Poetry and bugs should be thought of more often together. My friend, the poet Sara Nicholson, once told me she thought “ants deserve more poems.”

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But ants have a poetic pedigree worth tracking. John Clare wrote about them, and Robert Frost too. All kinds of bugs creep through poems, once you start looking. Blake wrote “The Fly”; John Donne “The Flea.”

There are dozens of poems riffing on Aesop’s fable about the cricket and grasshopper. In the journal American Entomologist, Louis C. Rutledge catalogs and taxonomizes the one hundred and eighty poems Emily Dickinson wrote in which arthropods of some variety appear: lots of bees and butterflies, but also gnats, worms, and of course her famous fly.

Insects have made more recent appearances too. Wong May has an incredible poem, “Zhi Lao,” about cicadas and knowledge. Bernadette Mayer, in Midwinter Day, notes “a small lady bug / with only two black dots on its back” climbing her pen as she writes. Dionne Brand’s book-length The Blue Clerk costars aphids, those other consumers of books.

Bugs are notoriously good analogues for human antics, ethics, and morality. For Frost and for Clare, bugs occasion recognition of “government and thought” as kin to human endeavor. But bugs seem to spark profounder recognition in poets. “Am I not / A fly like thee?” Blake asks.

Bugs are notoriously good analogues for human antics, ethics, and morality.

Ours are also marginal labors that support larger ecosystems. Cribbing from Deborah Gordon’s work on ants, I maintain that both bugs’ and poets’ “interactions have a rhythm / but no real meaning.” Poets toil as often-anonymous individuals building some greater nest, colony, or hive that might outlast us or end up squashed and swept away unceremoniously.

Contingency is built into effort; effort could very well, almost always does, end in accident. A hand brushes our wing too.

Writing about Cid Corman’s poems, Lorine Niedecker—one of our notable attendants to the creatures—writes, “World news: sun on the sill; a bug.” The bug’s arrival across our human consciousness, the sill of our days, sparks irritation and interest. We share “world news” that way.

The kind of attention we train on a bug, when we do, displaces the inner concerns of a meditating subject or re-places those concerns onto external phenomena. The poet considers unlikeness to generate kind-ness—similarity or analogy, and, in certain poems or poets’ moods, something like gentleness.

“What wonder strikes the curious,” Clare begins his ant poem. We might imagine the poet absorbed by regard rather than ruination of the colony under his observation.

But bug poems suspend us in a moment of uncertainty too—”pausing, annoyed” as Clare’s poem imagines its amateur entomologist to be—since that look could merely be prelude to murder. It’s not clear how Mayer handles the ladybug who is both participant in and distraction from her epic day of writing, or what the content of Corman’s next actions given the bug in his window might be.

Bug poems in this way are also about the violences of attention. The many bugs that my household shelters don’t irritate (or intrigue) me until I notice them. And then what do I do?

While they provide occasions for the kind of “transitive attention” Lucy Alford catalogs, wherein a poet fixes on a single object and the resulting poem gives rise to states like contemplation, desire, recollection, imagination, bugs also surface something darker about attention’s affects. Annoyance, disgust, anger, fear. “Ticks make me homicidal,” an acquaintance recently revealed.

And bugs’ ignoble practices exert fascination on poets too. David Seung, who first book Silkworm’s Pansori, came out with the Song Cave this March, includes many anecdotes about bugs as footnotes crawling across the pages. Seung writes about these footnotes as “infractions” or “taps on the shoulder to correct posture—reminders that one’s experience and understanding of a poem are dependent on a knowledge of what exists beyond it.”

The content of that beyond is often for Seung a fact about bugs: we read about Taiwanese giant wood roaches who eat their mate’s wings and have their wings eaten in turn; beetles that feast on magnolias with “mouthparts that know only how to chew.” As in Freud, the footnote operates as repressed content, surfacing the crawly world around us (and sometimes inside us) that makes our own go.

Any good anecdote about bugs features something surprisingly disgusting or nefarious that they do—for example, autothysis, which is essentially a bug blowing itself up to protect its colony from intruders, and which occasioned my own poem, “Ants.” The words scientists develop for these actions and behaviors, the means of discovery they utilize, broaden the purview of the bug poem and entangle it with the discourses and desires of science itself, another disciplinary realm in which noticing cannot be said to remain neutral.

The relevance of bug stories to Seung’s poetry, to poetry, is imagined as corrective outside to the poem’s defensive, beautified exoskeleton, its search for a structure impervious to the basics of feeding, shitting, mating, dying, all upon the beings, livelihoods, corpses of others. One function of bug poems is to remind us that messier and more hideous relations always obtain.

Even a seemingly self-enclosed lyric like Blake’s “The Fly” gets at the peculiar philosophical positions poetry’s bugs support. Blake begins in summer, perhaps he’s in a shady spot in Lambeth, near the Thames, likely full of flies. Unthinkingly, instinctively, he’s made a motion—a brush, a swat—to displace the fly from where it was, his hand, his bit of cheese.

The poem starts there. Addressing the fly, Blake considers not just how he is like or not like a fly but if this fly is “a man like me.” Bug poems often play with scale, flipping human and insect concerns to jiggle perspective, loosen the grip of humanity’s hold as all, only, ever.

In Blake’s poem, this line of thinking is transitive—fly and man both drink, sing, suffer. And they are connected by something we think of as peculiarly human, which is thought. In Blake’s poem “thought is life” and “the want / Of thought is death.” The kind of thinking the fly does is less important than that Blake recognizes thought as the guarantee of life.

It would be different if he had said, “if life is thought,” since not having access to a fly’s thoughts we could plausibly deny it was alive at all. But flies are alive—maddeningly, sometimes violently so. The fly-human pair exist as equally fragile living, dying creatures.

“The Fly” is a Song of Experience, not innocence. “One kills a bug now and then,” I wrote in “Ants.” “But feels quite perfect because death.”

If poetry’s bugs announced themselves merely as another way to think about poets’ and poems’ perennial labors and failures, I don’t think they’d be as interesting as they are.

If poetry’s bugs announced themselves merely as another way to think about poets’ and poems’ perennial labors and failures, I don’t think they’d be as interesting as they are. Bug poems can’t completely sublimate their object of poetic attention—bugs are too creepy and alive.

It’s that livingness that crawls through the language, whatever language we can find to describe these encounters which are also happening, John Clare reminds us, in whatever constitutes bug-thought and bug-language, “whisperingly / too fine for us to hear.”

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Ultraviolet of the Genuine by Hannah Brooks-Motl is available via The Song Cave.