Dave Bonta's "Death of the Author" is a small comedy of forgetting. A man sits on his porch with a book of poems in his lap, watches a bird feed in a dead tree, and manages to recall the bird's name, black-and-white warbler, only by losing the name of the poet he is reading. The two names seem to share one slot in his head, and filling it with one empties it of the other. The central idea is that memory is fragile and strangely economical, and that an author's name, which we treat as the solid anchor of a book, can slip away while the work stays in our hands.
The title makes a joke of a famous critical phrase. "The death of the author" is the idea that a text's meaning belongs to its readers rather than to its maker. Bonta takes it literally and domestically: for "more than a minute" the poet really is dead to the reader, and the poems are "orphaned." The word is well chosen, because it makes a lapse of memory sound like a small bereavement. The poet's name sat on the book like a parent's name, and without it the poems are stranded.
The imagery repays attention. The bird is "pin-striped," as if a tiny clerk had turned up for work, but black and white is also the colour of print on a page. The speaker's two kinds of reading, the bird and the book, quietly overlap. The bird feeds on "crevasses" in "decaying wood," a grand word for tiny cracks that gives the tree a mountain-scale drama. It also mirrors the speaker's own search. The bird is "gleaning," picking up what is left over, and the speaker is gleaning a name from the leftovers of his memory. Perhaps the book works the same way: a dead author's words, like dead wood, still feed whoever comes looking.
The most inventive moment is the hunt for the first letter. The speaker guesses "G," which he imagines as "a smile / warped into a grimace," and then "T, that tall gallows." These are playful, but they also darken the mood. Both letters turn into faces of suffering or execution, so the little memory lapse takes on a hint of mortality. The guesses are also wrong, since the name that arrives begins with B. The speaker's effort gets him nowhere, and the answer comes only when he stops chasing it.
Formally, the poem is free verse with no rhyme and a loose, conversational rhythm. Lines run on and break at awkward moments, as in "They're orphaned for more / than a minute," so that the line break itself seems to hesitate. The ellipses after "first letter…" and "grimace…" put the groping on the page. The ampersands, used twice, give a casual, jotted-down feel, as though the poem were written on the porch while the bird was still there. The sentences are plain and the vocabulary mostly ordinary, which makes the few vivid words, "gleaning," "orphaned" and "gallows," stand out.
The ending is the cleverest piece of construction. The warbler "stops to issue his usual / six whispery notes," and then comes the name, "Bill Knott," alone in a short, full-stopped line. The poem never says the bird supplied it, but the placement invites us to think so, as if the name drifted in through the gap the song left. After all the straining, recall seems to happen when attention is somewhere else. The final line also reverses the title. The author who has been "dead" for a minute is named again and brought back, and the person who revives him is the reader, which is exactly the role the title's theory gives readers.
What makes the poem significant is how lightly it handles a large idea. It treats the question of who owns a text, and what an author is once the person has gone, as something that happens over breakfast. It is funny at the speaker's expense ("my poor memory"), but it also shows how closely reading, nature and attention are tied together. The author is not a grand figure here. He is a name that has to be held in a tired mind, next to a bird that has its own name to be remembered.