Wallace Stevens: ‘the blackbird flew out of sight’

from Thirteen Ways of Considering Black Birds by John Bennett and John Laidler

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Here's Wallace Stevens reading a section of his well-known poem ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’.

When the blackbird flew out of sight, It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

Ecologist Michael Pocock has a suggestion: ‘A major challenge facing ecologists is effectively communicating the reliance of humanity on nature, so raising the importance of nature in public and political agendas, and thus influencing individuals and decision-makers. Ecological networks provide one potential powerful way to communicate these messages . . . data visualisation is increasingly being used by scientists . . . In most cases, networks are visualised with nodes as polygons (typically circles or rectangles).’
I happily misread Stevens’s circles as polygons. Mind/brain scientist Henry Cowles reminds us: ‘Black birds like ravens and most crows aren’t blackbirds at all . . . the singular ‘a’ of Stevens’s title is clearly misdirection. There are as many birds as there are perspectives, if not more, and as ever, what is true of the poem is true of the world. The more ways we look, the more we realize how much there is to see.’
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Michael J.O. Pocock et al., The Visualisation of Ecological Networks, and Their Use as a Tool for Engagement, Advocacy and Management’, Advances in Ecological Research 54, January 2016, p43, 54.

Henry M. Cowles, ‘What Is It Like to Have a Brain?: On Patrick House’s ‘Nineteen Ways of Looking at Consciousness’’ Oct 11, 2022. https://dev.lareviewofbooks.org/. There are five species of the blackbirds in North America, the Red-winged Blackbird and the Rusty Blackbird are the only two that may be seen in eastern North America. The common blackbird (Turdus merula) is found very occasionally in north America. Stevens could have been referring to a Corvid or a Grackle that migrates from South Eastern USA north in Summer.