Hmm. Hadn't heard this interview with Dean Young before and I haven't read that collection yet. I think I like Elegy on Toy Piano Dean Young best, but he's still one of my idols.

Birds do come up in poetry a lot, but I've always read them as something alien, something otherworldly. For example, Poe's raven is an intruder that becomes increasingly sinister as the poem goes on. Plus, the way birds move outside of flight is so jerky and strange.

I think that this is not so much an issue of the relationship poets have with birds, but rather the relationship people have with birds, which is to say, birds are weird and mysterious, at once beautiful and beauteous, but also pooping on our cars.