I’ve been reading again about insects because my poems have been slowly filling up with them over the last couple of years. Until I realized I wanted to be a writer around age 17, I thought I’d be a biologist, specializing in entomology. I was a shy kid, so I was always looking at the ground. My childhood was full of butterflies, moths, cicadas, grasshoppers, fleas, lightning bugs, beetle after beetle after beetle. For a few years, I raised monarch caterpillars in an old aquarium that I’d daily stuff with milkweed leaves; I’d watch the whole process of their transformation from caterpillar to chrysalis. It was better than tv! On the days the butterflies emerged, I’d take the aquarium out to the front porch. I’d take each monarch out one by one in my cupped hands. Some would stay on my fingers for a minute or so, flexing their wings in the sun and air. Some would fly off almost immediately. I loved doing that. I probably should start doing it again. It made me feel as if I were doing some direct good in the world.
So you can imagine that I have a particular attraction to poems with insects in them—Dickinson’s Fly, the white spider in Frost’s “Design”, Whitman’s spider that “launch'd forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,” Plath’s Beekeeper poems, which I reread this past summer and completely fell in love with again. So often the insect seems to represent a kind of boundary beyond which human knowledge, human morality fails or is devoured. I like Muriel Rukeyser’s poem that acknowledges the incredible difference between the speaker and the roach (and by extension, of course, the Other we might be afraid of) but keeps on trying to reach out.
ST. ROACH
by Muriel Rukeyser
For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.
Rukeyser also said, "If there were no poetry on any day in the world, poetry would be invented that day. For there would be an intolerable hunger." And this: "Always our wars have been our confessions of weakness."
Both of those last quotes are from The Life of Poetry, which so moved the poet and my dear friend Jan Freeman that she founded the not for profit Paris Press to bring The Life of Poetry, which was originally published in 1949, back into print.
Today is the fifteen anniversary of Paris Press, and I wanted to take a moment to salute not only my friend Jan, who has led an amazing and intense life of poetry out of her house in the woods of western Massachusetts, but all the editors and publishers out there doing small and intense work for all of us readers and writers. I know there are many reasons why one shouldn’t go to the big AWP conference—it’s full of networking crazies who are only out to get published, the panels are occasionally stupifyingly dull, it sometimes feels like a rerun of high school with its cliques and in-crowds—BUT the reason I go every year I can is because I get to meet, often very quietly and with no networky-slobber, one or two people who change my life. I met Jan Freeman completely by accident. I was browsing the Paris Press book table, stopped and picked up The Life of Poetry, a book I always meant to read, and we began to talk. I had just coincidently read Hyena, her first book, and so we talked about that too. I took home the Rukeyser book and Ruth Stone’s terrific Simplicity, with its fantastically beautiful cover. These books have stayed with me and meant much to me over the years. I buy extra copies of them and give them away to students just graduating and in need of companion books. In fact, my own copy of The Life of Poetry is currently on loan to a graduate student, which is where it can stay. I’ll gladly buy another copy.
Feel free to pass on your own favorite insect poem.
