May 1, 2008
 
NATIONAL POETRY MONTH: A Poem A Day in April...and a Bonus One for May ... Today's Poet: John Hollander
 
Special to Huntingtonnews.net
 
For our final day of poetry, a sneak preview from John Hollander's new collection, A Draft of Light, coming out in May. This New York City poem speaks to the accidental nature of poetic inspiration and reminds us to remain open to the gifts of the muse, wherever we stumble across them. We hope you've enjoyed April's offerings as much as we have enjoyed sending them your way.

Being Stung By A Bee on the Lexington Avenue Local
 
Ouch! etcetera
Aside, and then likewise the
Conclusion that I
 
Had indeed not been
Stabbed in the left shoulder with
A knitting needle
 
By some demented
Wretch whose misery I'd be
Momentarily
 
Too angry to spare
Any real sympathy for
(Though I knew too well
 
Life had undone so
Many) sitting in the jammed
Car heading uptown
 
Through the acutely
Nonrural subway tunnel:
Said conclusion drawn
 
From a subsequent
Nonmechanical humming
In my ear accompanied
 
By an actual glimpse
Of the creature who would not
Live long buzzing off,
 
As it were and as
A matter of fact as well—
What some idiot
 
Of the literal
Might mean by rus in urbe...
All of those aside,
 
It was only weeks
After that I realized
That the very (most
 
Nonliteral) point
Of the sting was that the thought
Buzzed through my mind some
 
Days later that I
Was as one who, once stung by
A gold-banded
 
Bee in a fable,
Might have thereupon acquired
As a gift—not from
 
Apollo himself,
But from one of his nine girls—
A peculiar kind
 
Of wisdom: but of
Which sort, and from which of them—
Which of the Muses—
 
Let alone what tied
That bunch to that misplaced bee
(Poor lost bee! I had
 
No anger for her
As I might have had for the
Knitting-needle nut)
 
And what deep cosmic
Questions had hung on this I
Could not imagine.
 
But although with no
Gift nor Muses nor indeed
An available
 
Apollo, I would
Come to conclude that even
The subsequent brief
 
Sting of the sudden
Awareness of them and their
Moot irrelevance
 
Was as much of a
Gift from those nine sisters as
Is ever given.
author spotlight
 
John Hollander is the author of seventeen previous books of poetry. His first, A Crackling of Thorns, was chosen by W. H. Auden as the 1958 volume in the Yale Series of Younger Poets. He has written eight books of criticism, including the award-winning Rhyme’s Reason: A Guide to English Verse and The Work of Poetry, and edited or coedited twenty-two collections, among them The Oxford Anthology of English Literature, American Poetry: The Nineteenth Century, and (with Anthony Hecht, with whom he shared the Bollingen Prize in Poetry in 1983) Jiggery-Pokery: A Compendium of Double Dactyls.
 
Hollander attended Columbia and Indiana Universities and was a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows of Harvard University. He has taught at Connecticut College and Yale, and was a professor of English at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, CUNY. He is currently Sterling Professor emeritus of English at Yale. In 1990 he received a MacArthur Fellowship.