Digitalis Poetry

[Magpie]

composed by a foxglove—
sonnets
for a bumble bee

[ellajam]

I like it. The pic is luscious and the poem is fun to think about. Good morning.

[Magpie]

I like it. The pic is luscious and the poem is fun to think about. Good morning.

And good morning to you too Ella. The foxglove in the pic are from the garden in bloom. All the foxglove I've got are pink but this white one has turned up from somewhere, perhaps it's an albino foxglove.
Once when I'd been awake for too many days I looked at a foxglove and I thought I could decipher all those little dots. They are what lure the bee in because bees see in ultraviolet and those dots are like illuminated signposts in ultraviolet light but there also sonnets as well  

Thanks,

Mark

[Quixilated]

Love this! Simple, whimsical, and lovely. I love the idea that the flowers are poetry to bees. They dance and read the poetry of the flowers. So happy you posted this.
-Quix

[RiverNotch]

And here was I, heading home with thoughts of Solomon's Mountain-Flowers -- this doesn't ring the thought exactly, since I was more fixated on said mountain flowers being already one with the gardener, but it's close enough to resonate, with little points of titillation of its own (say, sonnets the fourteen spots, bees being part of puberty's metaphor, and, my favorite, foxglove as itself the sly lover's glove). Absolutely lovely! -- although, in a more "objective" mind, perhaps if deprived of the picture pedestrian, but then I'm not a (esoteric) botanist yet, and really, with that story about your garden in mind (which, if it wasn't so obstructive, I'd recommend putting in, since it adds even more weight), the picture is the essence, isn't it? Or are those nectar-spots in the foxglove's definitions ubiquitous?

[Lizzie]

"Once when I'd been awake for too many days I looked at a foxglove and I thought I could decipher all those little dots."


Sounds like a wonderful opening line for a poem! Hint, hint.

[shemthepenman]

oh, i like it. it reminded me right away of a passage i read in one of Deleuze & Guattari's books. i couldn't find the actual passage but i found a paper with a very close approximation:

. . .art does not mark the beginning of humanity: bird-artists can create ready-mades by letting leaves drop and meticulously turning them to make a contrast between their interior face and the color of the earth. Their postures, colours, and refrains sketch out a total work of art.
(1994:184).

and this from mille plateaux [or the other one—it's hard to say for sure]:

How could movements of deterritorialization and processes of reterritorialization not be relative, always connected, caught up in one another?
The orchid deterritorializes on that image. The wasp is nevertheless deterritorialized, becoming a piece in the orchids reproductive apparatus. But it reterritorializes the orchid by transporting its pollen. Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, for a rhizome.
 
It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing its image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.). But this is true only on the level of the strata—a parallelism between two strata such that a plant organization on one imitates an animal organization on the other. At the same time, something else entirely is going on: not imitation at all but a capture of code, surplus value of code, an increase in valence, a veritable becoming, a becoming-wasp of the orchid and a becoming-orchid of the wasp.
 
Each of these becomings brings about the deterritorialization of one term and the reterritorialization of the other; the two becomings interlink and form relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further. There is neither imitation nor resemblance, only an exploding of two heterogeneous series on the line of flight composed by a common rhizome that can no longer be attributed to or subjugated by anything signifying.

—Deleuze & Guattari