ABSTRACT
To identify what is particular to the poetry of collapse, we can compare it with more widely known discourses. Jared Diamond for instance confronts the conundrum of scale in defining the term in Collapse: How SocietiesChoose to Fail or Survive, when he describes the phenomenon as “an extreme form of several milder types of decline, and it becomes arbitrary to decide how drastic the decline of a society must be before it qualifies to be labeled as a collapse”. In colony collapse disorder, or CCD, can witness at a smaller scale this failure to contain collapse. Poets taking up or taking on the theme of CCD work in a rich tradition of poetry about bees, a tradition in which the hive has always proved fertile for analogies with human society. One of the earliest texts in this tradition is Virgil’s Georgics, a Roman handbook of agricultural best practice in verse, itself attending to and written in a moment of collapse.
