BY JAMES P. LENFESTEY
Excerpts from the introduction to If Bees Are Few
It is said there are twenty thousand species of bees in the world, a genus fifty million years old, but in the fertile imagination of the world’s poets, there is no beginning and no end to bee buzz. As Rilke wrote, poets are “bees of the invisible. We wildly collect the honey of the visible, to store it in the great golden hive of the invisible.”
Sappho wrote of bees in the sixth century BCE (“neither honey nor bees for me”), as did Virgil, Rumi, Shakespeare, Bobby Burns, Clare, Coleridge, Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, Emerson, Herrick, Issa, Machado, Mandelstam, Neruda, Dickinson prolifically, Whitman, Whittier, Tennyson, Yeats, Frost, and on into the distracting buzz of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from Sherman Alexie to Timothy Young.
Sylvia Plath’s father kept bees, and while living in England she tried it, too. She got six jars of honey and the famous “bee sequence” of poems from 1962, later published in Ariel, which convinced her she was a real poet.
During the early seventies, when I ran an experiment in rural education, I kept bees. This fact relates me to Plath, but encounters with bees, whether in the guise of a bee-masked holy father or the mysterious swarms themselves, were indeed unforgettable to us both and worthy of praise in poems, if one can only figure out how.
I finally figured out how, and it is this anthology (the word, from ancient Greek, means a “gathering of flowers”). If Bees Are Few is a gathering of poems collected over the past decade that touch on, or are touched by, bees, including “To make a prairie” by 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.
James P. Lenfestey is a former editorial writer for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. 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.