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]

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.