“We Hunted the Invisible”

Amy Beveridge created “We Hunted the Invisible” from Anna Botsford Comstock’s How to Keep Bees (1905). Please click here to read.

About the poem and the process of composing it, Amy writes:

Using hard copies of the first few chapters of How to Keep Bees, I lightly scanned the pages and underlined vivid words and phrases while trying not to be distracted by, and actually read, the surprisingly lyrical writing of a practical handbook on bee-keeping in order to hold onto a sense of the poems I might create with my own sensibility. It is as if there is a pattern—a poem—hidden at a different level than the original text, and I must look at the text’s periphery or slightly blur my vision in order to make out this other texture. Once I chose the raw materials of the words, I composed the poem in a Word document, adding punctuation and arranging the words and phrases into lines that reflect breath and meaning.

Also by Amy Beveridge at HERON TREE:  “What We Said to the Lost Girls,” which you can read by clicking here.