This article is delivered to the reader in 13 stanzas, and is a modest takeoff of Wallace Stevens' poem, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at A Blackbird." The poem may be better known for the art and arguments created in its wake than for the original. In "Blackbird," Stevens displays a blackbird in a tree, then cuts language to its core, and uses metaphysics to drive the whole situation. In the first stanza of the current poem, author Frances McCue introduces herself as a poet and explains that with the corporatization of the American university, a trend in which curriculum is crowd-sourced, where budgets are set according to outside demand rather than to a compass of guiding values, where the sciences reign and "assets are monetized," she sings from a place of vulnerability and rarity; "Sometimes the stronger the cage the more robust the song." In each stanza that follows McCue mournfully speaks to the death of the humanities in an academic world where students are drawn into the study of science and machinery. The humanities people, the writers, those who document culture, are described as "the disrupted." The overall theme appears to be "The humanities teach you to think, to argue, to document, and to articulate. These are softer skills that are essential for helping with with the real work of STEM."