The Santa Barbara Song Sparrow is endemic to Santa Barbara Island, one of the Channel Islands off the coast of Central and Southern California.
Thank you to the Delisted project for assigning me this bird. Delisted asked a group of poets, artists, and writers to sit with a federally delisted species for at least a year to see what might arise. I was assigned this song sparrow, one that happened to have lived on an island not far from the coast where I grew up, a sparrow I had first thought about some twenty years earlier, and included in The California Poem (2004). I carried it with me all these years, stunned by the coincidence of its disappearance, the death of the last native speaker of Barbareño Chumash, Mary Yee, and my birth. I performed an earlier version of the poem with singer/storyteller Vienna Carroll for the Ucross Arts Festival in Sheridan, Wyoming in the summer of 2024, and I asked her to do a simple recording on her phone. (Not all the parts she sings are in the text above.)
The work is a long poem, with the ⸫ symbol indicating breaks between parts, but also including essay-like documentation, emails from James, and a visual poem.
