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

[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. . .