Faint with Animals
Mood:  amorous
Topic: Animal Poem Discoveries


the bare

things

just

the bare

things

when

out it comes

into

your setting

into

the proposition

you have

already set upon

its claw

its color

that isn't

so pretty

about what

it does

nothing much

more than

what it does

or then

you will

do something

it shouldn't

do and we

will have to

shoot it,

not you

A Note On Lisa Jarnot
Mood:  amorous
Now Playing: From Website "Mostly Medieval" (www.skell.org/explore/indexF.htm)
Topic: Animal Poem Discoveries

Possible Clue to title of Jarnot's latest collection,

Black Dog Songs:


Black Dog: The size of a young calf, with a long black shaggy coat and bright fiery eyes, it was harmless if left alone; but if a human spoke to a black dog or attempted to touch it he was instantly struck dumb and died. They appear in English fairy tales.

William Blake (excerpt from his letters)
Mood:  crushed out
Topic: Animal Poem Discoveries
To The Revd Dr Trusler
Hercules Buildgs Lambeth Augst 16. 1799

Revd Sir

I find more & more that my Style of Designing is a Species by itself.

Jeffers Selection
Topic: Animal Poem Discoveries

From the Selected Poems:

Skunks

The Deer Lay Down their Bones

Dickinson Doolittle
Topic: Animal Poem Discoveries


Emily Dickinson liked bees.

Sometimes she doesn't name the animals and this works very well.

March was her favorite month, because she could go outside after a long winter hibernation.

When she talks about the long sigh of the frog, it feels very daring, as if she were sriking into the interior.

She did not want to be afraid of snakes, but she was. Her narrow fellow in the grass scared the hell out of her.

To call flies "cattle smaller than the bee" is pretty good. The association brings out the devaluation of both species, their great numbers being responsible for a negative sort of anonymity, a necessary collective identity. It is not clear at this point whether she finds this pathetic. It is clear that she finds it (see the "Corporation Coat" of venerable birds in 1514, contrasted w/ the individual Crow.

I don't think she understands spiders that well. But that's o.k. Neither did Margaret Cavendish. For the writer, the spider is the whirlpool of the animal kindgom. So be on the lookout for bad spider poems. They are many and near between.

Some of the smaller poems feel like slides, especially one about the caterpillars and bees. She ends with 'and I present them here" after a brief description of the sensation felt by her hand, the feet of the caterpillar. There is a sort of jokiness to the "I present" a little self-conscious about the abrupt ending / its eruption into an "I"

The caterpillar is a "fuzzy fellow" and the snake is a "narrow fellow." Is fellow formal or informal in this sense? It is definitely polite and third person, tossing off an epithet. I am tempted to say "fellow" is closer to a term of endearment than any connotative "looking down on"

Now, an important word as to her bees. the word is surcingle:

n.
A girth that binds a saddle, pack, or blanket to the body of a horse.
Archaic. The fastening belt on a clerical cassock; a cincture.

[Middle English sursengle, from Old French surcengle : sur-, sur- + cengle, belt (from Latin cingula, from cingere, to gird. See cingulum).]
surcingle v.
__________________________________________________________________

The shiny bee shows up a lot, golden and decked out, even loaded, saddled like a horse (surcingle) except in 1522:

His little Hearse like Figure
Unto itself a Dirge

Here, the carrying of pollen is an empty thing. That's quite different from what she writes elsewhere. It feels like a renunciation. "Idleness" has the last word in this poem. It is indirectly beknighted as "divine."

Now back to 1405:

Bees are black, with Gilt Surcingles -
Buccaneers of Buzz.
Ride abroad in ostentation.
And subsist on Fuzz.

Fuzz ordained - not Fuzz contingent -
Marrows of the Hill.
Jugs - a Universe's fracture
Could not jar or spill.

Fuzz = pollen. Jugs is tough. A reference to fuzz, pollen? That it is not so perishable? That it is an effective means of reproduction?

If the universe, acting as a shelf to the jugs of ________, split in two, these jugs would not jar or spill because of their floatiness. I'm going with pollen as a sovereign element in nature. My final answer: what a wonderful world.

Do the bees then get upstaged, despite their cavalier dress and ostentatious manners? Yes, because theirs is a subsistence, which is why they disappear in the second stanza. Is that the thing about her animal poems, a sort of rifling through the fauna rolodex, trying to figure out the hierarchy? Who fares best?

Not the bat, though she is merciful:

His small Umbrella quaintly halved
Describing in the Air
An Arc alike inscrutable
Elate Philosopher

That's pretty funny. Going after the reclusiveness which somehow ties into "quaintly," which feels a little self-directed (Maybe her hair?)

The fact that she is looking for a song from these lips is telling, in that there is constantly unfolding between species these little comparative assessments.

Like "fallow Article" is an important line, even though I am not sure in what sense she uses "Article." She seems to be leaving room for that purpose she cannot find in the bat at this time. An indefinite article? Or this more specific, referring to the wrinkles of the wing, likening them to the wrinkles of an unused article of clothing?