"The Pirate Who Doesn't Know the Value of Pi" is a kind of novel in verse about communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. What began eight years ago as a children's rhyme has evolved into an exploration of contemporary and historical meanings of the terms "pirate" and "parrot." Topics such as copyright, capitalist ideology, animal intelligence, Cartesian philosophy, colonial ethnography, first contact narratives, and particularly accounts of pirates and parrots from the Renaissance and early modern period are included. Ultimately, it is simply about what it is like to talk to someone, and whether that someone is even a someone at all. And because the pirate and the parrot are on a deserted island.