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Bees | Chapbook | 'There There' by Daniel Payne

 

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Vol XXIII, There There

Daniel Payne (6.8.10)

 

Conceptually striking, audacious in word choice and full of poems that drum along in great bursts of word-smithed language. Headless in Finland is a particular treat.

Bees | Poetry | Wintering

It is difficult not to use ‘bees’ and ‘poetry’ in the same sentence without thinking of Sylvia Plath. Under interview she suggested that it was Ted Hughes that forced her to embrace her fixation upon the image of her father’s beekeeping.



Fear not, I do not intend to give you a cod-Freudian interrogation of ‘Ariel’… there is enough of that swarming around out there to satisfy any apiculturist readers of poetry.



I would simply like to share with you my favorite Plath poem, Wintering.



All poets have their individual strengths, and for me, Plath’s is her ability as a generator of images. Images that hold you and appall you and unsettle you and fill us with familiarity and disgust. Delving into Plath’s later poetry often feels like throwing an Easter egg against a wall to see it explode with maggots.



Of all the knock-you-off-your-feet imagery Plath has melded into her poems, there is an image, an idea, in ‘Wintering’ that has stuck with me with hypnotic clarity since the first time I read it, around 4 years ago.



This is the time of hanging on for the bees - - the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Filing like soldiers

To the syrup tin



To make up for the honey I’ve taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

Part of the reason this image stuck with me so clearly is Plath’s use of ‘Tate and Lyle’… an exceptionally rare use of an ephemeral brand name in a body of work which otherwise strives for an otherworldly, timeless quality. It feels like an interjection from the modern-world amidst an ancient ritual – a police siren wailing over Claire de Lune perhaps.



But it’s the idea behind the image that bares so much fruit in this poem. When I first read this poem I was sat in a library full of underslept academics gazing into the gaudy glow of their laptops. They were flicking frantically through all manner of text-books and literary theory, trying desperately to manufacture that artifice of originality in the over-farmed soils of literary theory.



Whilst doing this, they were doubtless keeping a weather-eye on an instant-messaging window, sifting through electronic versions of literary journals, hunting down publication dates with which to cite that sting-in-the-tail quotation they have been saving for their essay conclusions.



I was doing the same.



And I got to thinking about the most important ideas of all humankind coming from sitting under a tree, or getting into a bath, or Paul McCartney writing ‘Yesterday’ whilst making himself some scrambled eggs.



The human as bee, then. When was the last time we experienced honey? For how long has the Tate and Lyle kept us going? What do I have to do to experience the real thing?



Plath knew more than most of her time, how we medicate ourselves to maintain the equilibriums we aspire to, be it with aspirin or cigarettes, antibiotics or cocaine. In Wintering we have that horrifying idea of the human ability to spread this dependence indefinitely – by turning a swarm of bees into her basement into syrup junkies.



I hope that you enjoy her poem as much as I do.

Wintering by Sylvia Plath



This is the easy time, there is nothing doing.

I have whirled the midwife's extractor,

I have my honey,

Six jars of it,

Six cat's eyes in the wine cellar,



Wintering in a dark without window

At the heart of the house

Next to the last tenant's rancid jam

and the bottles of empty glitters ----

Sir So-and-so's gin.



This is the room I have never been in

This is the room I could never breathe in.

The black bunched in there like a bat,

No light

But the torch and its faint



Chinese yellow on appalling objects ----

Black asininity. Decay.

Possession.

It is they who own me.

Neither cruel nor indifferent,



Only ignorant.

This is the time of hanging on for the bees--the bees

So slow I hardly know them,

Filing like soldiers

To the syrup tin



To make up for the honey I've taken.

Tate and Lyle keeps them going,

The refined snow.

It is Tate and Lyle they live on, instead of flowers.

They take it. The cold sets in.



Now they ball in a mass,

Black

Mind against all that white.

The smile of the snow is white.

It spreads itself out, a mile-long body of Meissen,



Into which, on warm days,

They can only carry their dead.

The bees are all women,

Maids and the long royal lady.

They have got rid of the men,



The blunt, clumsy stumblers, the boors.

Winter is for women ----

The woman, still at her knitting,

At the cradle of Spanis walnut,

Her body a bulb in the cold and too dumb to think.



Will the hive survive, will the gladiolas

Succeed in banking their fires

To enter another year?

What will they taste of, the Christmas roses?

The bees are flying. They taste the spring.



*



Phil Brown
Poetry Editor

Bees | Introduction | The Language of Mead

Week 11 | Bees | Contents

Tuesday | Poetry | Wintering

Wednesday | Fiction | Royal Jelly: Critical Consensus and Counter-consensus

Thursday | Music | Blow Job Betty

Friday | Chapbook | There There, by Daniel Payne

Saturday | Mixtape | Bonnie "Prince" Billy, by Jack Underwood

A city is a place where there is no need to wait for next week to get the answer to a question, to taste the food of any country, to find new voices to listen to and familiar ones to listen to again.
Margaret Mead

Mead is one of those ancient things, deeply old and established in so many cultures around the word. It is The Great Grandmother of All Fermented Drinks. As a result it holds a certain position in the market of language, with ‘fingers in many pies’. A great thing for those that take pleasure in the discovery of new pools of language.

You can see the full list of variants of mead here. However, below is a short-list of words you probably haven’t heard of before – ready for you to slip into any mead related conversation – or a poem perhaps.

•    Acerglyn — A mead made with honey and maple syrup.
•    Bochet — A mead where the honey is caramelized or burned separately before adding the water. Gives toffee, chocolate, marshmallow flavors.
•    Braggot — Braggot (also called bracket or brackett). Originally brewed with honey and hops, later with honey and malt — with or without hops added.
•    Capsicumel — A mead flavored with chile peppers.
•    Cyser — A blend of honey and apple juice fermented together; see also cider.
•    Hydromel — Hydromel literally means "water-honey" in Greek. It is also the French name for mead. (Compare with the Spanish hidromiel and aquamiel, Italian idromele and Portuguese hidromel). It is also used as a name for a very light or low-alcohol mead.
•    Melomel — Melomel is made from honey and any fruit. Depending on the fruit-base used, certain melomels may also be known by more specific names
•    Metheglin — Metheglin starts with traditional mead but has herbs and/or spices added. Some of the most common metheglins are ginger, tea, orange peel, nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, cloves or vanilla. Its name indicates that many metheglins were originally employed as folk medicines. The Welsh word for mead is medd, and the word "metheglin" derives from meddyglyn, a compound of meddyg, "healing" + llyn, "liquor."
•    Morat — Morat blends honey and mulberries.
•    Mulsum — Mulsum is not a true mead, but is unfermented honey blended with a high-alcohol wine.
•    Omphacomel — A mediæval mead recipe that blends honey with verjuice; could therefore be considered a variety of pyment (qv).•    Oxymel — Another historical mead recipe, blending honey with wine vinegar.
•    Pyment — Pyment blends honey and red or white grapes. Pyment made with white grape juice is sometimes called "white mead."
•    Rhodomel — Rhodomel is made from honey, rose hips, petals or rose attar and water.




James Harringman
Editor-in-disbelief