Those of you who hang out on the net with Stephanie Young , who is physically a resident of Oakland, but whose voice resounds in all corners of the poetic universe, are probably familiar with her true story, “The Bees,” of a hive that was found outside the window of one of the buildings where she works. She describes how

The bee keeper thrust his hand up into the ceiling and pulled out the piece of the hive where the queen bee lived. He showed us her larger compartment, surrounded by cells of royal jelly which the babies had been eating only moments before. At his urging, we put our fingers near the honeycomb and then we ate the honey.

Thinking of this piece of Stephanie’s, I turned to ever-plagiarizable Maurice Maeterlinck for an entry into the flower of her person and her writing:



Day after day, at the first hour of sunrise, the explorers of the web return, and browsers awake to receive the good news of the earth. “The lime trees are blossoming today on the banks of the canal.” “The grass by the roadside is gay with white clover.” “The sage and the lotus are about to open.” ” The mignonette, the lilies are overflowing with pollen.” Whereupon the antennae of the race must organize quickly, and arrange to divide the work. The bloggers immediately sally forth, in long strings of zeroes and ones, each one flying straight to her allotted task. The bloggers are perfectly informed as to the locality, the relative melliferous value, and the distance of every melliferous thought within a certain radius from their personal cell.

Each of the cells is an hexagonal tube placed on a pyramidal base, but the royal cells are most exceptional, and contrived somewhat in the shape of an acorn, or a well-nourished moon, like the one in which Stephanie Young, today’s featured queenpoet, keeps her residence.

I met her there in the midst of that growing world that so constantly transforms itself, where hundred of workers are dancing and flapping their wings. They appear thus to generate some necessary heat, out of which a young queen like Stephanie can be born…. Picture her birth: two large and earnest black eyes appear, surmounted by antennae that already are groping at life, while active jaws are busily engaged in enlarging the opening from within. Having come from another world, she is bewildered still, trembling and pale. She is perfect, however, from head to foot; she knows at once all that has to be known, and proceeds to beat her wings and to dance in cadence.

No one, to my knowledge, has written as perceptively about Stephanie than one of her many fervent admirers, the hotheaded young blogger David Hess. I take the liberty of quoting him here.

To think and feel in xylophones, horns and zu-zu-zuum vibrations. What blurb would I write for Stephanie Young’s book were she to ask?

“I do believe there is some razzamatazz in here.”

What kind of critical reading could ever do justice to an aggressive celebration of life? We associate this proud and unresigned creation with idealism, forgetting its roots in the dire realities of daily living. Easier to do it with xylophones, horns and zu-zu-zuum vibrations. Words, get the words clean, if you wish, or load them up with flute saws and drumming plasmas.

In another blog entry, David Hess tells the story of Stephanie admitting to

“excessively enjoying a glass of iced water at a restaurant. “I’ve never been happier to see a glass of iced water,” she said. Somehow I found this the perfect addition to my love for her consistently surprised personality. You should have seen her point out a wooden 7-11 sign as we zigzagged around Charles Street, and the huge ears of a dog. “Those dog’s ears are huge!” Do you not want [he asks] this person to take you on a tour of the universe, and do so in one of those duck boats with wheels?”

Yes! We want very much for Stephanie to take us on that tour, in a duck boat or any vehicle she chooses. Friends, please welcome…