R a v e n

“Raven’s Reprise” is a narrative poem about a raven (Corvus corax) inspired by the trickster origin myths of Northern Pacific cultures & the COVID-19 pandemic. Raven travels through the landscape of the 2020s, transforming herself, battling her nemesis Lord Fatberg (who smells suspiciously like BoJo¹ & Trump), hanging out with extinct species on the beach, & eventually re-making the world to her better designs. 

The raven is an extremely intelligent bird capable of mirror recognition, metacognition, & holding grudges. In his book, The Mind of a Raven: Investigations and Adventures with Wolf Birds, Bernd Heinrich addresses the extreme variability of the raven’s behaviour.

With other animals you can usually throw out 90 percent of the stories you hear about them as exaggerations. With ravens, it’s the opposite. No matter how strange or amazing the story, chances are pretty good that at least some raven somewhere actually did that.²

This intelligence (often, perhaps anthropomorphically perceived as deviousness) can, in part, be explained by their position as mesopredators. Like their fellow mythic figure the coyote, they have had to use their wit to ensure a full belly.

In many Northern Pacific cultures, Raven is a trickster god. Metamorphic, scatological, and irreverent, Raven makes & illuminates this world with creative wit. Through ongoing research into Kamchatkan indigenous culture with Book of Regrets: For Kamchatka (2018) & Vika is the Volcano (WIP) and collaboration with Itelmen anthropologist Dr. Tatiana Degai, I have only just begun to delve into the vast cosmological systems of Northern Pacific peoples, and Raven’s place in this. This poem draws on the version of Raven Travelling told by the masterful Haida myth-teller Skaay of the Qquuna Qiighaway to the anthropologist John Swanton in 1900, translated by Robert Bringhurst in A Story as Sharp as a Knife.