It was a great evening under a full moon last night at Avery Point, talking “Swimmer Poetics.”  I always enjoy speaking to a mixed audience; Avery Point is a maritime studies campus, with an emphasis on marine science and public policy as well as a growing but still modest humanities presence.  I was introduced by my old friend Mary K. Bercaw-Edwads, a blue-water sailor and Melville scholar, but there weren’t many other literary types around.

What everyone shared, though, was a deep personal commitment to the ocean.  One of the really great questions I got after the talk was about how differently a less-ocean focused audience might reaction to the idea that swimming and poetry are essentially ecological practices and ideas.  It’s a question I might revisit at SAA, though my Oceanic Shakespeares seminar will be filled with dual-focus types like me, interested in poetry and the sea, wanting to use the one to get at or into the other.

Early in the talk I rehearsed something that I wrote in the first few pages of At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean, the claim that the sea is receding from our cultural imagination.  I still basically believe this, having taken the point in part from Robert Foulke, but I also think it needs refining.  The sailor and the sailing ship have been receding in our imagination since Conrad, whose novels comprise a kind of requiem.  Perhaps maritime shipping and the ship as such are as well, with the exception of the cruse ship.    But the beach is our public property, and ocean swimming has, almost certainly, become much more common in the past few generations than ever before.

The distinction between sailors and swimmers, between being “on it” or “in it,” was the refrain of my gallery talk at the Folger back in June 2010, and I wonder now if I should go back to that frame as a way of separating out two different versions of the human-sea relationship.

The other great question I got after the talk, asked by a former competitive swimmer who’s recently started coaching a high school swim team, was about the morality of swimming.  As I was thinking through it during my answer, I tried to lay out a distinction between the ship, which has been an emblem for social bonds and political order since antiquity — Plato’s Republic uses it, and I think Antigone also — and the solitary swimmer, head down underwater, who, to paraphrase Frost, cannot see out far and cannot see in deep.  I’m pretty focused on the wisdom of the swimmer, the knowledge that comes from living in an inhuman and untenable environment — but what’s the social politics associated with this practice?  What’s the morality?

The best thing about bringing new work somewhere is getting unexpected feedback.  The shipwreck book, which is nearly done — I’ll be able to use some of the material about Donne’s “The Storm” that I talked about last night in the chapter on the lyric, and an expanded version of the Crusoe in the surf bit also in the “Castaways” chapter, and those are the last two that I need to write — is feeling more and more like a hinge book, a way into the water where I’ll be swimming for a while.

Swimmer Poetics isn’t a bad book title, I suppose.  I’m going to use it for a short talk at a Maritime conference in Cape Cod in April, and also for an eco-theory piece for O-Zone.  Unless I decide I need to save that phrase.

A couple paragraphs out of the talk I’m giving tonight at U Conn Avery Point, as part of the Coastal Perspectives lectures series —

It happens in three stages.  First, immersion.  The sudden shock of getting into the water.  It’s a phase change, really, a transition from being in the air, which, depending on location and temperature, contains quite a bit of water vapor, into heavier, viscous liquid water.  You’re out, then you’re in. Nothing quite like it.  After that, buoyancy.  Our bodies need just a little help to pop up to the surface.  We can relax and float, for a little while.  This is the hopeful moment.  Last, exertion.  Moving our arms and legs in practiced patterns, we stay at the surface, even move around from place to place.  Nothing lasts forever, but there is short-term stability and pleasure, for a while.

And a little later —

Swimming matters because humans can learn how to do it, even do it very well, but it’s always dangerous.  Eventually you need to get out of deep water.  A minor character in Conrad’s Lord Jim emphasizes that swimming is, at bottom, futile:

Very funny this terrible thing is.  A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea.  If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavor to do, he drowns….No!  I tell you!  The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep, sea keep you up.

 

The “exertions of your hands and feet” provide a bleak a vision of human insufficiency, but it puts off drowning.  Conrad’s character is a native German speaker, and his jumbled syntax parallels the awkwardness of human swimming itself.  As Conrad knows, as all swimmers and sailors know, there is no long-term survival plan for swimmers in the deep ocean.  But the immersive experience, being in the “destructive element,” is precisely what poetry helps us understand.  Poetry is good at imagining radical change, and good at making readers enjoy it.  Literary criticism has a name for this technique: the poetic sublime, which I’ll explain shortly.  My focus tonight is on the way that poetic forms provide models for enduring inside a hostile environment.  The world after global warming is not the future – it’s the present – and making sense of that present requires a poetic, oceanic imagination.

Abbreviating the spirit of Woody, I’ve got three things this year: write, cook, and swim.

The first — “Work more and better” — wants a renewed focus on prose style.  When I wrote At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean in 2009, playing with my  academic style meant no footnotes, prose-poem interludes, a half-dozen different ways of interpolating modern writers from Melville to Walcott to Glissant, and working through sentences every day in the warm waters of Long Island Sound.  In 2010, writing case labels and brochures and website text for “Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550 – 1750” meant writing for a new audience: clear, brief, lucid prose, plus more imaginative moments in two talks in the theatre.  This past year had me writing for various outlets — a couple journals, introductions for two essay collections, the still-looming shipwreck book — and trying to figure out how much of the churn and froth of Shakespeare’s Ocean I can keep as I return to footnote-landia.  In 2012, the answer will be: all of it, and more.  It’ll be fun.

Second — “Eat good — fruit — vegetables” –digs into cooking and eating.  No farmer’s markets here in CT during the winter, but replacing Stop’n’Shop with Bishop’s Orchard helps a lot.  Though I think our wine won’t come from CT…

Last — “Keep hoping machine running” — I want to build on 2011’s rediscovery of swim racing, which took me to Bermuda for a 10km open water race in October.  It’s great to have an athletic focus that doesn’t pound my lower body — though I’d also like to keep running on days I can’t get to the pool.  Not sure what the long swims will be in 2012: I’m waiting to hear about the Chesapeake Bay Swim, the lottery for which gets decided in a few days.  There are also a few fun NYC swims, including two in the Hudson and two in the Bay.  The Little Red Lighthouse is a current-assisted 10km in September that looks like fun.  The Hellespont looms, but not in 2012.

I’m also considering some races in the pool, for the first time since the mid-80s.

A good line-up of academic events too, including chairing seminars at the SAA in Boston and the ISA in Stratford, giving a “Coastal Perspectives” Lecture at UConn Avery Point and a talk at CUNY, plus heading west and slightly out of field for the New Chaucer Society in Portland in July.  The big family trip to Europe will follow the Stratford conference, though we’re still working out the details.  France or Greece?