Poetry & Academia & Personal Posted by Oaktown Girl, 04 Apr 2007 05:10 am

Squirrels

By Amanda French

From my enormous second-story concrete porch or deck or balcony or
whatever it is (and by enormous I mean twice as big as my apartment’s
living room), I have a great view of squirrels. Lots of squirrels.
Thereare lots of trees near the house, so when I sit out on my second-story
porch (I’m going with “porch”), I’m kind of up in the boughs right
among’em, the squirrels. There’s one methodically tightrope-walking the
telephone line about twenty feet straight in front of my nose and
exactly level with my eyes. There’s two chasing each other in a
skittering helix up and around and down the tree trunk like red stripes
up and around and down an electric barber pole. There’s one eyeing me
worriedly, amanda_french_squirrel.jpgcompletely still except for the whipcracking bushy tail.
There’s one triumphantly making the notoriously tough leap from the
thick fallen branch stuck in the tree crotch to the thin branch of the
next tree over. The branch dips and sways as the leaper grabs it and
scurries upward.

I like watching the squirrels, and I feel fairly expert at it by now.
One of the reasons that I like watching them is that I know what
they’re called. Squirrels. They’re called squirrels. They don’t have any other
name that I should be calling them, as far as I know, though I’m sure
there is some Latin term. Maybe biologists call them “American
squirrels” or “gray squirrels” or “brown squirrels” or “common
squirrels” when they’re not using the Latin, but only the pedantic
would call them something like that. They’re called squirrels, and everyone
knows it, and everyone knows exactly what I mean when I say squirrels.

This appellational certainty does not apply, for instance, to the
birds. I like watching the birds, too, but I know I should be calling them
something besides birds. Bluejay, got it. Robin. Ooh, hummingbird.
Ruby-throated? There aren’t any cardinals, I know that. I saw cardinals
in Virginia, but I rarely see any here. The rest of the birds, present
and absent, are birds. I bought binoculars and a bird-watching book,
but their lessons have been murky or have not stuck. Woodpecker, yes,
correct, but what kind? I should check again if those are chickadees,
those birds, those ones that most of the birds are. I bet Chris Clarke
knows what those birds are.

The black finish of the binoculars is now holed and bubbled because one
lens got fogged with condensation after I left them outside so I put
them in the toaster oven thinking to dry them out. And one lens is
still fogged.

The only poetry-writing class I ever took was from Greg Orr at the
University of Virginia, and one of the main things he taught us was to
be specific, to name things, to name them precisely. He walked us
through an exercise in which we all named what we saw in our mind’s eye
at the word “beauty,” then the word “flower,” then the words “red
tulip.” We all had different images in response to the abstract noun
“beauty,” some overlapping images in response to the categorical noun
“flower,” and mostly the same image in response to the concrete name
“red tulip.” The exercise demonstrated that the more specific the name,
the greater the likelihood that the image in your mind will match the
image in the reader’s mind. Greg also wanted us to name things
specifically so that our language would match the world itself as
closely as possible. He had an amused scorn for structuralism, or
possibly post-structuralism, or at any rate for the idea that words
attach only to each other. He held that words do indeed refer to things
in the world. To write abstractly, categorically, nonspecifically, was
to disrespect words and to disrespect the world.

Greg’s lesson in precise naming really stuck with me. I use the red
tulip exercise in my own teaching to illustrate what I mean when I say
“Be specific” and to explain why I say it. It helped my writing, and it
has helped my students’ writing, I’m convinced. Yet at the time I
argued with Greg about the dictum that poetry should be specific. I
immediately remembered a few famous or favorite lines where the abstract or
categorical nouns make the line: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.”
“People or stars / Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.” “The sunlight
has never / heard of trees.” “A poem should be wordless / As the flight
of birds.” Sometimes you mean a whole category, not a specific. And
sometimes you want a sound more than you want a specific. I have more
affection than Greg had for that structuralist, or possibly
post-structuralist, idea that words attract and repel each other at
least as much as they attract and repel real things. Rhyme, for
instance. I love rhyme, and I don’t see why it isn’t a great example of
how meaning can be produced by words just messing around among
themselves.

Here’s my theory: Poetry should try to make words touch both each other
and the world at the same time. You don’t want to go too far either one
way or the other. Get too close to the world and you’ll wind up with a
seed catalog instead of a poem. Get too far away from it and you’ll
wind up with clichés or jargon, something vague that just sounded good.

Squirrels strike me as hilarious and adorable and vivid. This guy I
know named Mike plays banjo in our bluegrass band, and he owns several
shotguns and often goes squirrel-hunting. Owning shotguns and going
squirrel-hunting also strikes me as hilarious and adorable and vivid.
(This capacity for treachery to the Party, any Party, is why I’ll never make an
activist.) Another reason I like watching the squirrels is because
they’re so different from me. So is Mike. I couldn’t tightrope-walk
that telephone wire. I never chase anybody around at high speed, at least
not anymore, and even back then it wasn’t up and around and down a tree. I
certainly don’t own shotguns and go squirrel-hunting; I’m sentimental
and squeamish. It’s all fascinating.

So I wanted to write a song about Mike and his squirrel-hunting, but I
also just wanted to use the word “squirrel.” It’s exact and precise and
specific, just as Greg Orr would want, and, moreover, it rhymes with
“girl.” Rhymes for “girl” are scarce. Five hundred pop songs, I bet you
anything, have some version of this: “Oh, girl, you’re the best damn
girl in the whole damn world, gonna buy you diamonds, gonna buy you
pearls.” That’s an example of (cough) poetry that isn’t touching the
world. I bet that girl isn’t the best damn girl in the whole damn
world.I bet he doesn’t even really think she is. And he’s never really going
to buy her pearls. Pearls are not bling. Gillian Welch wrote a great
song called “Barroom Girls” in which she avoided the over-used “world,”
worked in “twirl” and “swirl,” and, most impressively, made all the
rhymes seem both new and true: “Last night’s spangles and yesterday’s
pearls / Are the bright morning stars of the barroom girls.” But even
brilliant Gillian hasn’t rhymed “girl” with “squirrel,” and hanging out
with Mike gave me an idea of how I could.

The song I just finished is called “Shotgun,” and it’s from the point
of view of a guy who is like Mike in that he owns shotguns and goes
squirrel-hunting, but who is unlike Mike in that he comes home one
night to find his woman a-cheatin on him, which isn’t going to happen to Mike
and his lovely wife Holly. The first lines of the last verse: “Last
night I came home from huntin squirrel / Caught some stranger messin
with my girl.” Bang. Done.

And the thing about that squirrel tightrope-walking the telephone line
right in front of my nose and exactly level with my eyes as I sit on my
second-story porch is that I always imagine shooting it. It’s such a
perfect shot.

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Responses to “Squirrels”

  1. on 04 Apr 2007 at 7:28 am 1. JP Stormcrow said …

    I just knew all the posts here would basically turn out to be the same old post over and over again. :) [hmmm, we have smileys turned on? :| ] But I will let that first one stand - thanks for the fresh look at the quotidian world of squirrels.

    Then there is the too specific use of words.

    I was discussin’ with the doc, Do I need an epidural?
    While that goddamn son-uva-bitch was still out a-hunting squirrel.

  2. on 04 Apr 2007 at 8:15 am 2. christian h. said …

    Love the post. And the precise naming lesson - it’s a good one.

  3. on 04 Apr 2007 at 8:33 am 3. spyder said …

    One may even wonder what Mike does with the squirrels after he shoots them; and if what he does with them squirrels is the same as what lyrical analogous Mike does with the epidural delivering doc strange????

    Thanks for this great spring-gushing refreshing post, Amanda. And yes, i am fairly certain the CC would be able to splat the appropriate taxonomic labels on all them critters, and insist that the geographic location of tree squirrels prefigures their genus and species (i recall reading some years ago that about a debate concerning whether eastern tree squirrels were of the same genus and species as western tree squirrels since they could not mate to produce offspring?? non lo so).

    “Pearls are not bling,” but some of them sure cost as much.

  4. on 04 Apr 2007 at 9:17 am 4. Jams said …

    I was taught a subtly different lesson, as follows:

    Good poetry does not suffer unintended ambiguity.

  5. on 04 Apr 2007 at 9:52 am 5. Seattle said …

    Years ago I took a class from a visiting professor from Japan at Western Washington University in Bellingham WA. It was a tough class for all of us, because if you’ve ever had to sit through a class with someone who is very intelligent and very well spoken in their own language trying to teach in another language that they aren’t nearly as fluent in, you’ll understand the frustrations on both sides of the teaching podium. He was trying to discuss the then Japanese Emperor and we were reading through a selection of his poetry. We were invited to comment on the following poem:

    The matsui pine
    Stands in the rocks
    Here at the southernmost limit of it’s growing region.

    Now keep in mind that’s not exact-it was haiku and I’m pulling up that memory from over 20 years ago. The professor asked for our impressions. The class sat silent. I spoke up-yet again illustrating that it is sometimes best to keep your mouth shut… “It sounds like a botany lesson…” He looked at me, and started to talk about how the poetry was about a tough survivor…I felt like an idiot. Lesson learned. It may sound literal-look again.

  6. on 04 Apr 2007 at 10:23 am 6. Heraclitus (Jeff) said …

    How exactly does one “hunt” squirrels? I’ve never known them to be all that hard to “track.” In fact, probably half the squirrels I’ve ever seen approached me, looking for food. And a shotgun? Maybe the skill in hunting squirrels comes in seeing if you can completely vaporize it?

    Your song reminds me of a joke from The Simpsons version of Hee-Haw (I forget what the parody version was called).

    “I caught my wife in bed with my best friend.”
    “You bitter?”
    “Yup. Bit him, too.”

    And, of course, good post.

  7. on 04 Apr 2007 at 11:15 am 7. Sven DiMilo said …

    Well, see, the squirrels in the suburbs are easy to see & track, on account of the no-discharge-of-firearms-within-city-limits laws. It is a hell of a lot harder to see (let alone shoot) squirrels in the woods where you’re permitted to shoot ‘em.
    “Squirrel” is much easier to rhyme than “Sciuris (the tree-squirrel genus), or “sciurid” (referring to the whole famn damily, including woodchucks, chipmunks, etc.).
    Another option is to read your poem in a Scottish accent (think Shrek), in which case you can rhyme “squirrel” with “griddle” and “paradiddle.”

  8. on 04 Apr 2007 at 12:03 pm 8. peter ramus said …

    There once was a girl
    with a big brace of squirrels
    frolicking by her veranda
    “I know ‘em by name
    but still just the same
    I’d plink ‘em, I would!” —Oh, Amanda!!

  9. on 04 Apr 2007 at 12:11 pm 9. JP Stormcrow said …

    I know squirrel hunting from nothing.
    But searching on the Internets, I found this great tool for searching on the Internets. Put in squirrel hunting and these are the first two that came up, so I think that means the they are supposed to be authoritative or something. The second contains material relevant to the appropriate weaponry to use against the little buggers:

    You can spark a lively debate among veteran squirrel hunters as to whether a shotgun is a better tool than a .22 rifle. Yet even the most impassioned debaters may well change their stance with the seasons.

    Conventional wisdom dictates that the smoothbore is the preferred tool during the early fall, when vegetation is still relatively thick and squirrels are on the move. Once the full weight of winter settles in, bringing bare-branch vistas and noisy walking conditions, the rifle is often the choice.

    You can’t talk to a girl, when she’s lining up a squirrel

  10. on 04 Apr 2007 at 12:24 pm 10. spyder said …

    Must be something like prairie dog huntin; the bloody version of whack-a-mole, and that’s not the sauce. The lengthy debates on appropriate weaponry are always suppressed by the one guy who has the RDX, Semtex, or C-4. Sure junior’s advocacy for fertilizer and kerosene, with a wee touch of dynamite, has its local merits, but would Caddy Shack have ever been the same??

  11. on 04 Apr 2007 at 2:53 pm 11. Roxanne said …

    Seattle:

    The nail that sticks up, gets hammered down.

  12. on 04 Apr 2007 at 3:03 pm 12. Seattle said …

    Roxanne:

    LOL No pain, no gain.

  13. on 04 Apr 2007 at 3:39 pm 13. Amanda French said …

    Sorry I’ve been absent so far today: crazy busy. Thanks for comments, all.

    spyder, Mike skins the squirrels after he shoots them and makes stew out of some of them and puts the rest in his freezer. Apparently. That’s hearsay. And Sven, thanks for being on top of Heraclitus’s question — you’re exactly right. Again according to Mike, it’s, well, not difficult exactly, but reasonably challenging to hunt squirrels out in the woods where you’re allowed to hunt em.

    Jams, that’s probably exactly the lesson Greg was teaching us — I did think that he disliked even intended ambiguity too much, but it’s surely true that most amateur poems suffer far more often from unintended ambiguity.

    peter, peter, peter, what are we going to do with you . . . “brace”? “Big brace”? Doesn’t “brace” mean “a pair”? That “big” reeks of expletive.

  14. on 04 Apr 2007 at 3:41 pm 14. black dog barking said …

    Slowly, with country dignity—

    Got me a shotgun, got me a girl
    Took my gun and got me a sqrl
    Now I’m so eff’ing loaded I could hurl

    (spoken)
    but I won’t … because … I’m …

    Goin’ home to see my Pearl
    But she’s in bed with cousin Merle
    I think I’ll give Phi-lah-so-phee a whirl

    Skitter helix-ly away, sans dignity.

  15. on 04 Apr 2007 at 3:43 pm 15. Amanda French said …

    And the “epidural” / girl rhyme is . . . words fail. Good. “Epidural” is good. It is a good rhyme for “girl.”

  16. on 04 Apr 2007 at 4:20 pm 16. Heraclitus (Jeff) said …

    My uncle knows someone who does something rodeo related or something, but he’s some kind of champion lassoer. There’s apparently a video of him lassoing a squirrel. Whenever I think about that, I laugh for like a minute straight.

  17. on 04 Apr 2007 at 4:35 pm 17. Heraclitus (Jeff) said …

    There’s also “squirrelly,” one of my favorite words. It rhymes with a lot: girly, Shirley, surely, purely, girlie, etc.

  18. on 04 Apr 2007 at 4:42 pm 18. opit said …

    When I was a young imp, the girl next door used to try and ‘talk’ to squirrels, chipmunks and birds from her window. She had her favourite ‘call’ : it was quite a while before she finally figured out which critter was making it.

  19. on 04 Apr 2007 at 4:54 pm 19. James Killus said …

    My mom used to shoot squirrels off the trees when when she lived in the house back in the Georgia woods. They were varmits that ate the vegetables in the garden and the nuts off the trees. Also, the occasional shotgin blast reminded the neighbors (mostly relatives, but still untrustworthy for the most part) that it wasn’t safe to go sneaking up near the house of the widow living in the woods.

  20. on 04 Apr 2007 at 5:31 pm 20. JP Stormcrow said …

    …and don’t call me squirrelly.

  21. on 04 Apr 2007 at 6:03 pm 21. Oaktown Girl said …

    Heraclitus - lassoing a squirrel? That would take some serious lassoing talent. I’d feel badly for the squirrel, but damn, that is one hell of a funny image.

    And now I’ve also got the image of a very intimidating-looking Widow Killus sitting on her front porch in the Georgia backwoods, holding a shotgun. Ain’t no one gonna mess with her, that’s for sure.

    My dad battled squirrels. They’d dig up his potted plants looking for nuts and other goodies. There’d usually be just one truly relentless squirrel at any given time, and for my dad, that squirrel’s singular purpose in life was to drive him crazy. But dad couldn’t stand the thought of me melting down over him shooting squirrels, so he broke down and bought a squirrel trap. He’d catch them and drop them at the top of Grizzley Peak just a few miles away. (That link is to someone’s Flickr photos of the Grizzly Peak area. Pretty nice shots, too).

  22. on 04 Apr 2007 at 6:27 pm 22. christian h. said …

    It’s very weird for a European like me to see squirrels as some kind of plague - the very shy - and much cuter - red ones we have back there are much rarer, and everybody loves them. The animals people used to shoot - usually with pellet guns - were sparrows.

  23. on 04 Apr 2007 at 6:33 pm 23. peter ramus said …

    Amanda, of course you’re right. That “big brace” simply will not do.

    On reflection, substitute:

    There once was a girl
    with a passel o’ squirrels
    [etc.]

  24. on 04 Apr 2007 at 7:04 pm 24. peter ramus said …

    The animals people used to shoot - usually with pellet guns - were sparrows.

    That seems to be a shared cultural practice, christian h:

    Turpentine and dandelion wine
    I’ve turned the corner and I’m doin’ fine
    Shootin’ at the birds on the telephone line
    Pickin’ em off with this gun of mine
    I got a fire in my belly
    And a fire in my head
    Goin’ higher and higher
    Until I’m dead
    […]
    Oh, the sun shines bright on
    My Old Kentucky Home
    And the young folks roll on the floor
    Oh, the sun shines bright on
    My Old Kentucky Home
    Keep them hard times away from my door

    —Randy Newman

  25. on 04 Apr 2007 at 7:37 pm 25. spyder said …

    to see squirrels as some kind of plague

    And that is actually one of the problems, particularly in CA along the Eastern Slope of the Sierras and Western Nevada, and more generally across the state. Golden-mantled and Belding ground squirrels are hosts of fleas that carry the plague, bubonic. CA has had more than its share of campground and park closings from the discovery that local colonies of squirrels are dying of the plague. Thus they have folks like these.

  26. on 04 Apr 2007 at 9:27 pm 26. jimmiraybob said …

    I move that a squirrel lassoing exhibition be incorporated into the next show trial. Perhaps as as an act of contrition by the guilty party….uh, I mean accused.

  27. on 04 Apr 2007 at 10:27 pm 27. Chris Clarke said …

    A sonnet:

    Harassing eastern chickadees, a squirrel
    ignores the observations of a girl
    (This condescending noun may make her hurl,
    and rightly so. What sort of sexist churl
    would note a woman by way of referral
    to children? Did I ever read my Searle?
    My hand was forced, this passage my abjural.)
    that notes his leap from limb to trunk to burl
    and back again, its grey pelage aswirl.
    A robin, distant cousin to the merle
    alights, wind-riffled feathers in a whorl,
    declares himself the Oak Viscount, the Earl
    of Sassafras, and further says he sure’ll
    keep me from thinking of another fucking rhyme.

  28. on 05 Apr 2007 at 12:37 am 28. Earl said …

    The hunter’s a churl and his brow will furl as he takes his bead and when the pellet strikes the squirrel’ll swirl and the squirrel’s fur’ll fly indeed. The chikadee will peep a song of relief. The cat in the corner will stretch then into a ball will curl. But what of the flea?

  29. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:51 am 29. The Constructivist said …

    Growing up in cental NY, I had never seen a black squirrel until I moved to NJ for grad school. It was cool the first time, but by the 5,000,000th time I was pretty jaded. What’s the oddest color you’ve ever seen on a squirrel?

  30. on 05 Apr 2007 at 6:51 am 30. Sven DiMilo said …

    My wife was watching crows one day (as is her wont) and spotted a pure-white squiddle. A week later it (presumably the same one) showed up in our backyard, at least a half-mile away. Three days later, the damn thing sprinted out of the woods and got itself smushed under the rolling tire of my Jeep. A true albino, pink eyes and everything. It’s probably still in a freezer someplace.

    Also, leaving a Dead show in Grand Rapids one time I saw a bright-green one with glowing yellow eyes (but that observation has a more parsimonious explanation than true existence).

  31. on 05 Apr 2007 at 7:40 am 31. JP Stormcrow said …

    of Sassafras, and further says he sure’ll
    keep me from thinking of another fucking rhyme     Quirinus Quirrell.

    This reminded me of a rhyming wager in Barth’s The Sotweed Factor. Ebenezer Cooke (Poet Laureate of Maryland) challenges Henry Burlingame to find a rhyme for month, if he can’t he must walk the remaining portion of their day’s journey behind a flatulent mare, if he can, Ebenezer must so walk.

    Burlingame finally despairs of finding one and says:
    “What sort of poor vocabulary is’t, that possesses nary noun or verb to match the onth in August is the Year’s eighth Month.”

    Whereupon Burlingame is declared the winner and Ebenezer dismounts.

    (Interestingly, I had misremembered the word in question as “orange” - another “toughie”.)

  32. on 05 Apr 2007 at 9:54 am 32. peter ramus said …

    Only a dunth
    would try to rhyme “month”

  33. on 05 Apr 2007 at 12:09 pm 33. spyder said …

    Damn you Clarke, for writing so elegantly about her squirrels
    a sonnet of species and literature, drenched in such lovely pearls.
    –of wisdom that is

  34. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:17 pm 34. Amanda French said …

    With that amendment, peter, your verse becomes sublime. As usual.

    Damn you, Chris Clarke, indeed. Genius.

    I once dated a French guy, Jean-Luc, and I asked him what he noticed most about America, and he said “The squirrels.” I’d forgotten that till you reminded me, christian h.

    Oaktown SquirrGirel, it’s so weird — the squirrels have just in the last week discovered the potted plants that I recently de-wintered out onto my verandah (that is clearly the proper word). Was it JP Stormcrow who wrote recently about how once the animals “hack” your defenses, said defenses are irretrievably hacked? Maybe on faultline? Can’t look it up right now, must dash —

  35. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:37 pm 35. JP Stormcrow said …

    Maybe on faultline?

    Yes, surprised that you saw it. It was a way late comment on this Squirrel Jumping off Feeder thread at Creek Running North. Had forgotten about that squirrelly picture of CC’s, perhaps it was an inspiration for you?

  36. on 05 Apr 2007 at 1:53 pm 36. christian h. said …

    JP broke the internets with a nasty never-ending “italics” tag. Fix it, or you will be edited. Plus, show trial.
    Thanks, JP.

  37. on 05 Apr 2007 at 9:53 pm 37. Amanda French said …

    JP, CC is always an inspiration to me, and undoubtedly his nature=observation writing inspired this, which will probably be the last piece of nature-observation writing I ever do, because I’ve about reached the limit of the words I know for those things out there in nature. But no — I’d already written this piece before he posted the fantastic Squirrel Jumping Off the Feeder picture.

    That twirly thing that dumps the squirrels off the bird feeder is also very funny, I thought.

  38. on 05 Apr 2007 at 11:35 pm 38. JP Stormcrow said …

    …because I’ve about reached the limit of the words I know for those things out there in nature.

    No problem, just go on in general terms about the things you see out in the World….

    OK. Nevermind. Chipmunks. Chipmunks, that’s the ticket.

  39. on 06 Apr 2007 at 8:38 am 39. The Constructivist said …

    Alvin? Simon? Theodore? Yes, Theodore would be most appropriate for Blog Against Theology Weekend (perhaps by way of Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses?)