades Alan Powers has studied bird vocalizations, developing the remarkable ability to imitate birds’ songs and get them to respond and even change tunes. Through his years of study, he has discovered that birds can teach us important lessons about the world and about ourselves. As Powers explains, by communing cross-species we reach out to the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present--what Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus , the “Whole turned into One.”
Sharing his journey to learn birdtalk and his profound observations about the poetic, spiritual, and healing influences of birdsong, Powers explores the ancient language of birds and the depth of meaning birds convey. He explains how bird speech sounds like song to us, but birdtalk is urgent and nuanced, whether about predators or the weather. He details how he began learning birdtalk, listening to one bird each summer, learning their many vocalizations and variations. Discussing specific techniques, he shares insights into the birdtalk of many species, including the complex and intelligent speech of Crows, the emotional depths of Loons, the mimicry of Blue Jays, and the beautiful song of the Wood Thrush.
Exploring the intertwined metaphysics of bird and human languages, Powers looks at the long-standing tradition of “avitherapy” throughout history, literature, and the arts. He shares insights into birds from Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, reveals how birds appear in love songs throughout the world, and examines how famous writers such as Keats, Catullus, St. Francis of Assisi, and the French historian Jules Michelet found that talking to birds improved their state of mind. He also explores how song-talk with birds restores peace, calms anxiety, and enhances health.
192 pages, Paperback
Published February 21, 2023
About the author
Alan W. Powers
6 books386 followersEducated at Amherst College and the University of Minnesota, plus post-docs at Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, the Folger Library, Breadloaf, Villa Vergilliana (Cuma, Italy) and the American Academy, Rome. Taught and published on 17C English and Comparative Literature and History, especially Shakespeare and Giordano Bruno. Wrote two books of verse. Appeared in two poetry films, Keats and his Nightingale, and A Loaded Gun. Composed several song settings to Yeats and Dylan Thomas, and jazz heads largely based on birds like Wood Thrush, Oriole, and the European Blackbird. See Google profile for NYT publications and www.zoomusicology.com. Mentors include Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Leonard Unger, Jean D'Amato Thomas, Thomas M Greene, Annabel Patterson, Marjorie Garber, Sander Gilman, Tony Molho, LL Lipking, G. Armour Craig, Richard Cody and Theodore Baird.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
October 9, 2024
Wonderful book, excellent read in between my writing an assignment for my Greek study, so soothing for my soul while it is slaving away with Greek verbs and conjunctions!
It is a book that keeps giving, it is a world of its own and balm for the soul. Now I want to go North America to study those birds that I won’t be able to find here in Strasbourg nor in Denmark. I had to look up a Cardinal, exotic bird that I have never seen before, looks a bit, but only a bit, like our Eurasian Hoopoe.
The author kindly sent me this, because I couldn’t find it on Amazon or elsewhere, still the opinions are, as always, my own, but of course I’m bound to think positively of his book, as you can probably imagine, just think of the idea to write a whole book about birdsong and with note sheets, but there I also have to say that I am bit lost, unmusical as I am.
Update:
Finished the book yesterday, so now I’m providing stars. I’m withholding one star, because the ending isn’t as good as the beginning, but still a marvellous book, one of a kind and exquisite.
It is a book that keeps giving, it is a world of its own and balm for the soul. Now I want to go North America to study those birds that I won’t be able to find here in Strasbourg nor in Denmark. I had to look up a Cardinal, exotic bird that I have never seen before, looks a bit, but only a bit, like our Eurasian Hoopoe.
The author kindly sent me this, because I couldn’t find it on Amazon or elsewhere, still the opinions are, as always, my own, but of course I’m bound to think positively of his book, as you can probably imagine, just think of the idea to write a whole book about birdsong and with note sheets, but there I also have to say that I am bit lost, unmusical as I am.
Update:
Finished the book yesterday, so now I’m providing stars. I’m withholding one star, because the ending isn’t as good as the beginning, but still a marvellous book, one of a kind and exquisite.
March 7, 2023
Fine online review by Geoff Ward on Medium subscription service, "Winged Words about our Feathered Friends":
‘Avian language may well be the language of the psyche, of the soul and mind.’ Alan Powers
Convinced of the spiritual and healing effects of talking with birds, Powers has studied birdsong as a language for decades and developed a unique ability to imitate birds, by whistling to and with them, inviting them to respond and even vary their song. It’s a singular story.
He describes how he started to learn birdtalk, listening attentively to one bird each summer, moving on to appreciate the language of a number of species, including that of crows, loons, blue jays, orioles and the wood thrush, and discusses particular birdtalk techniques.
Grander destiny
‘I readily accept that I am a lover of birdsong,’ he writes in indication of his metaphysical credo. ‘But I would argue that my approach to understanding birds, my attempt even to respond and communicate with them in some rudimentary way, may serve as a model for the grander destiny of our species.’
Powers’ narrative style is allusive, musicological, literary (he’s a former chairman of a college English department) and diaristic; his tone can be professorial and didactic at times, chirpy and buoyant at others, and there’s gravitas: ‘I speak with other species and fear my own,’ he remarks.
But before applying human behaviour to birds, we should think a little, he advises. What might seem to us a melodic interval might be a desperate or distressed plea. Even to call bird sounds ‘song’ is to project a relatively narrow range of human activity. What we call their songs are more often curses and threats, defiance or concession, arrests and apprehensions, or even weather bulletins.
Nevertheless, Powers cleaves to the tradition of ‘avitherapy’, in particular as reflected in literature and other arts through time. He gives examples of insights into birds in the works of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, of how birds feature in love songs of all nations, and how writers including John Keats, Catullus, St Francis of Assisi and the French historian Jules Michelet were uplifted by talking to birds.
Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence / He’s singing his song for me at his own expense / And I’m just like that bird …
Bob Dylan (You’re a big girl now, 1974)
Powers quotes Lorenzo’s famous lines in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: ‘The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils … Let no such man be trusted’.
Then, pointedly, Powers adds: ‘Following Lorenzo (or Shakespeare), I urge that those who fail to whistle to birds not be allowed to vote, to drive or to bear arms.’
Break barriers
The idealist in Powers wants to break barriers between species, while the nostalgic wants to connect with nature as in childhood when, according to William Wordsworth, we were closer to nature and to God. Most likely, Powers feels, he echoes birds as a linguist (having studied languages, although his training is literary) and a musician: for many years he has been an amateur jazz musician, even the composer of a few jazz tunes, some based on wood thrush and oriole songs.
His musical instruction from birds, along with his development as a musician, have yielded him ‘fruitful effects’, including health of spirit. Indeed, in connection with the quote from him at the head of this review, birds, in mythologies worldwide, are symbols or carriers of the soul, and are even seen as the soul itself.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the great affliction today, so bound up with all our strife and conflict, and troubling us deeply both individually and socially, is the loss, and threatened obliteration, of soul. Hence the pressing need to find restorative, spiritual paths which lead us to regain soul and attain selfhood.
Powers is on one such path, I feel, not least through his application of poetics to the avian experience. By communing cross-species, he asserts, we reach out to ‘the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present’, or what the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus, the ‘Whole turned into One’.
Alan Powers earned his PhD in English from the University of Minnesota in 1976, with post-doctoral studies at Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, the Folger Library, Breadloaf, Villa Vergilliana (Italy) and the American Academy, Rome. He is professor emeritus of English at Bristol Community College where he was chairman of the English department from 1988 to 1992. The author of several books, including The Worlds of Giordano Bruno, he lives in Westport, Massachusetts.
*****
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Join Medium with my referral link - Geoff Ward
Read every story from Geoff Ward (and thousands of other writers on Medium). Your membership fee directly supports…
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Birds
Music
Songs
Nature
Books
47
1
‘Avian language may well be the language of the psyche, of the soul and mind.’ Alan Powers
Convinced of the spiritual and healing effects of talking with birds, Powers has studied birdsong as a language for decades and developed a unique ability to imitate birds, by whistling to and with them, inviting them to respond and even vary their song. It’s a singular story.
He describes how he started to learn birdtalk, listening attentively to one bird each summer, moving on to appreciate the language of a number of species, including that of crows, loons, blue jays, orioles and the wood thrush, and discusses particular birdtalk techniques.
Grander destiny
‘I readily accept that I am a lover of birdsong,’ he writes in indication of his metaphysical credo. ‘But I would argue that my approach to understanding birds, my attempt even to respond and communicate with them in some rudimentary way, may serve as a model for the grander destiny of our species.’
Powers’ narrative style is allusive, musicological, literary (he’s a former chairman of a college English department) and diaristic; his tone can be professorial and didactic at times, chirpy and buoyant at others, and there’s gravitas: ‘I speak with other species and fear my own,’ he remarks.
But before applying human behaviour to birds, we should think a little, he advises. What might seem to us a melodic interval might be a desperate or distressed plea. Even to call bird sounds ‘song’ is to project a relatively narrow range of human activity. What we call their songs are more often curses and threats, defiance or concession, arrests and apprehensions, or even weather bulletins.
Nevertheless, Powers cleaves to the tradition of ‘avitherapy’, in particular as reflected in literature and other arts through time. He gives examples of insights into birds in the works of William Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, of how birds feature in love songs of all nations, and how writers including John Keats, Catullus, St Francis of Assisi and the French historian Jules Michelet were uplifted by talking to birds.
Bird on the horizon, sittin’ on a fence / He’s singing his song for me at his own expense / And I’m just like that bird …
Bob Dylan (You’re a big girl now, 1974)
Powers quotes Lorenzo’s famous lines in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice: ‘The man that hath no music in himself, / Nor is not moved by concord of sweet sounds, / Is fit for treason, stratagems and spoils … Let no such man be trusted’.
Then, pointedly, Powers adds: ‘Following Lorenzo (or Shakespeare), I urge that those who fail to whistle to birds not be allowed to vote, to drive or to bear arms.’
Break barriers
The idealist in Powers wants to break barriers between species, while the nostalgic wants to connect with nature as in childhood when, according to William Wordsworth, we were closer to nature and to God. Most likely, Powers feels, he echoes birds as a linguist (having studied languages, although his training is literary) and a musician: for many years he has been an amateur jazz musician, even the composer of a few jazz tunes, some based on wood thrush and oriole songs.
His musical instruction from birds, along with his development as a musician, have yielded him ‘fruitful effects’, including health of spirit. Indeed, in connection with the quote from him at the head of this review, birds, in mythologies worldwide, are symbols or carriers of the soul, and are even seen as the soul itself.
As I’ve written elsewhere, the great affliction today, so bound up with all our strife and conflict, and troubling us deeply both individually and socially, is the loss, and threatened obliteration, of soul. Hence the pressing need to find restorative, spiritual paths which lead us to regain soul and attain selfhood.
Powers is on one such path, I feel, not least through his application of poetics to the avian experience. By communing cross-species, he asserts, we reach out to ‘the timeless interconnected web of all life past and present’, or what the Renaissance philosopher Giordano Bruno called in Latin the Uni-versus, the ‘Whole turned into One’.
Alan Powers earned his PhD in English from the University of Minnesota in 1976, with post-doctoral studies at Princeton, Brown, Harvard, Cornell, the Folger Library, Breadloaf, Villa Vergilliana (Italy) and the American Academy, Rome. He is professor emeritus of English at Bristol Community College where he was chairman of the English department from 1988 to 1992. The author of several books, including The Worlds of Giordano Bruno, he lives in Westport, Massachusetts.
*****
You can subscribe to Medium by using this link:
Join Medium with my referral link - Geoff Ward
Read every story from Geoff Ward (and thousands of other writers on Medium). Your membership fee directly supports…
geoffjward.medium.com
Birds
Music
Songs
Nature
Books
47
1
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews