If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems
It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman—a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others.

The title of this book is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few—hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent.

If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the author proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.


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If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems
It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman—a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others.

The title of this book is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few—hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent.

If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the author proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.


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If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems

If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems

by James P. Lenfestey (Editor)
If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems

If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems

by James P. Lenfestey (Editor)

Overview

It is said there are 20,000 species of bees, a genus 50 million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning or end to the bee buzz. Virgil wrote of bees, as did Rumi, Shakespeare, Burns, Coleridge, Emerson, Mandelstam, Neruda, Whitman—a lyrical hum heard well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries in poems by Yeats, Lawrence, Plath, Mary Oliver, Carol Ann Duffy, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Sherman Alexie, among many others.

The title of this book is from Emily Dickinson: To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee, / One clover, and a bee, / And revery. / The revery alone will do / If bees are few. Her conclusion resonates with a terrible poignancy today, as bees are indeed becoming few—hives collapsing, wild species disappearing. Amid this crisis, the poems collected here speak with a quiet urgency of a world lost if bees were to fall silent.

If anyone can save the bees, it is entomologist Dr. Marla Spivak and the hive of bee scientists and beekeepers at the Bee Lab at the University of Minnesota. A portion of the author proceeds from this anthology will be donated to support research at the Bee Lab.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780816698066
Publisher: University of Minnesota Press
Publication date: 05/30/2016
Pages: 300
Product dimensions: 5.70(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where he won several Page One Awards for excellence. He has published a collection of personal essays, five collections of poems, the poetry anthology Low Down and Coming On: A Feast of Delicious and Dangerous Poems about Pigs, and coedited Robert Bly in This World, also from Minnesota. His memoir with prose and poems, Seeking the Cave: A Pilgrimage to Cold Mountain, Milkweed Editions, was a finalist for the 2014 Minnesota Book Award.

Bill McKibben is an author and environmentalist who was awarded the Right Livelihood Award, sometimes called the “alternative Nobel,” in 2014.

Marla Spivak is an entomologist and Distinguished McKnight University Professor at the University of Minnesota. In 2010 she was awarded a grant from the MacArthur Foundation for her pioneering research on honeybees. She heads the University’s Bee Lab (www.beelab.umn.edu).


Table of Contents

Contents

Foreword
Bill McKibben

Introduction
James P. Lenfestey

Sherman Alexie
In the Matter of Human v. Bee

Maureen Ash
Swarm

Thorsten Bacon
On Bees

Aliki Barnstone
Alas

Willis Barnstone
Eleven Tiny Commandments

John Barr
First Light

Tree Bernstein
A/B/C Scenarios

Barry Blumenfeld
Boy with Honeybee Hair

Robert Bly
Words Rising

Sean Borodale
24th May: Collecting the Bees
6th September: Wild Comb Notes
10th February: Queen

Karina Borowicz
Medicine
Ruins

David Bottoms
Cemetery Wings

Jill Breckenridge
Honey

Fleda Brown
Bees

Robert Burns
“Of A’ the Airts the Wind Can Blaw”

John Burnside
Melissographia

John Caddy
Two New World Bees
Carpenter Bee
Leaf Cutter Bee

Jared Carter
Landing the Bees

Sharon Chmielarz
Bees

Lucille Clifton
earth

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Inscription for a Fountain on a Heath

Lorna Crozier
Angel of Bees

Annie Deppe
The Sacrament of the Bees

Emily Dickinson
With Flowers
The bee is not afraid of me
Possession
Two Worlds
The Bee
Could I but ride indefinite
The pedigree of honey
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee

Josephine Dickinson
B

Carol Ann Duffy
Bees
Ariel
Virgil’s Bees

Ralph Waldo Emerson
The Humble-Bee

Heid E. Erdrich
Intimate Detail
Stung

Earl of Essex (Robert Devereaux)
The Buzzeinge Bee’s Complaynt

John Evans
The Bees

Diane Fahey
Bees

Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Alienation: Two Bees

Nick Flynn
Workers (Attendants)
Hive
Blind Huber (iii)
Queen

Stuart Friebert
Supersedure

Ross Gay
Ode to the Beekeeper

Eamon Grennan
Up Against It

Barbara Hamby
The Language of Bees

Tom Hennen
Outside Work

Jim Heynen
The Man Who Talked to His Bees

Selima Hill
Elegy for the Bee-God

Brenda Hillman
In Summer, Everything is Something’s Twin

Jane Hirshfield
Bees

Kevin Holden
Bees

Issa
Haiku

Helen Hunt Jackson
My Bees: An Allegory

Naomi Jackson
Prairie Bees

George Johnston
Ecstatic

Susan Deborah King
Prayer

Rudyard Kipling
The Bee-Boy’s Song

D. H. Lawrence
Flapper

David Lee
On Finding a Drone Bee and a Painted Lady in the Same Claret Cup of Cactus Blossom

James P. Lenfestey
Honey
Blaming the Bee

Nathaniel “Max” Lenfestey
Beard of Bees
Her Sting

Diane Lockward
Invective Against the Bumblebee

Antonio Machado
Song
Proverbs and Songs
Last Night, As I Lay Sleeping

Bruce MacKinnon
The Bees

Osip Mandelstam
The Necklace

Thomas McCarthy
Foraging Honey-Bees

Paula Meehan
The January Bee

Robert Morgan
Bees Awater
Honey
Moving the Bees

Lisel Mueller
Life of a Queen

Amy Nash
Not Just a Question of Fertility

Pablo Neruda
Ode to the Bee

Aimee Nezhukumatathil
Bee Wolf

Joan Nicholson
Antics of Bees

Naomi Shihab Nye
Honeybee
Bees Were Better
Pollen

Mary Oliver
Happiness
Honey at the Table

Joe Paddock
A Sort of Honey

Linda Pastan
The Death of the Bee

Sylvia Plath
The Bee Meeting
Stings

Lia Purpura
Bee

Jeri Reilly
Honey

Jame

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