A parasitic oscillation is an “unintended self-sustaining oscillation in an electronic circuit,” per Wikipedia—it’s a kind of feedback static or loop. Parasitic Oscillations is also the title of Madhur Anand’s 2022 collection; she connects the phenomenon to birdsong and to birds, which she says, “are often no longer direct subjects of metaphor, but rather remain strange, sometimes silent, a kind of menacing and stray capacitance… but still harbingers of discovery and hope.” Ecology and the natural world emit a signal which has aspects of order and aspects of chaos, and we try to interpret that even as we’re the signal ourselves.
Anand comes by her jargon honestly; she’s a professor of environmental science at the University of Guelph. Her poetry builds on her professional work; many of the poems in the collection are collaged or constructed from snippets of ecology papers or monographs. The poem “Sensible Parallels,” for example, is drawn from a 2008 paper on birdsong production.
…How can a single source generate both tonal sounds
and harmonically rich sounds? Collision, collided, collide.
Three roots remain remnant and three roots are born.
Bird, birds, birdsong, songbirds, songbird, songs, song, syllables.
The connection between poets and birdsong goes back at least to Shelley, Keats, and the Romantics. Anand’s birds aren’t exactly chirping of love and individual unique suchness, though. Instead, they’re a mystery, their sounds forming sense and then decaying, reinforcing and then dissolving, “Collision, collided, collide.”
Like birdsong, patterns surface and submerge throughout Anand’s volume; a 2016 fire that destroyed Delhi’s natural history museum; Anand’s mother’s likely terminal illness; verbal slips as she keeps noting that she almost wrote—“fathers” for “feathers”; “feather” for “father”; “sings for “signs”; a visit to view bird specimens in Tübingen, Germany; India’s partition, the work of A.O. Hume, British ornithologist and advocate for Indian independence. The poems are illustrated with scientific figures, photos of specimens, photos of specimen labels. And the volume ends with a long piece called “Slow Dance” which imitates and sometimes quotes John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” That poem takes its specific inspiration from an installation piece by Wonder Machines called “Slow Dance” which uses strobe lights to create an illusion of plant life moving.
The variety of ideas and approaches doesn’t cohere; instead, it generates a resonance of rhymes and referrals that oscillates in information-rich opacity. The graphs she publishes are uninterpretable to lay people (or at least this lay person); photos of handwriting labels are hard to parse (like Emily Dickinson’s handwriting “akin to fossil bird tracks” which Anand references). Specimens are mislabeled, A.O. Hume’s “notes on life/histories of seven hundred bird species” are “stolen by his servant and sold as waste paper,” Anand finds herself unable to scan QR codes at the Natural History Museum which are supposed to allow her to access digital bird song.
There is something called the “death rattle,” a crackling
that is amplified when a person breathes. It happens
when death is very near. I heard it in my mother’s
voice last week before I knew what it was and had a
panic attack. When I discover what it is I
have another. What then is knowledge for? She is still
alive.
Not knowing what the rattle means and knowing what it means spark the same physiological and psychological reaction—even though in the end what it means (death) turns out to not to be what it means. Knowledge doesn’t produce understanding; it’s just another kind of information which vibrates with facts and sounds and affect, generating static in the brain or throat.
Ashbery is referenced because he too was obsessed with the way language means too much or too little to arrive at sense. But he’s also chosen because his easy aestheticization of incomprehension is in contrast to Anand’s scientific and poetic push towards an understanding that retreats, not into expressionist splashes, but towards mistake, feedback, inarticulation, loss.
Part of the degradation of knowledge is environmental; part is colonial; part is just human confusion—but it’s hard to separate one from another. Anand reproduces American explorer C.T. Bingham’s account of his travels in South Asia, during which he encountered an Indian fairy bluebird. “I could see the nest and that it contained two eggs, so I shot the female, who had taken to a tree a little above me.” The image reproduced with the passage shows a specimen and a QR code which in theory lets you hear the song of a bird of the same species which now, like the one Bingham shot, can’t sing. (I tried to access the QR code but couldn’t get it to work.)
Contemplating burning museums and dead birds, not to mention dead mothers, is unsettling, and the book can sometimes feel like an anxiety dream, where you’re eternally and repetitively rifling through drawers of desiccated specimens, searching for the labels. There’s also pleasure, though, in the sense that there are no answers, and that Anand’s looking for them with you. While Parasitic Oscillations is arguably in an experimental poetry tradition, it doesn’t treat the poet as knower and the reader as acolyte to be shown, or denied mysteries. Instead, you’re a colleague, joining scientists and poets and birds in the construction of a wavering, oscillating, garbled, but intermittently lovely song.