Robert Creeley at Isola di Rifiuti

"A bird that gets to be a champion is a show bird; it’s a very
careful vocabulary. But then you have what are called stock birds
and stock birds are the birds that are used, frankly, in breeding show
birds. Stock birds may have overemphasized characteristics. Then you do
get into genetics. But a stock bird is a very distinct bird in that it
is used in breeding the qualification, the qualities you want to have in
breeding a bird that will then be used for show. But a show bird is
oftentimes of no use as a breeder at all. I mean, he’s just a moment in
time. I remember one instance of pigeons I was given as a kid—I had an
interest early—a pair of fantails, a very common bird around New
England. Once you got past icehouse pigeons, the pigeons you could get
by climbing up into icehouses or whatever they nest in, and taking the
young two or three week old birds out of the nests, getting young squeakers
as they call them—once you get past that you then went to homing
pigeons, homers we used to call them, or fantails—these were
very common varieties. Well, this one pair of fantails I was given
suddenly bred a fantastically good fantail. But I was a kid; I didn’t
know anything about banding, and you can’t show birds without having
them banded; that’s part of the etiquette in the show scene. This bird
was what we call a sport; he was suddenly a lucky strike in the genetic
situation. But I mean that taught me to pay attention to a lot of
things. I’m surprised now; I haven’t been engaged with pigeons for
almost fifteen or more years—almost twenty years now—and yet the habits
of that attention as we’re now talking is so precise, that they give me
the vocabulary immediately. I mean, I couldn’t tell you the same kind of
detail about the method of scanning a line of poetry or various systems
of metric that are involved with descriptions of poetry. Now I found
that one information was useful and felt right in my environment; not
that I wanted to be only a pigeon man but I mean that kind of
information taught me a lot. It taught me how to pay attention to an
awful lot of things..."