Jessica Goodfellow spent several weeks as an artist-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska while finishing her latest book, Whiteout. The poems in this collection explore the stark natural beauty of that mountain, which drew her uncle there for a climb that turned out to be deadly. Martha shares one of those poems, “The Magpie.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Mountain-Inspired Poetry by Jessica Goodfellow”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
The magpie is a really striking-looking bird. It’s got black feathers, and it’s got a patch of white on either side. And then it’s got these other feathers that are sort of this iridescent blue-green or bronze-green and has an exceptionally long tail. And, you know, magpies are known for going around and picking up lots of things or turning things over to find things to eat, and they seem pretty indiscriminate in the way that they eat.
And the Latin word for magpie, pica, gives us the English word pica, which is the term for, as you know, eating things that aren’t normal foodstuffs. Like a lot of times pregnant women crave mud or dirt.
Right, right. They eat clay or soap, something like that. But anyway, I’ve been thinking about magpies a lot because of a poem I read by Jessica Goodfellow. She’s a poet who was an artist in residence at Denali National Park in Alaska. The National Park Service has an artist in residence program.
That’s cool.
Yeah, yeah, where a poet will go and stay in a national park for a while and write poetry about it. And she wrote this poem about a magpie that I absolutely loved and wanted to share with you.
The magpie drags my gaze around. A teeter-totter of blue and black, a wink of stark white epaulette, crazed glass wings, a sheen of green, a swaggering wand of opal tail. Then with a shake of lacquered beak and a fling of fingery wings, is gone. And you have to see this poem, too, because is gone is way over on the other side. And it just, I think it’s a poem that should be taught in high schools.
It sounds exactly like a magpie.
Doesn’t it?
Yeah.
Yeah, and just like an imagist poem, you know, sort of a William Carlos Williams type of thing. I also loved the crazed glass wings because, you know, crazed glass is that kind of glass that’s all crackly. It’s meant to be, right?
Yeah, yeah. And the word craze is also used in dentistry when you’re talking about enamel that’s cracked on your teeth. That’s crazed. And it’s related to our word crazy. It has to do with the idea of shattering, cracking. Something that’s not whole anymore.
Yeah.
These fissures. And the poem again? It’s called The Magpie. It’s by Jessica Goodfellow, and you can find it if you just Google those words.
Okay.
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