Buzz Off Poem by gershon hepner

They say that Yeats, when reading what he’d written,
would buzz, and sound like bees in glades.
My verses, if recited by a kitten
might well receive more accolades
that they’re accustomed to, for every cool
young kitten preciously can purr,
whereas most humans do not, as a rule.
“Buzz off! ” instead, they say, when they demur.

Inspired by an article by Jim Dwyer on an exhibition of the notebooks of William Butler Yeats and Maud Gonne in Dublin (“Yeats Meets the Digital Age, Full of Passionate Intensity, ” NYT, July 20,2008) . After I wrote the poem, I read an article by Vivien Schweitzer on a movie about the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen called “The Helicopter Quartet” in which the composer underscores the magic nature of the sound of bees (NYT, July 13,2008) .

Dwyer writes about Yeats:
All his verse was meant to be heard, not read. Yeats once said, ‘“Write for the ear, I thought, so that you may be instantly understood as when an actor or folk singer stands before an audience.”
Here the words roll across one screen, while evocative pictures fill the others. The opening of each poem commands silence:
When you are old and gray and full of sleep
And nodding by the fire, take down this boo.
The readers include Seamus Heaney, Sinead O’Connor and Theo Dorgan, but it is the voice of Yeats himself, reciting “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” at a sing-song pace, that comes as a revelation. Yeats “had a very distinctive Irish country accent, from Sligo, ” noted Patrick McAfee, a visitor earlier this month. “That was amazing. And the way he was reciting was very peculiar. My friend said it was rather beelike, like a bee in a glade.”
Vivien Schweitzer writes:
When asked how the realization of the project compared with his dream, Stockhausen, looking rather despondent, said that dealing with the mundane logistics and technical apparatus rendered everything 'very down to earth.' In his dream, he said, 'I was freer.' 'I floated through the air, ' he added. 'I was a creature without a body.' Stockhausen, who was widely criticized for remarks (taken out of context, he said) that the 9/11 attacks were 'the greatest work of art that is possible in the whole cosmos, ' imagined that the whole world could become music. But it's probably just as well that he didn't try to realize all his dreams. One, he explains in the film, involved a swarm of bees and a violinist. 'The buzzing made by lots of bees is a magic sound to me, ' he says.


7/20/08