Take me back on the bay, boys

[sovay]

Today involved no sleep, a very early orthodontist's appointment with bonus braces-tightening, and a complete failure to nap in the afternoon thanks to derspatchel's current next-door neighbors waging the age-old battle of Power Mower vs. Hedge Trimmer (spoiler: nobody within earshot wins), but I also got several hours with my cats and a windfall from a library sale: Moods of the Sea: Masterworks of Sea Poetry (1981), edited by George C. Solley and Eric Steinbaugh of the U.S. Naval Academy. I had no idea this book existed. It's full of poets I would have included, like Rudyard Kipling, John Masefield, H.D., Matthew Arnold, Adrienne Rich, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Herman Melville, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, not to mention material from the folk tradition like the Odyssey, sea chanteys, and "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry," but it's also full of poets I wouldn't necessarily have expected or hadn't even heard of—Carl Sandburg and e.e. cummings among the former, Stephen Spender and R.P. Blackmur among the latter. The anthology was put together in the year I was born and I know it's arrogant to think it was waiting for me, but it was there on the shelf and for two dollars I regret nothing, but I wouldn't have regretted it for even more.

Appropriately, my poem "Ghost Ships of the Middlesex Canal" has been accepted by Not One of Us.

All dripping in tangles green,
Cast up by a lone sea,
If purer for that, O Weed,
Bitterer, too, are ye?
—Herman Melville, "The Tuft of Kelp"

Comments

[yhlee]

I'm so glad you found that book. It sounds wonderful.

And yay poem!

[sovay]

And yay poem!

Thank you!

It is a wonderful book.

[swan-tower.livejournal.com]

. . . I'm trying to think of what I would have designed if somebody told me "put together a book perfectly tailored for sovay, and so far I'm not coming up with anything you didn't just describe in this post.

Maybe a reference to Carthage in one of the poems? That's about all that comes to mind for an improvement. But for all I know, that's in there already.

[sovay]

. . . I'm trying to think of what I would have designed if somebody told me "put together a book perfectly tailored for sovay, and so far I'm not coming up with anything you didn't just describe in this post.

I'd have more recent sea-poems if I had edited it: Caitlín R. Kiernan's "Atlantis," Claire Askew's "The Mermaid and the Sailors," "Niall Campbell's "The House by the Sea, Eriskay" and "The Letter Always Arrives at Its Destination," Sarah Holland-Batt's "Thalassography," Jenn Grunigen's "Ekphrastic 22/The Drowning Girl," A.E. Stallings' "The Ghost Ship," Jo Bell's "Doggerland," Robin Robertson's "At Roane Head," Derek Walcott's "The Schooner Flight," off the top of my head. I'd have to decide which poem I wanted from George Mackay Brown because I love so many of them. But it's a lot of things I hadn't read before, and that matters to me.

[edit] I mean, if it were really me putting an anthology together, I'd include excerpts from the libretto of Peter Maxwell Davies' The Lighthouse (1979) and Dudley Nichols' script for The Long Voyage Home (1940) and other more abstractly defined forms of sea-poetry, like the lyrics to the Bills' "Bamfield's John Vanden" or Sting's "Valparaiso." That reminds me of Kipling's "Anchor Song," without a question. Conrad Aiken's Mr. Arcularis (1957). But you see I wouldn't have the funds to secure the rights for a project like this, and anyway I shouldn't try to put it together after midnight after nights without sleep.

Maybe a reference to Carthage in one of the poems? That's about all that comes to mind for an improvement. But for all I know, that's in there already.

There's one directly in a poem from Byron, but I prefer the echoes in James Elroy Flecker's "The Old Ships" and John Masefield's "Cargoes."

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I *love* "The Letter Always Arrives at Its Destination"--just seeing the title brought a wave of good feeling.

if it were really me putting an anthology together ... Now there's a powerful and appealing idea. Do you think you'd ever consider it?

[sovay]

Do you think you'd ever consider it?

I'd enjoy it—and I'd want it to be a lot more international than just the examples I linked above, which are mostly very Atlantic—but I don't know where I'd get the money. I really think the reprint rights would be staggering after a while.

[negothick.livejournal.com]

I taught from that anthology for years at the Coast Guard Academy. I even remembered that it was published by The Naval Institute Press. You've already started a great book proposal arguing that it's time for a new anthology, including women's voices and those of non-Anglophone traditions.
Here's the link: http://www.usni.org/naval-institute-press/writing

Did you know that they published Tom Clancy's The Hunt for Red October? They did. Stranger things have happened. . .

[desperance.livejournal.com]

...wait, what, never heard of Stephen Spender? He goes very much with Auden and Isherwood - and indeed went with them to Germany, tho' not to America for the war. I'm not actually sure what he did do in the war, tho' I know he was in Spain for their civil war beforehand. He became a sort of Grand Old Man of British poetry: knew everybody, founded a few magazines, occupied a chair or two (tho' not at Oxford, which is the famous Professor of Poetry), and never stopped writing. Mostly poetry, at least one novel. We rather liked him, by and large.

[sovay]

Mostly poetry, at least one novel. We rather liked him, by and large.

His name was not at all familiar to me and neither were either of the two poems reprinted in Moods of the Sea, "The Drowned" and "Seascape," both of which I loved. It's possible that I've read him before and didn't remember his name, but I tend to. I'll check some of my parents' and grandparents' books the next time I'm in Lexington just in case.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

Like desperance, I was surprised that you listed Spender as unknown (surprised enough to reread and make sure I wasn't muddling formers and latters). A reminder never to take for granted that canon in the US matches that in the UK.

In which spirit, then: you don't mention Charles Causley?

[sovay]

In which spirit, then: you don't mention Charles Causley?

He's not in this collection! He wrote "At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux," though, so I know his work and like it very much.

With Spender, it's much less likely to be an issue of differing canons than whether I had the opportunity to run across him on my own time. See discussion here. I discovered almost none of the poets who are important to me in school. [edit] To be really pedantic about it, while I certainly discovered many of my favorites while in college and graduate school, I discovered almost none of them from being taught them in school. I was part of an experimental track in my last two years of high school, so I missed most of the Western Canon. (I remember reading Fitzgerald's Odyssey in ninth grade and some very badly taught American poets in the tenth.) I don't think I have ever taken a class on poetry that wasn't reading Latin or Greek. I know I got Wilfred Owen my senior year of high school because Dr. Fiveash gave us "Dulce et Decorum Est" after reading Horace, but I read my first A.E. Housman in the student copy of Louis Untermeyer's Modern American and British Poetry that had belonged to my grandmother (and thought for years she had written one of his more famous poems because it was pasted in unattributed in her handwriting) where I also read my first H.D., though it would take me until very early grad school to discover a used copy of Trilogy (1946) and fall for her for real. I think I picked up Yeats via "The Second Coming" late in high school, but Robinson Jeffers and T.S. Eliot were independent discoveries around the same time. I got Anna Akhmatova from a class on Russian literature I was sitting in on. For years I thought I hated Sylvia Plath because the aforementioned terrible tenth-grade English teacher had us read "Daddy" and then talk about Plath's relationships with her father and Ted Hughes—I had to run across a copy of The Colossus and Other Poems (1960) in the Book Trader Café in New Haven in order to get any independent sense of her as a poet (and one who could beautifully write the sea). Rika Lesser was pure used book store potluck—I saw the title Etruscan Things (1983) and pulled it off the shelf like a shot. I started to care about Kipling as a poet because of Peter Bellamy's settings and I tracked George Mackay Brown back from Bok, Muir & Trickett's "John Barleycorn" and Seamus Heaney's "The Haw Lantern" was the poem that leaped out at me in his collected works the first time I browsed the campus book store at Brandeis. These last four examples are much more normally the way I discover non-classical poets than anyone I was formally introduced to. There's also the internet. As with film, I think I am much more self-taught as a poet than may be obvious from the outside. I read widely, but it's rarely systematic.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I'm waiting for you to write a story or poem about the seals of the Charles.

[sovay]

I'm waiting for you to write a story or poem about the seals of the Charles.

I would love to. I need real sleep.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I really ought to introduce you to E. J. Pratt, who deserves to be known outside CanLit classes: https://canpoetry.library.utoronto.ca/pratt/poems.htm

The first one, "Erosion," I've never much liked, but it's his best-known (and probably shortest) poem. The others are more interesting.

[sovay]

The first one, "Erosion," I've never much liked, but it's his best-known (and probably shortest) poem. The others are more interesting.

"The Ground Swell" and "The Titanic," sold. "The Truant" is much more interesting than it looks at first, especially by the time you hit the last verse and the date of composition.