Douglas Basford Every bee is a gift of heat: A Preface-Review of Carol Ann Duffy One of the more simultaneously distressing and silly thoughts ever to come to me arrived some years ago, when in midwinter I was waiting for a shuttle to ferry me up from Mt. Vernon Square in Baltimore to the Homewood campus of Johns Hopkins. I was bulked up in winter garb head to foot. I never was a freezie growing up, pioneering the soccer-shorts-in-winter look long before it ever took off (has it, though?), but I was becoming increasingly spoiled, I think, by the excessive heat coming out of the radiators in both my apartment and my then-fiancée’s apartment (the former baked my Faulkner Vintage paperbacks yellow around the edges). We both had to keep our windows cracked in wintertime. A young, dark-haired woman stood a few feet away, her hair still damp from a shower and giving off light strands of vapor, just as her breaths left traces in the frigid air. I was nearly dragged under by the thought that with her head uncovered and with each breath she was radiating life, slowly it was draining away unnoticed into the emptiness. I had to fight the temptation to tell her to put a hat on, or something. Stop breathing? I said it was silly.
A mental busybody, I suppose in this there was a tinge of Renaissance preservation fantasy as I was writing a series of epithalamia-sonnets at the time (and even after our wedding) that were, in a word, defiant, all about surviving difficult circumstances together, preserving what was ours and ours alone. Sure, I was drenched in Shakespeare, Petrarch, and Dante, but I'd like to think there was something exterior to this—instead, a concern for the long life of others, my mother and brother-in-law having been through cancer not long before.
I began writing this preface in early December when Buffalo was distinctly balmy, raining and in the 60s and as with any heat wave in December (though there was one in 1941 that was worse), thoughts turn naturally to global warming. As I skimmed the radio, some talk-show host was saying something about "let's focus on heat" in a monologue I was only partially following. But anyway, she said, "there are only 17 more days of life as we know it." Well, we all know, thankfully, how that turned out. The end of the world is not nigh, not yet.
Carol Ann Duffy's The Bees
Trying to escape that December heat wave, we went up to Toronto for a day (actually to do research at the UT library), and we stopped in the campus bookstore at College and St. George. I gravitated towards the poetry section after lingering over some titles in a burgeoning area of interest for scholars these days—philosophical theology and the "resacralizing" of literary studies, like Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank's dialogue The Monstrosity of Christ and Jean-Luc Marion's post-metaphysical Augustinian phenomenology God without Being. There in the poetry shelf I found Carol Ann Duffy's latest, The Bees.
I was in the bees frame of mind, having lately been to the best bakery in Buffalo, Five Points, where their "toast cafe" has a copy of Allison Benjamin and Brian McCallum's A World without Bees, and having, upon gearing up to piece together this issue, reread portions of our last issue, including a section from Jane Satterfield's Collapse: A Fugue, which cites Joe Strummer's refrain from "Johnny Appleseed," "If you're out to get the honey / you don't go killing all the bees." Bees, for me, have this strange transhistorical resonance, almost always upon seeing hives nestled at the edge of a wood somewhere I am cast into reveries about Plath's jittery bee poems, Book IV of Virgil's Georgics, and more than a few poems of G. C. Waldrep that point to how many phenomena seem to have "Something to do with bees."
Now I have another point of poetic reference in Duffy's collection, in which she strikes an elegiac but fierce note throughout—"bees // are the batteries of orchards, gardens, guard them." Beyond an inexplicable, flaccid rewrite of Yeats's Leda ("I knew their names that instant, pierced by love / and by the song the swans sing as they die"), the poems in The Bees are comprised of stark hard pulses—like "a scattered bracelet of bees / lay on the grass by their burgled hive") that gain a cumulative power. At times she sounds in looser meters and free verse like Mary Oliver:
Cold, inconvenienced, late, what will you do now
with the gift of your left life?Like Oliver, for whom the political is inextricable from the phenomena of the world ("What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?" does not come simply or easily), Duffy here is just as political but more subtly biting than in her earlier collections The World's Wife and The Feminine Gospels, instead tracking two unsettling feelings: (1) those we have when confronted with thoughts of global famine or other catastrophes (I think about the appropriate term coined this week by a Slate writer, "pandemic porn," to describe the panicky draw of books like The Coming Plague); and (2) those we have when we note our own blindness and complicity, or in the words of Waldrep regarding the Mission Blue butterfly becoming "more and more endangered every day": "this isn't a loss I notice automatically, something I breathe in / with the sea air and coffee in the morning." If we're fortunate and observant, that is.
I find Duffy at her strongest when she takes on other voices (her widely anthologized "Warming Her Pearls" being one of my favorites), or admits to particular roles. For example, her unassuming sonnet "Crunch," in which the speaker allows us to feel sequentially the delight of the 12-year-old daughter running out to catch the first snow on her tongue, who "then topples / down, cartoon joyful, brightly young" while the speaker watches from the kitchen, peeling and coring an apple, the dogs coming out "hilariously perplexed," and then reminiscences of the aftermath of the burglary of their house, the policeman's tepid explanation ("Be drugs [...] or credit crunch"):
[...] I watch snow deepen, settle hard,
like . . . which simile? Like debt? Like poverty? . . .
imagine some gloved hand insert my useless cards
into the wall, that other life; then What’s for lunch?
she bawls. I throw the apple, happy, hear the crunch.The giddiness in the poem is only marginally tempered and the writerly surmises after suitable similes are grounded on the sense of fortune, on happy happenstance. Were it not, however, for intrusion of this gloved hand, also fruitlessly in search of the rewards of something previously committed or committed to (in the burglar's case, the burglary and/or a life of crime, in the poet's case, the poet's vocation), the poem would sink into mawkishness and one more ars poetica too many.
A second understated poem draws on the collection's context of worry about a world without bees: what will we do when they are gone? In a fairytale-like recollection of being twelve herself (or of the speaker being twelve), of being given a "wand" and a flask of pollen and sent into the orchards to pollenate apple and lemon trees, Duffy's speaker as the "human bee" works dawn till dusk "till my eyesight blurred [...] the bones of my fingers thinner than wands." We may already be engaged in fruit-husbandry, then, but the labor is fruitful in only a limited sense:
I had my wine from the silent vines,
and I’d known love,
and I’d saved some money –
but I could not fly and I made no honey.In a third poem I'll mention here, the last in the collection, she imagines a speaker who hears of a "rare bee" kept by a hairshirted hermit deep in the wood and mounts his/her steed to ride after it. After some time of riding,
I dismounted my bony horse to walk;
out of the silence, I fancied I heard
out of the silence, I fancied I heard the bronze buzz of a bee.So I came to kneel at the hermit’s hive –
a little church, a tiny mosque – in a mute glade
where the loner mouthed and prayed, blind
as the sun, and saw with my own eyes
one bee dance alone on the air.
I uttered my prayer: Give me your honey,
bless my tongue with rhyme, poetry, song.
It flew at my mouth and stung.
Then the terrible tune of the hermit’s grief.
Then a gesturing, dying bee
Then a gesturing, dying bee on the bier of a leaf.It is no coincidence that the layout of the lines in each stanza are a slight echo of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. This geste poem mocks our self-declared heroism on more fronts than I have time to work with here, but it is a reminder of the myths we construct to entertain, educate, keep in line, how they are retrospective in a sense all while ostensibly making sense of life now so that we can live it. That dying bee, however, is a gesture towards the apocalyptic warmed-globe future, one perhaps most poignantly captured by Helen Simpson in her story "Diary of an Interesting Year" in The New Yorker. A harrowing thought comes in thinking about those diary entries—which record life in which a young woman living outside London can say " My thirtieth birthday. G. gave me this little spiral-bound notebook and a Biro. It’s a good present, hardly any rust on the spiral and no water damage to the paper. I’m going to start a diary. I'll keep my handwriting tiny to make the paper go further.” And "I give a new baby three months max in these conditions. Diarrhea, basically." That thought: what myths will future generations come up with to explain life and how to live it?
Virtual Ink and Our New Submission System
All of this gets to a kind of queasy ambivalence I have always had about building and running an online journal: that it may not, in fact, be the most ecofriendly way to promote poetry. I love paper, ink, and books, I prefer reading in hardcopy rather than online, and encourage others to buy directly from publishers and used bookstores rather than online retailers (someone, no doubt, will have a compelling, eco-friendly argument to the contrary). I admire many of my colleagues here at UB who embrace the DIY-letterpress aesthetic and who are eco-conscious, in the broadest and most theoretical sense of the word.
When I read, I do read with an eye that broadens rapidly to aesthetic, social, political, ecosystemic realities, at times laughably. In Duffy's book, both the copy in the UT bookstore and in the UT library (I double-checked) suddenly went from a tan-grey ink to black ink beginning at the page with the poem "Dorothy Wordsworth Is Dead." At first I thought it a fitting but unwitting printer's imperfection. And then dug further, wanting more from its material presence, but again, here, restraint, for time. At least I was rebuffed twice: the copy at UB's Poetry Collection had the opposite ink-color situation, the second half of the book lighter-toned; and in the poem itself, "but was loved yet, / sharp lass, noticer"—noticer, noticer not of typographical blemishes, but of "the robin's blushing bounce, / the magpie's funeral chic, / the heron's grief..."
From the outset I had sought to design a site that was minimalist and beautiful, instantly visually accessible and not compounding our already substantial attention-deficit issues. But I had also fought off the completely unnecessary junk code that many web-builders include (and even rightly anticipated my fellow editor's complaint against the use of two spaces between sentences as ecologically problematic), both because I wanted a site that anyone could access without the latest add-ons and large RAMs and because I wanted to reduce the amount of information being transmitted. But I want to deliver the poems, regardless, to give pleasure and sociality their best on our site.
Duffy's wintering poem, "The Bee Carol" seems appropriate here and also because of this time of year, with Christmas tailing off, and particularly the stanza about the means of survival:
Flightless now and shivering,
around their Queen they cling;
every bee a gift of heat;
she will not freeze
within the winter cluster of the bees.For me, at least, I can't help but read this against our human condition—the clustering that we do, the gifts of heat we bring each other—as it is affecting the very stability of the weather that permits our climes everywhere to be productive and support life: we each are giving off heat, demanding energy that gives off heat, sound, greenhouse gasses. Each reader, each editor, each poem, each pixel, tied to heat and byproducts that may be our undoing. This is not an easy truth, if any truth is easy.
If each Google search reportedly requires enough energy to boil two cups of water, what does it take to download one of our poems or stream one of our recordings? I admit I haven't crunched the numbers, or let someone else like Enernetics calcuate it for me (to the tune of $9.95 per month or more), but I would like to think that we are abiding to the best of our abilities to the principle behind the "Green Friendly Site" mark, even if we don't put the label on our site: "This site advocates for the deployment of green friendly technologies and encourages others to take steps to minimize their environmental impact through increased energy efficiency, reduced waste, and/or renewable energy purchase." But we can do better, no doubt.
Not having done the numbers truly, it is hard to know what the following move will "cost," carbon-wise, but we are going into further commitments to the online world, adopting the Submittable/Submishmash system for all our future submissions, in part because we were wasting inordinate time (and likely energy) on tracking our submissions, entering the names, titles, dates, etc., into a shared Google spreadsheet that we have kept opening and closing, consulting and adding to. In all that, I should add, we probably lost a small number submissions along the way, for which we apologize—if you never heard from us, please let us know!
Happy New Year and Many Happy Returns!
But what we have before us now is our latest issue, posted just at the end of 2012, with fiscal cliff negotiations churning and just about everyone unhappy about news from Washington as it leaks out. We hope that you will find some great comfort, at least, in reading these poems and in looking at Catherine Nelson's striking photo-collages (which are meant to remind us that the global is local, if it is possible or even desirable to reduce her work to a single phrase), and in the celebrations that are already underway east of here. We wish you all a beautiful, productive, and joyous new year!
Buffalo, NY
Dec. 31, 2012