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What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature that explores experiences and ideas that spark the writing of new poems. In Books We’ve Loved, invited poets reflect on a book that has been particularly meaningful to them in the last year. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem from the book and an excerpt from the essay.
Susan Stewart
That the bees were born in the corpse of the injured animal.
That the bees came forth out of the corrupted flesh.

That a small room was chosen, made narrow just for this,
and the animal was led beneath the low roof and cramped walls

and that the four winds came through the four windows
and that the morning fell upon the small

and heavy head, its horns curving out
from the whorled medallion of the forehead.

That the hot nostrils and the breathing mouth were stopped
and the flesh was beaten, pounded to a pulp,
beneath the unbroken hide.

                           He lies on his side on the broken apple-boughs. He lies on a bed
             of fragrant thyme and the cassia is laid in sprays about him
and the sweetness of the fields surrounds him.

Do this when the west winds blow. Do this when the meadows
are alive with poppies. Do this when the swallow hangs her pendulous

nest and the dew is warm and the days grow long.
And all the living fluids will swirl within the hide, and the bones

will dissolve like bread in water.
And a being will be born, and another, and then a thousand

and a thousand thousand swarming without limbs or form.
And that the wings will grow from atoms. And that the stirring wings

will find their way into the air. And that a thousand stirring wings
will come forth into the day like a storm of arrows made of wind

and light. And the flesh will fall back into the earth, and the horror
into sweetness and the dark into the sun and the bees
thus born.
 
—Virgil, Georgics, Book IV.281-314
from the book CINDER: NEW AND SELECTED POEMS / Graywolf Press
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What Sparks Poetry:
Keene Carter on Susan Stewart's Cinder

"'Bees' is a wonderfully successful poem, as is the book Columbarium and indeed all of Cinder. I've pried into it a little because of its success, which is, as I've tried to show, tied directly to its 'failure'—a 'failure' in quotation marks because it is the failure to represent everything, and that's like calling death a failure of life: the requirement is absurd, even if the sentence is true."
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Peggy Ellsberg on Lisa Russ Spaar's Madrigalia: New and Selected Poems

"Offering a personal take on universal experience, Spaar's poems attract us to a world where even stones and trees and artifacts have lives of their own, where we encounter the familiar shock-state of private failure, where we resonate with the quintessential facts and activities of humanity, like farming or fishing, surviving or dying. Generously, Spaar's poetry catches and releases all that emanates from the universe."

via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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