Sacha Archer is a Canadian concrete poet. His most recent book is Second Sight, published by Redfox Press. Some of Archer’s other publications include Havana Syndrome (The Blasted Tree); Sweet Sixteen (Zimzalla), cellsea (Timglaset); Empty Building (Penteract Press); Mother’s Milk (Timglaset), which was included on CBC’s best poetry books of 2020 list; Perverse Density (above/ground press); and In Remembrance of Lost Children (Paper View Books).
“In his essay ‘On Speech,’ Robert Grenier famously wrote ‘I HATE SPEECH.’ With this hyperbolic statement in mind, I crafted a cheeky, brief response to Grenier’s poetic work Sentences Towards Birds, which he published in 1975. The result is a sentence toward bird, neither sentence nor bird; no speech, no word—albeit I did add a paragraph to frame the work. After all, I don’t hate words, or speech.”
When a bird has its wings torn off by a cat it has to walk from place to place like you or I, which is why it would seem (and in truth would be) if you saw it, so miserable. That is, it is the measure of similarity to humanity that, in the end, is the primary determiner of a creature’s happiness and, it follows, general wellbeing, which is to say, every step towards human resemblance is a step away from the harmony of knowing better. The violent loss of the bird’s wings would be, it would be ridiculous to deny, a factor of that bird’s misery, but a scant secondary determiner, as it stands. Whatever it is walking towards, or hopping, as the case may be, its progress is deflated for being an identifiable progression towards a determined end.
