Suzanne Mercury is a poet whose work lies in the interstices of the natural and metaphysical world. Much of her work is ecological, and her approach to writing poems in many ways models life processes with forms that are organic and responsive.
Change, light, growth, decay, and death are the lifeblood of the natural world and of earth, and her work is a conversation with this.
Her publications include: Sassafracas (Xerolage 69), a collection of visual poems she made using dichroic glass and a laser cutter (2018, Xexoxial Editions), Hand to Earth (2019, Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs), and Hive (2023, Lily Poetry Review and Press), a book-length poem and her first full-length volume.
Her poetry has appeared in a wide variety of publications including SpoKe, Truck, Summer Stock, Bombay Gin, Sonora Review, Arts & Letters, and Hayden’s Ferry Review, as well as in the anthologies Let the Bucket Down and The Wisdoms of the Universes in a Single String of Letters.
A graduate of Smith College and Syracuse University’s MFA program, she lives in the greater Boston area where she served as an organizer for the Boston Poetry Marathon for eight years.
Kristina Marie Darling: Your ingenious poetry collection, HIVE, launched recently from Lily Poetry Review Books. What are three things you’d like readers to know about the collection before they delve into the work itself?
Suzanne Mercury: Hive is essentially a 49 stanza book-length poem, written in a syllabic formula that corresponds to Cornelius Agrippa’s Magic Square for Venus. It started as a formal challenge, but for me quickly became a spell of connection to my bees. I could go down quite a rabbit hole talking about alchemy and magic squares. They were very popular in Europe during the middle ages, and Agrippa’s squares grew from his studies in alchemy, math, and philosophy.
Agrippa believed that his magic squares were in some mystical way connected to the stars, and I found his square for Venus to be particularly riveting. For me, it fits perfectly with writing about bees, which has been a weird kind of love affair. The poem became a spell, an incantation and my bees were the first to hear it when I was finished. I have a very strong interest in poetry as performance, as ritual, and this really spurred the writing.
I think some of the stanzas work as stand-alone poems, and I do have a shorter excerpted version that I use for readings. I don’t think I could have written this if I were not doing the work of keeping bees– they have taught me so much.
KMD: HIVE is as formally daring as it is conceptually arresting. What I enjoyed most about the book is the way that form and technique serve as extensions of content. Seemingly small stylistic choices become metaphor. How did this book find its form? Can you tell us about your writing and revision process?
SM: Thank you! As I said, it began as a formal challenge, an experiment, and then it became an obsession. I wanted so badly to get the syllabics just right. I tend to overwrite, I let my poems wander all over the place. I love that process of discovering, of finding the poem in the poem. During revision, I pare them down considerably. I always read aloud when I am working. I have found that reading silently on the page is one experience, and standing up and moving around while I read the poem is a completely different way of hearing the poem. So my process is pretty physical.
Formally, I use field composition in a lot of my poetry. I’m strongly influenced by Denise Levertov’s ideas about organic form, and this way of approaching the poem, for me, is very visual, musical, and in the body. Rhythm and breath all play into how I arrange the poem on the page. I think all of this is at work in Hive. Adding syllabics on top of that made it extra challenging, but also held the whole thing together.
KMD: In HIVE, the page becomes a canvas, a visual field. As an editor and avid reader, I wish I saw more of these visual techniques, more artistic risk and formal play, in poetry. What does experimentation with form make possible in your writing practice?
SM: For as long as I have been writing poetry, I have loved to experiment. I love anything that sends me into a new direction. I thrive on it. A technical challenge can often be the doorway into the new world that is the poem. I love doing things I have never done before; I like going to places where I have not been. I write poetry, but I am also visual and physical in my expression. When I discovered that I could make my poetry a visual or haptic and well as an aural experience, I felt like I was set free.
KMD: One might say that HIVE is a book-length poem or a project book (admittedly, my favorite kind of book!). What advice do you have for writers who struggle to negotiate the integrity of individual poems, lines, or sections with the cohesion of the larger sequence?
SM: Wow, I really do love this question! I hope I can do it justice.
I do think of Hive as a book length poem– hey, a book length spell! And I think if read in one sitting, it holds together as a sequence. Each stanza is its own world, a fragmented part of a larger story about a world we are in the process of losing– but these worlds connect to each other.
Some of the stanzas I think do work on their own as stand alone poems, but other stanzas admittedly are quick episodic glimpses that need the context of the whole. Hive is filled with silences and absences, and for me this is appropriate for the subject. Bees are just so beautifully weird and there is so much we don’t know! It can take a lifetime to get to know them.
KMD: In addition to your achievements as a poet, you are also a beekeeper. Can you speak to the value of experiences outside of and beyond the writing community for one’s craft and artistic vision?
SM: I am so grateful to have the opportunity to keep my own bees. I wanted to do this for years, but it is hard when you live in an urban area or you don’t have a yard or your neighbors object. I finally got permission from the Rock Meadow Conservation Area in Belmont some years ago to keep bees on their land, and it’s been a wild ride ever since.
It is deeply physical, sweaty work, which I feel is just good for everything– we all need to sweat more. I’ve been stung plenty of times, but I’m used to that. It’s worth it. There is nothing though, absolutely nothing that compares to watching a new virgin queen being born, unfurling from her cell. If you are lucky, you just might catch that moment. As for learning about the lives of bees…. Good god you can’t make this stuff up. It’s wonderful. I spent part of last summer learning about drones and mating flights. As time goes on, I am less concerned about honey harvesting, and much more curious about where these bees spend their days. How does their world work? How do they know what they know?
Prior to keeping bees, I wrote a couple of poems about them based on my reading. Once I got my hands into the actual work, I recycled those poems! Actually holding bees in my hands changed me, and changed how I think, changed how I write. Did you know you can pick up swarming bees in your bare hands and watch how they stick together by holding onto each other’s legs? Spend a day doing that, and then write. It’s a blast.
KMD: What are you working on? What can your readers look forward to?
SM: I am currently at work on my next book, and the poems this time are longer and a bit more dense. The center piece for the book (so far, who knows where this will go?) is a cycle of poems I wrote about the early 20th century photographer Anne Brigman. She is probably most known for a series of photos she took in the Sierras of herself and her sister, sometimes naked, sometimes draped against the mountain landscape filled with wind-blasted trees. She’s fascinating.
I also have another long poem about environmental activist Julia Hill, who lived in a tree for 738 days in an act of civil disobedience to prevent the destruction of ecologically significant forests. I have a long history of writing about trees– I think they want me back.
I have also taken an interest in documentary poetics. I want to go out west and retrace Anne Brigman’s steps. I’ll see where this takes me!