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

[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.