Lately, one small critter has caused a lot of buzz. In this episode of Poetry on the Page, NIU’s English Professor Amy Newman shares a few poems about creatures that rub her the wrong way. Here’s her recent conversation with WNIJ’s Yvonne Boose.
Yvonne:
Hello Amy, how are you today?
Amy:
Hi, Yvonne. I'm fine. How are you doing?
Yvonne:
I am well and thank you so much for joining me for another episode of Poetry on the Page. So, tell me what have you been reading lately?
Amy:
Well, Yvonne, because of all the insects in the air these days, I've been wondering a lot about nature; whether it's delightful in its design or disturbing. For example, spiders and flies. Spiders seem to make it their life's work to bite me. But Poet Walt Whitman sees the spider spinning its web as analogous to his own soul sending out as he writes, (Walt Whitman lines from "A Noiseless Patient Spider.”)
“filament, filament, filament, out of itself,”
and he feels his own soul similarly
“venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold.”
And flies are always irritating too. But Emily Dickinson in her poem, which is numbered 591, but we know it as, "I heard a Fly buzz - when I Died - " has almost received celebrity status in poetry. The speaker is at the point of death, and she's willed away her keepsakes, but instead of witnessing God in the room, there's a fly, she writes,
There interposed a Fly -
With Blue - uncertain - stumbling Buzz -
Between the light - and me -
And then the Windows failed - and then
I could not see to see -
And that's where the poem ends. The speaker tells us nothing more. Is the fly all there is left of her life? Dickinson's marvelous phrase, “stumbling” gives us the image of that irritating way flies have of landing and buzzing off again.
Yvonne:
Now I want to talk about, take a minute to talk about, you said that you wanted to talk about insects, and I know there's a lot of buzz around the cicadas. What happened in the last couple of weeks that made you want to focus on insects?
Amy:
Well, in part all that — there are so many stories about cicadas these days. I keep looking for them, but I'm not seeing a lot around here. I kind of feel like they left us out. I liked the idea of hearing that buzzing from the cicadas.
It's not just insects who are disturbing. I've been reading Matthew Olzmann's third book, Constellation Route, published by Alice James Books. It's a hymn to our human desire for connection. The book is epistolary, it’s letter poems, poems, in which the titles reflect the sense of addressing someone or something.
The titles delight, such as "Letter Written While Waiting in Line at Comic Con," and "Letter to the Horse You Rode in On." But even when there's a bit of whimsy in such a form, the poems are deeply thoughtful. Some even reveal the human tendency to irritate as well, even to destroy. Early in the book, he writes a "Letter to the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America." And later in the book, the poem I'll be reading today: "Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America." And the epigraph for the poem marks the pine in Southern Pines, North Carolina.
Tell me what it’s like to live without
curiosity, without awe. To sail
on clear water, rolling your eyes
at the kelp reefs swaying
beneath you, ignoring the flicker
of mermaid scales in the mist,
looking at the world and feeling
only boredom. To stand
on the precipice of some wild valley,
the eagles circling, a herd of caribou
booming below, and to yawn
with indifference. To discover
something primordial and holy.
To have the smell of the earth
welcome you to everywhere.
To take it all in, and then,
to reach for your knife.
That poem is called “Letter to the Person Who Carved His Initials into the Oldest Living Longleaf Pine in North America.” And it's from Constellation Route published by Alice James Books.
Yvonne:
Well, thank you so much for sharing with our listeners what you have been reading, and I look forward to our next conversation.
Amy:
Me too, Yvonne. Take care, watch out for the bugs.
Yvonne:
Alright, I will, bye-bye.
