Mosquito Rage

Pesty Insect Poems

Jane Anderson JonesSeptember 2002

Table of ContentsIntroduction 3Poems

from “The Adironacs” by Ralph Waldo Emerson 4“The Mosquito” by D.H. Lawrence 5“Veto” by Don Blanding 10“Awakened by a Mosquito in the Villa Aurelia” by Philip Guston 11

and Musa McKim“Mosquito” by Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson 12“Mosquitos” by David Chorlton 13“A Mosquito Sings at 4:30 A.M., Minnesota” by Stephen Morse 15“Mosquito” by Jeanne Murray Walker 16“Mosquito Poem” by Nancy Botkin 17“insect airlines - we never run out of fuel” by Richard Zola 18“Mosquito” by Myronn Hardy 19

Poets 21Mosquito Evasion 27Bibliography 28

                                           

   

Fig. 1. The parts of a mosquito. Freundenrich. “How Mosquitos Work.” Marshall Brain’s How Stuff Works. 20 Sept. 2002 < http://www.howstuffworks.com/mosquito.htm/printable >

Introduction

The Introduction should discuss how the theme of the anthology is revealed in the selections. The editor may decide to compare and contrast some poems, point out different techniques used by the poets to address the theme, and/or discuss cultural differences among the poets, among other possible topics. Biography of the poets should NOT be discussed in the Introduction. This is a critical, analytical introduction, hence there should be no use of 1st (I, we) or 2nd (you) person.  If you use critical sources for information, they must be documented according to MLA Guidelines. Discuss the poetry, not why you chose it. 750-1000 words.

from The Adironacs

Hard fare, hard bed and comic misery, The midge, the blue-fly and the mosquitoPainted our necks, hands, ankles, with red bands:But, on the second day, we heed them not,Nays we saluted them Auxiliaries,Whom earlier we had chid with spiteful names.For who defends our leafy tabernacleFrom bold intrusion of the travelling crowd, Who but the midge, mosquito and the fly,Which past endurance sting the tender cit,But which we learn to scatter with a smudge,Or baffle by a veil, or slight by scorn?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1858

In the introduction to The Adironacs, Emerson gives the occasion for the poem: “In August, 1858, Mr. William J. Stillman, an artist by profession, but a man almost of the versatility in accomplishment of The Admirable Crichton, as painter, writer, critic, foreign consul (in which service he showed himself a chivalrous Philhellene), and last, not least, an accomplished woodsman and hunter, led a party of his friends into the then primæval forest of the Adirondac Mountains. The party were, Stillman, Agassiz, Lowell, Judge Hoar, Dr. Jeffries Wyman, the comparative anatomist; Samuel G. Ward, a near friend of Mr. Emerson's; Dr. Estes Howe, John Holmes (brother of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes), Horatio Woodman, Dr. Amos Binney, and Emerson.” (Notes)

Sources of information must be cited in parenthetical citations

Mosquito

When did you start your tricksMonsieur?

What do you stand on such high legs for?Why this length of shredded shankYou exaltation?

Is it so that you shall lift your centre of gravity upwardsAnd weigh no more than air as you alight upon me,Stand upon me weightless, you phantom?

I heard a woman call you the Winged VictoryIn sluggish Venice.You turn your head towards your tail, and smile.

How can you put so much devilryInto that translucent phantom shredOf a frail corpus?

Winged Victory: The Winged Victory of Samothrace, a statue of Nike, the Greek Goddess of Victory, is found in the Louvre Museum in Paris.

Queer, with your thin wings and your streaming legsHow you sail like a heron, or a dull clot of air,A nothingness.

Yet what an aura surrounds you;Your evil little aura, prowling, and casting a numbness on my mind.

That is your trick, your bit of filthy magic:Invisibility, and the anæsthetic powerTo deaden my attention in your direction.

But I know your game now, streaky sorcerer.

Queer, how you stalk and prowl the airIn circles and evasions, enveloping me,Ghoul on wingsWinged Victory.

Settle, and stand on long thin shanksEyeing me sideways, and cunningly conscious that I am aware,You speck.

The conceit of the mosquito as sorcerer runs throughout much of the poem.

I hate the way you lurch off sideways into airHaving read my thoughts against you.

Come then, let us play at unawares,And see who wins in this sly game of bluff.Man or mosquito.

You don't know that I exist, and I don't know that you exist.Now then!

It is your trumpIt is your hateful little trumpYou pointed fiend,Which shakes my sudden blood to hatred of you:It is your small, high, hateful bugle in my ear.

Why do you do it?Surely it is bad policy.

They say you can't help it.

If that is so, then I believe a little in Providence protecting the innocent.But it sounds so amazingly like a sloganA yell of triumph as you snatch my scalp.

Blood, red bloodSuper-magicalForbidden liquor.

I behold you standFor a second enspasmed in oblivion,Obscenely ecstasiedSucking live bloodMy blood.

Such silence, such suspended transport,Such gorging,Such obscenity of trespass.

You staggerAs well as you may.Only your accursed hairy frailtyYour own imponderable weightlessnessSaves you, wafts you away on the very draught my anger makes in its snatching.

Away with a pæan of derisionYou winged blood-drop.Can I not overtake you?

Are you one too many for meWinged Victory?Am I not mosquito enough to out-mosquito you?Queer, what a big stain my sucked blood makesBeside the infinitesimal faint smear of you!Queer, what a dim dark smudge you have disappeared into!

Siracusa. D. H. Lawrence, 1920

pæan: a joyful song

Veto

There's a law of nature I'd like to veto...It's the life and love of the (blank) mosquito.

Don Blanding, 1955

Philip Guston and Musa Mckim, 1970s

Toward the end of his life, abstract artist Philip Guston, turned his attention from the art world to theliterary world and began to “tangle and mingle” his drawings with poems by various poets, including hiswife, Musa McKim. “His drawings for these poems aren’t illustrative, either realistically or Metaphorically. The pictures are a response, an addition to the argument, another light pointed at the same spot.” (Craghead) Sources of information must be cited in parenthetical citations

Mosquito

Delicate creature of gossamer wingsashaying by: I hear you sing.

Can you not see the hovering threatfocussing palm, your life it will get?

Now you are daintily poised on my book.Fairy-like sylph, you tempt me, but look-yes, for your beauty I'd fain let you fly,

but for that bloodthirsty look in your eye-that murderous, bloodthirsty look in your eye!

Lorna Whitelaw/Anderson, 1974

Mosquitos

With his radio tuned to newsa listener alone in the early hoursgazes at a cometthrough his window.The feeling drains

from his feet. He pours a bowl of hot waterand takes off his socks.War has broken out in a countryhe cannot place. Aspirin is helpless

against his headache. He wants explosivesto break the dambehind his eyes. The presidentis crushing grammar between his teethand the listener cries outfor a flood

to wash away the concretethat blocks his senses,a cleansing floodthat rushes down from the mountainsscented with pines. He looks outat the stars, but cannot hear

the mockingbirds. Financial marketsare falling in a trail of light.The sky sparkles. He just sitsand is numb

to the bite of mosquitoeswho go back into the nighteach with a drop of his bloodglowing inside them.

David Chorlton 2002

A Mosquito Sings at 4:30 A.M., Minnesota

I,I,I,I,I,I,I . . .

I wing my wayWith precisionto animal heat.

The viscuous, warmMammalian liquid draws myProbe.

The penetration is the ultimateMoment. I gorge, I feed, IAm at greatest risk. I amLegend. My spirit will live in theGreat moisture land of theForever warm. There hasBeen no other greater. I amA feeder. I live in the landOf the giant mammals. ISurvive.I,I,I,I,I,I,I (the sound of a hand slapping)

Stephen Morse, 1980sThe onomatopoetic repetition of “I,I,I,I,I,I,I”at the beginning and end of the poem, not onlyrecreates the whine of the mosquito, but emphasizes the first person voice of the mosquito’s song

Mosquito

Six hours for everything! She has to make some choices. I would do what she does-fly up from the cool waterlike a dust mote, dry my wings, hoping they might lift me further. I would jazz it up, all for love, draw circles on the air. In this brief, expanding universe of suns, I would try to be nothing but longing, entirely hunger. And when I died, I'd leave behind a memory

like an itch.

Jeanne Murray Walker, 1994

The lack of punctuation in theten-line long first sentence createsa rush of words interrupted onlyby the stanza breaks. Thesecond sentence, nearly as long,seems more deliberate as itsphrases are set off by commas.Ending the six tercets of the poemwith a single-line stanza servesto emphasize nature’s sacral aspect

insect airlines - we never run out of fuel

if over coffee in a parisian cafea mosquitoelegantly holding a gitanesaid:saddle me upand we'll fly through the junglesof madagascarand across the burning plainsof africai'd gobut i'd worry all the timethat i was being exploitedand was nothing morethan a gullible fuel tank

Richard Zola, 2000

Gitane: a brand of French cigarettes

Mosquito

She visits me when the lights are out, when the sun is loving anotherpart of the world.

She passes through the net I sleep under like a cloud its holes are easily navigable.

Her buzzing tells me thatshe doesn't want my legs arms cheeks or chest.

No.

She craves adventure wanting to travel through the dark canal the spiraling cave where earthquakes are wind.

Note how the poet uses interior space

Her prize is in sight the gelatinous mass controlling this machine. How beautiful she thinks it is her needle mouthfilling with water.

Her children will know physics geometry will understand English Spanish perhaps Portuguese. They will be haunted their whole lives by trees gunsand a boom that won't cease.

She cries before drinking the fluid is salty-sweet. Oh if my mother had done this for me I would have lived.

Myronn Hardy, 2001

Anderson, Lorna (1918-2001) Canadian. Mother of Susannah, who created a website that contains her poetry.

Blanding, Don (1894-1957). Born in Oklahoma, Blanding studied at the Art Institute in Chicago and in Paris and London. An itinerant artist and writer, his light verse met with popular success, and his first collection, published in 1928 under the title, Vagabond's House. met with immediate success. “After 1928 he wrote both poetry and prose, and his published works, some of them with his own illustrations, were: Virgin of Waikiki (1929), Hula Moons'(1930), Songs of the Seven Senses and Stowaways in Paradise (1931), Floridays (1940), Pilot Bails Out'(1943), Today Is Here (1946), Mostly California'(1948), A Grand Time for Living (1950), Joy Is an Inside Job'(1953), and Hawaii Says Aloha (1955) ” (“Don Blanding”).

Sources of information must be cited in parenthetical citations

Poets

Botkin, Nancy (?): Botkin is a Lecturer in English at Indiana University: South Bend (Botkin)

David Chorlton (?): lived in England and Austria before moving to Phoenix in 1978. His volumes of poetry include Forget the Country You Came From, Outposts, and a chapbook, Common Sightings which won the Palanquin Press Competition. He is a painter as well as a poet(Contributors).

Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1803-1882): Poet, essayist and philosopher,Emerson was one of the towering figures of nineteenth-centuryAmerican literature. Known as “the sage of Concord,” he was the chief spokesman for the Transcendentalists. (Benet’s 300-01).

Guston, Philip (1913-80) and Musa McKim (1908-92): Guston's Poem-Pictures were assembled in an exhibition at the Addison Gallery of American Art in 1994. “The Poem-Pictures incorporate passages, lines and, in some cases complete stanzas from poems by Berkson, Coolidge, Corbett, Musa McKim (Guston's wife), Stanley Kunitz (an old friend from the 1950s), among others ….and represent a form of collaboration that counter the ongoing modernist reading…that has been brought to bear on Guston's work” (Balken). Selections of Musa’s poetry are collected in Alone With the Moon (1994).

Hardy, Myronn (1972-): Hardy, born in Michigan, currently lives in New York City, where he earned an MFA degree in fiction at Columbia University's School of Arts in Writing. In 1998 he spent a year in South Africa transcribing apartheid and post-apartheid narratives and has presented his research at the University of Havana and the University of Guantanamo. His poems have been published in Third Coast, Many Mountains Moving, The Black Scholar, Callaloo, and in the anthology Testimony from Beacon Press (“Approaching”)

Lawrence, D.H. (1885-1930): One of the major English novelists of the Twentieth Century (novels include Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover), Lawrence also wrote short stories, poetry and essays. His poetry collections include Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923), Look! We Have Come Through (1917) and Pansies (1929) (Benet’s).

Morse, Stephen (1945-): Morse was born in Oakland Naval Hospital, Oakland, CA. As a teenager during the early 1960s, he hung out with the Beat poets at Coffee and Confusion in North Beach . He studied with Robert Creeley at San Francisco State University during the 1970s. His poetry has been published in Saturday Review, numerous small magazines, and in his 1972 book, Dusty Rabbits (“About Stephen Morse”).

Walker, Jeanne Murray (?) Walker is the author of five books of poetry. They are Gaining Time (Copper Beech, l998), Stranger Than Fiction (Quarterly Review of Literature, l992), Coming Into History (Cleveland State, l990), Fugitive Angels (Dragon Gate, l985), and Nailing Up The Home Sweet Home (Cleveland State, l980). Her poems have appeared in Poetry, The American Poetry Review, The Georgia Review, The Kenyon Review, The Nation, and many other journals and anthologies. A professor of poetry and drama at the University of Delaware, she also writes for the theatre (“Jeanne Murray Walker”).

Zola, Richard (1949-): Zola is an English poet who publishes his Poetry on his website dances with zola (Stoneking). Born on the Isle of Guernsey, he says “i write because i have a tribal mentality.....and no campfire” (Zola, “poetics”)

Mosquito Evasion: Personal Reflections on Pests and Poetry

The editor's Concluding Reflections should be a personal statement about the Anthology. Here may discuss why you chose the poems. 250-500 words.

Bibliography

"About Stephen Morse." Stephen S. Morse. 8. Mar.2002

< http://www.juice-press.com >.

Anderson, Lorna. “Mosquito.” 1974. Poems by Lorna Anderson. Jan. 2005

< http://mypage.direct.ca/s/susannah/mombugs.html >.

"Approaching the Center by Myronn Hardy." Book Review. New Issues in Poetry

and Prose. Spring 2001. Western Michigan University. 8 Mar. 2002

< http://www.wmich.edu/newissues/spring2001/hardy.mosquito.html >.

Balken, Debra Bricker. “Philip Guston’s Poem Pictures.” Lingo: A Journal of the Arts.

Cultureport: Hard Press. 11 Sep. 2002

< http://www.cultureport.com/newhp/lingo/authors/balken.html >. .

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Blanding, Don. "Veto." 1955. Florida in Poetry: A History of the Imagination. Eds.

Jane Anderson Jones and Maurice O'Sullivan. Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press,

1995. 261.

Botkin, Nancy. “Mosquito Poem.” Poems of Life, 1999. Rpt. Home Pages Indiana

University. 9 Mar. 2002.

<http://www.iuinfo.indiana.edu/homepages/4-14-2000/text/botkin.htm>.

Chorlton, David. “Mosquitos.” Slipstream 22 (2002). Online sample. 10 Sept. 2002.

< http://www.slipstreampress.org/issue22.html >

“Contributors.” The Ascent Experience: Aspirations for Artists. August 2002. 23 Sept.

2002. < http://www.bcsupernet.com/users/ascent/contributors.html >

Craghead, W. “Philip Guston’s ‘Poem Pictures.’” USS Catastrophe. 23 Sept. 2002.

< http://www.usscatastrophe.com/cannon/guston/wc.guston.html >

"Don Blanding." The National Cyclopedia of American Biography. New York:

James T. White and Company, 1963. Vol. 46: 146-147. Rpt. Don Blanding.

2002. 8 Mar. 2002. < http://www.don-blanding.com/index.htm >.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. “Adirondacs.” Works: Poems Vol. 9. 1903. The American Verse

Project. University of Michigan. 9 Mar. 2002

http://www.hti.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idxq1=mosquito&sid

Freundenrich, Craig T. “How Mosquitos Work.” Marshall Brain’s How Stuff Works.

11 Sep. 2002 < http://www.howstuffworks.com/mosquito.htm/printable >

Guston, Philip and Musa McKim. "Awakened by a Mosquito in the Villa Aurelia" from

Poem Pictures, 1970s. UbuWeb Historical. 9 Mar. 2002

< http://www.ubu.com/historical/guston/guston17.html >Hardy, Myronn. "Mosquito." Approaching the Center. 2001. Rpt. Poetry Exhibits.

Poets.Org. The Academy of American Poets. 1997-2002. 8 Mar.2002.            < http://www.poets.org/poems/poems.cfm?prmID=2112 >.

“Jeanne Murray Walker” Professor.: English Department, University of Delaware.

12 Mar. 2002. < http://www.english.udel.edu/faculty/walker.html >.

Lawrence, David Herbert. "Mosquito." 1921. Representative Poetry Online. University of

Toronto Department of English and U of Toronto P, 1994-2000. 8. Mar. 2002.

< http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/poems/dhl10.html >.

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poet, playwright and professor” University of Delaware Update Archives. 9 Mar.

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Morse, Stephen. "A Mosquito Sings at 4:30 A.M., Minnesota." Stephen S. Morse.

8.Mar.2002 < http://www.juice-press.com/poemorse/80s/mosquito.html >.

"Mosquito: Anophales Quadrimaculatus" Illinois Department of Natural Resources:

Department of Education. 8 Mar. 2002 <http://dnr.state.il.us/lands/education/classrm/wingleg/mosquito.HTM >.

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Stoneking, Billy Marshall. “ The Near Interview of Richard Zola.” dances of zola. 19

June 2001. 11. Sep. 2002 < http://www.richardzola.co.uk/pages/interview.php >.

Walker. Jeanne. “Mosquito.” Jeanne Walker: poet, playwright and professor. 8 Aug. 1994

University of Delaware Update Archives. 9 Mar. 2002.

<http://www.udel.edu/PR/UpDate/94/39/16.html >

Zola, Richard. "insect airlines - we never run out of fuel." 2000. dances of zola.

9 Mar. 2002. < http://www.1freespace.com/art/danceofzola/poem83.html >.

_____. “poetics.” 2002. dances of zola. 11 Sep. 2002.

< http://www.richardzola.co.uk/archive/index.html >.

Take a quiz to see how attractive you are to mosquitos:

http://www.mosquitoes.com/meter.asp

Post ScriptMosquito Limerick

A mosquito was heard to complain

That a chemist had poisoned his brain

The cause of his sorrow

Was para-dichloro-

diphenyltrichloroethane

From the Seattle Food Garden Newsletter,

put out by the Washington State University's Extension Service and King County