Author’s Note: “A System of Seeing” recomposes John James Audubon’s proposal to the New York Lyceum of its collaborative investment in a book project that would eventually become– with largely British sponsorship—his masterpiece, The Birds of America. My poem amplifies the vocabulary of “vision” and “correspondence” that makes its music on the margins of the predominantly transactional pitch of Audubon’s original letter. It belongs to a sequence of twenty poems (and counting!) that treats episodes, encounters and images in Audubon’s ruthless pursuit of a transcendent “system” of seeing.
A System of Seeing
J.J. Audubon to the president of the New York Lyceum
My Plates are a rifleman’s
captures more than
ornithological charts,
yet no feature demanded
by science is denied
in them or overlooked.
My watchfullest pictures
encompass some seventeen
subjects or more; a hawk
mauling a flock of great
grouse-hens; a robin’s nest
stormed by a snake.
Your best fellows might
lend prudent comments,
each naturally bearing
their name. Correspondence
should then fill the vision,
each page spreading
the imprint of God. Then
will this book open a region
and increase our love
of the birds.
⧫
Colin Jeffrey Morris’s sequence-in-progress poems on Audubon have recently appeared in descant, Lily Poetry Review, and The Ekphrastic Review. He was born in Liverpool and raised on the Lancashire coast of England. Morris lives in Berkshire County, Massachusetts.
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