This was a commissioned project by a very thoughtful husband for his wife’s birthday. He wanted me to do something (originally the idea was custom socks!) with her favorite poem, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens. I thought an artist’s book would be nice—the poem is so visual, and black and white ink paintings seemed right for illustrations. I made a tiny book and then thought it would be a neat surprise to hide it within a larger book. I found this beautiful Birds of New England book online (there were a number of copies, and I bought one that was water-damaged because I had no small amount of angst about carving out the center of the book—I think the book punished me by making it take a thousand hours and then being too small for the book, which I then had to re-create so that it would fit!).
Here is the poem:
I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.
II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.
III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.
IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.
V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.
VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.
VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?
VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.
IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.
X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.
XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.
XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.
XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.
Wallace Stevens, “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” from The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens, 1954