Intro
Les Murray is an Australian poet who grew up dirt-poor on a farm pretty much in the middle of nowhere (at least, "nowhere" according to humans). As a kid he spent a lot of time just wandering around in nature and with animals. In fact, he spent so much time with animals that, when he grew up, he wrote a whole book of poems about animals called Translations from the Natural World. And a bunch of them were from the perspective of animals. Like a poem written the way a herd of cows would write a poem, if they could grasp a pen or keyboard with their hooves, that is.
Here's one about bats. Here's a hint: the "ultrasound" has to do with the noises they make, not with a device they used to see baby bats. And the poem is a perfect example of what the Formalists are talking about when they talk about "poetic," as opposed to "practical," language.
Quote
Bat's Ultrasound
Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing
with fleas, in rock-cleft or building
radar bats are darkness in miniature,
their whole face one tufty crinkled ear
with weak eyes, fine teeth bared to sing.
Few are vampires. None flit through the mirror.
Where they flutter at evening's a queer
tonal hunting zone above highest C.
Insect prey at the peak of our hearing
drone re to their detailing tee:
ah, eyrie-ire; aero hour, eh?
O'er our ur-area (our era aye
ere your raw row) we air our array
err, yaw, row wry—aura our orrery,
our eerie ü our ray, our arrow.
A rare ear, our aery Yahweh.
Analysis
Remember how the Formalists said that "practical language" is just about communicating something, and "poetic language" does a lot more than just communicate? There's a lot in this poem that's not just communicating. So we can definitely see that distinction playing out right here.
Okay, sure, the first half of the poem is communicating something to us: it's telling us that we are talking about bats here. But even then, there's something more than that going on. It's not just communication. Murray could have just told us: "This is a poem about bats." Can't get much clearer than that.
Instead, he says, "Sleeping-bagged in a duplex wing/ in rock-cleft or building/ radar bats are darkness in miniature." He's playing with language, working with words, imagining with imagery (see what we just did there?). So yes, he's communicating information to the reader—but it's not "practical" language because he isn't just communicating. He's putting together words and sounds and images in a way that's way more complicated than that.
And then we get the second half of the poem. The crazy italicized portion. And we're like, did he fall asleep on his keyboard, or maybe get bit by a bat? Seriously, what is that?
And it's a good question. That's bats talking. Yes, bats. Talking. Murray is actually trying to capture the high-pitched ultrasounds that bats make to find their way around—because bats are as blind as, well, bats.
Here we're going into purely "poetic language" territory. There's no "practical language" whatsoever in this part of the poem. We may recognize words like "air" and "arrow" and "eerie," but they don't actually make any sense together—they're just spelled out because we know how to make those sounds. There's no grammatical logic to them at all (with the exception, maybe, of the final line). This part of the poem is all about sound, not sense. It's about poetry, in other words. It's poetic language, and it's taking over the animal kingdom, too!
We bet Formalists like Jakubinsky, Eikhenbaum, and Shklovsky would get just batty about Les Murray.