On My Mind with Liz Chang

~ On Your Mind ~

I’ve been working on a new project for about a year, based on historical confirmation that my great-great-great grandfather died in the Titanic’s sinking. (He’s my third great grandfather on my mother’s side.) It’s a hybrid manuscript that also weaves in work inspired by my great-grandparents on the other side—my Dad’s side of the family—who were Chinese immigrants who settled in Hawaii around the turn of the 20^th century. This is my main project, and it’s been challenging to decide which pieces should be essays (I’m slowly inching into Creative Nonfiction territory) and which micro-memoirs and which ideas can remain poems.

…But what’s been coming out in between these historically based pieces are these odd little bee poems. I have a few that I’m storing in a separate folder in my file cabinet under the tab “bee manuscript.” I have no idea where these might end up or when they might gel into something more manuscript-like, but they seem to come from a different place than the other work.

I did recently read Helen Juke’s A Honeybee Heart Has Five Openings: A Year of Keeping Bees, and I started backyard beekeeping myself in 2015. (I’ve taken a few years off in between, but I have a hive now that I just winterized.) When people ask me why I started beekeeping, my husband will usually point out that I played a honeybee in my second-grade play, and so it was destiny. This is, of course, true. I usually refer to the line in an essay from Naeem Murr called “My Poet” (written by a fiction writer who is living with a poet) where he opines, “what is it with poets and bees?” Of course he’s right: we have an outright obsession. Years ago I read Blind Huber by Nick Flynn, and I’d be remiss not to mention Sylvia Plath’s bee poems in Ariel. But I never set out to write bee poems—probably because I so deeply admire these works that I felt it was already well trod terrain. What could I possibly offer?

However, I learn over and over in my life that, as soon as I decide not to do something in my writing, it happens anyway. I did this when I first became pregnant with my older daughter (people would say, “will you write about it?” and I’d respond, “absolutely not—the publishing industry does not respect or acknowledge pregnancy poems,”) and even the Titanic project idea was something I couldn’t imagine writing about when it was first suggested to me. It wasn’t until I saw a documentary called The Six about the six surviving Chinese sailors (out of eight) who were traveling in steerage that night that I felt a certain permission to write about this. Oh, and those pregnancy poems that I eventually wrote after reading about another multiracial Asian woman attempts to explain their heritage to her four-year-old? They became my third published collection.

I guess what I’m thinking about, then, is how often I brush off a subject until I find something bubbling up inside me that I simply can’t contain. I often tell my students that that’s what happens in art: the more you try to push something away, the more often it surfaces. This, like so much advice, is something I could use myself. So, in the midst of the consciously designed project (the Titanic manuscript), what’s coming out is bees. The strange thing is—and this took me a while to admit, beyond the little quips I offered people when they asked—is that I love beekeeping because it is one area of my life not based in words. There’s so much that’s instinctual about ’keeping that I can just get lost in. Once you get into it too (and yes, I was initially afraid, but a good bee suit and veil makes me feel protected), there’s something so impressive about their workings, and even relaxing about watching them fly in and of their hive entrance on their genetically encoded missions.

I think another thing that appeals to me about honeybees is how long they’ve stuck it out on this earth. Yes, I know all about Colony Collapse Disorder, and it’s horrific (also, it’s not the kind of bees I keep—apis melliflora—that are endangered). But there’s an ancient feeling, an inevitability that I get to plug into when I am working the hive that I only also feel when I’m writing.

If you asked me what “unlocked” these bee poems in me, I honestly couldn’t tell you. A few of them weave together my good friend’s journey with cancer, and another one attempts to be funny (which I should never do) in relating a story of a ridiculous bee mishap to my friend who was killed in a car crash a few years ago. The poem addresses him now, in whatever afterlife exists. Maybe it’s just because I’m getting older, but time feels different these days, and I’m realizing as I write this post that maybe the bee poems are mining that feeling of endlessness and still… transience. Maybe. Or maybe I’ll just keep writing and revising these bee poems until I figure it out.

About The Author:

Liz Chang’s poetry has recently appeared in Verse Daily, Schuylkill Valley Journal, Rock & Sling, Exit 7, Breakwater Review and Stoneboat Literary Journal, among others. Chang was 2012 Montgomery County Poet Laureate and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her fourth published collection, Museum of Things, is available now from Finishing Line Press. Chang’s translation of Claude de Burine’s poetry is anthologized in Paris in Our View from l’Association des Amis de Shakespeare & Company. She is an Associate Professor of Creative Writing at Moravian University.