I’ve been working on ‘A Bird's Guide to Flight’ slowly for a couple of years. I guess it’s a ‘book’ but I’ve started doing so many bits of multimedia for it I’m not sure how it will end up. It started out as a bit of an exploration into the science of flight and where that meets poetry, and it turned into a broader investigation into poetry’s obsession with birds/flight and how they’re/it’s written/not written about.
For this poem, I’ve found a number of instructions for each knot, tried them and adapted bits and pieces from across them to apply to birds in, for lack of a better adjective, human ways. They’re theoretically followable—‘Double Cormorant’ is a double bowline.