They are both bodily and animal; they are closer to human than machine, but mechanic in actions, or flight at the very least, (which is what most poets emphasize); they are a perfect middle ground between poet / author / creator and computer / medium / machine. They are that in between state, in dreams recognized as a symbol of that transcendant quality that lifts man from his lower self to his higher self, from the material world to the spiritual world.

Birds are a perfect mechanism for understanding the world today through poetry. They are constant rhythm--in flight, in language. They are removed from human and stasis, a sense that we cannot really go anywhere, especially without exterior equipment. (In the larger sense, the farthest we as a people have traveled is the moon, and we consider it a great accomplishment that we've put machinery on Mars. Presumably, there is a lot more out there, and we cannot even get outside our universe.) Of course, birds are probably unable to go that far on their own too, but they have the ability to transport themselves up, down, forward, and backward using only their own bodies. They are similar to us (and other animals) and yet apart from us.

Visual poet Jim Andrews says, "to animate text is to break it up, dislocate it from the printed context dramatically, from the usual notion of a text and the printed world." (Jim Andrews, "Architecture and the Literary," http://www.vispo.com/StirFryTexts/architectureandtheliterary.html [Accessed 4 November 1999].) Birds, too, break up our usual reading or understanding of the world, they have no location, they are pure motion and body.