Blackbird and Beethoven
Blackbird, you are the Beethoven of songbirds
but when I hear this, the metaphor summons
his bust and I can’t recall your call.
How many musicians, blackbird, are deaf
like the percussionist who taught herself to hear
with parts of her body other than her ears,
who performs barefoot to hear the music better?
If I’d known more about vibrations, blackbird,
how we hear with our hands with special nerve cells,
known that hearing, blackbird, is an audio-tactile experience,
with both senses tuned to environmental oscillations,
I could have countered his anecdote, the conductor
who claimed the percussionist was fake because she looked
round when he entered her dressing room. Blackbird, I
would have sung out your chink, chink warning call.
When I see you in the ivy, blackbird,
I think of the thirteen ways of looking at you
and how you are a sign as well as a song.
Blackbird, you came before and after Beethoven,
your shaped phrases and motifs recorded
in his pocket notebook. You sing the opening
to the rondo of his violin concerto. I see him, blackbird,
as his housekeeper saw him – pencil in mouth,
a yellow beak, touching the other end to the soundboard
of a piano to feel the vibration of your song. Blackbird,
as he hits the notes harder, as the piano starts
to fall apart, will the fake musicians turn round?
I don’t know who first called the blackbird “the Beethoven of songbirds” though it’s a widely quoted phrase, which Lisa Kelly borrows, among other popular anecdotes about the composer, in Blackbird and Beethoven. Why was Beethoven (1770-1827) singled out for the “blackbird” honour? It might be because it’s known that during his regular tramps through the Viennese countryside he transcribed the various bird calls into his notebook. When composing, he occasionally reproduced those calls (such as the cuckoo in the Pastoral Symphony), though he more usually took them as the starting point of further musical development.
For Lisa Kelly, a poet writing from the D/deaf perspective, Beethoven is an especially significant figure. His struggles with eventually total hearing-loss allowed him to transform the condition into the development and amplification of his genius.
The poem is essentially a one-voiced dialogue. By talking directly to the blackbird, and constantly using the name, “blackbird”, Kelly breaks a sound- and species-barrier, calling worded response to the wordless calls. She also pauses to record her response through sight and sign: “When I see you in the ivy, blackbird, / I think of the thirteen ways of looking at you / and how you are a sign as well as a song.” To refresh memories, here’s the Wallace Stevens poem referred to, a work intent on visualisation but creating through its own sounds and rhythms a lyrical piece of audio.
With blackbirds and Beethoven in the foreground, it would have been easy for Kelly to write a romantic and prettified kind of poem. She resists this from the start in her form, idiom and material. In the first tercet, she’s deflected from the potentially sentimental “metaphor” by a seemingly uninvited memory – that of the famously stony and stormy bust of the composer. The poem goes on to achieve a still harder surface. It explores the physiology of hearing, “how we hear with our hands with special nerve cells …” and how in this “audio-tactile experience”, both senses are “tuned to environmental oscillations”.
The poem’s deeper aim is exposure, and this centres, with some anger, on the ignorance of the hearing world as focused through the story of an orchestral conductor who claimed a percussionist had faked her deafness “because she looked / round when he entered her dressing room”. The poet regrets not having immediately “sung out” in response the blackbird’s “chink, chink warning call”. Instead, her poem sounds it clearly, and develops it further.
A striking image, one on the edge of comedy perhaps, appears in the eighth stanza. Beethoven is playing the blackbird’s song on his piano while using one of his ingenious listening methods, picking up the vibrations through a pencil which resembles the bird’s yellow bill. The original anecdote is recounted here.
The “looking round” episode in stanza five gains power from another anecdote, one of the best-known and most painful Beethoven stories. It describes how the composer had to be physically turned round by the conductor at the end of the first performance of his Ninth Symphony, so he could see the applause he was unable to hear. Rightly, it’s not directly included in the poem: the Beethoven presented here is not an object of sympathy, nor even a gigantic, heroic strider of the landscape, but a man too filled with music to be silenced.
The final scathing question Kelly asks turns on a more general concept of “fake musicians” – the host of the hearing in their states of various un-hearing. It challenges the historical incapacity of the critics to understand Beethoven’s music, and, most significantly, British society’s widespread inability to tune in to BSL, the revolutionary language of the D/deaf community.
Blackbird and Beethoven is from Lisa Kelly’s 2023 collection, The House of the Interpreter. A magical mystery tour of unusual forms of communication, the collection is reviewed here by the poet Stuart Henson. And here for pure enjoyment is the Rondo from the Violin Concerto, a work which Beethoven composed during the “middle period” of his career, after the onset of his hearing-loss.
