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Take me back on the bay, boys
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 ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
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"
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"
no subject
The first one, "Erosion," I've never much liked, but it's his best-known (and probably shortest) poem. The others are more interesting.
no subject
"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.