TRANSCRIPT

Today’s episode is guest hosted by Samiya Bashir.

I’m Samiya Bashir, and this is The Slowdown. 

In 2009 I was grateful to be awarded a Cave Canem scholarship to attend the Community of Writers in Lake Tahoe. I got to work with, and study with, some of my favorite writers. What sticks with me to this day is an experience that continues to connect me to lineage, students, teachers, and the very idea of time and artistic growth. 

When I arrived, and for weeks before, I had been trying to make real a poem about apian colony collapse. This environmental breakdown of bee colonies around the world sets off a cascade of harm and destruction for us all. Our survival on this planet is not singular, but communal. Bees don’t just pollinate our food; they are the key to ecological continuity. What I’d been trying to do was mark this moment of die casting. The alarm systems colony collapse represents warn us that we have to do something, repair something now or the worldwide consequences will be devastating. 

You know, something simple. A poem. No biggie, right?

That year, Galway Kinnell was a guest poet. We poets had the opportunity to have a powerful workshop with him, under the Northern California lakeside pines. The process at Community of Writers is  that we all drafted new poems each night, even the instructors,  and shared them with each other during workshop the next morning . That day, Galway Kinnell shared a poem he’d written the night before: “Exeunt the Bees.” 

I. Was. Blown. A. Way. In one night, Kinnell had written the poem I had been futzing around with for weeks and weeks, including the night before, and hadn’t been able to find my way toward clarity of voice and precision of poetic experience. After the workshop, he generously sat with me one on one and I asked him about the poem. LIKE: HOW??? His response was a shrug…this is what I do, he said. And I’ve been doing it forever. And honey my flabbers were ghasted. But what I know now, in so many conversations with students: that’s the only answer. Time. Experience. Attention. Understanding. 

As far as I can tell, Kinnell’s poem has never been published. I’m grateful to still have that draft, and I refer to it from time to time to remember the power of growth; of staying with something and building upon the knowledge and experience we gain through practice and patience and willingness–that what we gain is worth the work.

Today’s poem does something seemingly simple: it restores the bees to their best lives. Restoration, like most things worthwhile, is far from simple. But we know, and this poet shows us, that by taking such deliberate steps toward doing recovery, repair, and renewal, in our poetry as well as in our environmental stewardship, we re-establish our own ability to live our own best lives. And that, like attention, like experience, like growth, just might be worth a little more than a little bit of everything.

Orchestra
by Russell Brakefield

Bees sleep
because they need to

like us. Together
a bundle

of bees asleep
at night

is a concertina
wheezing closed.

In the hive
they dance

a democratic dance,
a waltz

to prioritize.
Abdomen wobbles

a whole note.
I read today 

some bees feel 
the thrum

of electric current
as they encounter

a flower’s field,
which is true

but also
what I need to be—

social spark,
singing field.

"Orchestra" by Russell Brakefield. Used by permission of the poet.