Steve Mentz

Another strange, dislocated year, with not much organized Bookfish-ing.

Just 17 posts over the year, mostly in a few bursts: three in Jan, mostly about #bluehumanities; four in May, building up to the great Sea Sense web-conference “at” UC Irvine; six in a burst in June including a Creative-Critical event “at” Nottingham Trent U. for which I ran a Zoom workshop and my lone theater review, of Madeline Sayet’s “Where We Belong,” which I watched on Zoom but also heard her do a live interview on the New Haven Green; one in August when Grand Little Things published three of my Covid sonnets; one in November for #shax2022; and my year-end wrap on 12/31/21.

A did have a nice new development in publishing poems — three from Blood & Bourbon in June, three in Grand Little Things, and this blog-sonnet for World Ocean’s Day.

What will I Bookfish about in ’22? I have big plans, which may encounter reality in various ways. A trip to Auburn in March to visit a grad seminar and give a talk about “Geography, Genre, and Elizabethan Fiction”! SAA in Jacksonville in April! A trip to Bern in May to give a workshop and a public lecture! All of it building up the three months (Oct-Dec) at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich at the year’s end.

I hope those will all go, but this past year I ended up skipping out on the amazing Swimming a Long Way Together launch in Dublin, and also Anthropocene Campus Venice in November. So we’ll see what the third year of Covid brings…

For the past two years I’ve been keeping count with the Reading List app. Mostly these are books I read for “pleasure,” though many of these books are or may be important for future research and writing. (What is pleasure for a professor?) My techno-innovation of these pandemic years has been listening to audio books while tromping through New England woods; I’d guess that I “read” roughly half of these books via earbuds rather than pages.

Here are my five favs from 2021 (alphabetically by author)

David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything : A New History of Humanity (Nov 2021)

I gulped down this massive book over many long walks through the unseasonably (climate-changed) warm fall weather. It’s desire to unfold and re-imagine the political possibilities of human culture inspires — even if, as K. Anthony Appiah’s excellent review in the NYRB shows, the price of their utopian range may be fudging some facts. They lean heavily on what they call the “Indigenous Critique,” which in their reading comes back to Europe from Native American cultures between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries. In this case, especially, I felt they underestimated the overlap between Old World philosophical visions of the Golden Age and the news coming back from the Americas – the two are deeply entwined and probably not fully extricable, as I see it. But even if Graeber and Wengrow exaggerate, their vision opens up historical possibilities in inspiring ways. It’s a basic historical truth that we can be something other than what we are now, and this book helps cultivate that perspective.

Philip Hoare, Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Durer and How Art Imagines Our World (May 2021)

Philip Hoare’s twitter feed (@philipwhale) makes the best poetic case I know for the virtues of daily immersion in salt water, but his most recent book isn’t a swim memoir. Instead, it’s a gorgeous, speculative, multi-temporal engagement with the life and art of Albrecht Durer. The cetacean of the book’s title is a beached sperm whale whose body Durer failed to see in early modern Holland. The project of the book – to learn what art enables us to see, and to see the past and present through that art — is stunning. I won’t pick favorites among these five titles, but I’m pretty sure Hoare’s is the one I’ll re-read first.

Riva Lehrer, Golem Girl: A Memoir (Oct 2020)

I found this one via my daughter Olivia’s first-year writing class at Haverford. It’s a riveting and often painful autobiography of a disabled artist. I listened to the audio, read by the author, and but after looking through the hard copy Olivia brought home over break, I think the illustrations, mostly of Lehrer’s paintings and pictures of her family, are just amazing.

Stephen Pyne, The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next (Sept 2021)

I’ve read a few of Pyne’s earlier books and articles, but I was super-pleased to find this short & compelling summa-style book in 2021. In under 200 pages, he traces the long relationship between hominids and fire, which has been central to human evolution as it is crucial to today’s global climate change. It’s another book I’ll go back to!

Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain: A Celebration of the Cairngorm Mountains of Scotland (orig. 1977)

I found this one via Margret Grebowicz’s Mountains and Desire, which I also loved. For the beauty of its prose and open-heartedness of its vision of humans in nature, it’s hard to match Nan Shepherd’s early 20th century memoir. The audio book contains ancillary material from both Robert McFarlane and Jeanette Winterson. A great book to hike with!

Here’s my month-by-month breakdown with numbers and mode:

Jan: 7 books, including Obama’s A Promised Land (audio) and Jeminsin’s Hundred Thousand Kingdoms (print)

Feb: 4 books, including Kolbert’s Under a White Sky and Douthat’s The Decadent Society (both audio)

March: 5 books, including Gooley’s How to Read Water and Scott’s Seeing Like a State (both audio)

April: 5 books, including Thompson’s Blackface (print) and Nestor’s Breath (audio)

May: 5 books, including Hoare’s Albert and the Whale (print) and D’Arcy Wood’s Tambora (audio)

June: 6 books, including Eisendrath’s Gallery of Clouds (print) and Beard’s SPQR (audio)

July: 7 books, including Grebowicz’s Mountains and Desire and Suzman’s Work: A Deep History (both audio)

August: 6 books, including Pyne’s Pyrocene (print) and Shepherd’s The Living Mountain (audio)

September: 11 books, including Rovelli’s The Order of Time (audio) and Nersessian’s Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse (print)

October: 9 books, including Ghosh’s Nutmeg’s Curse (print) and Odell’s How to Do Nothing (audio)

November: 8 books, including Graeber and Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything and Boon’s What the Oceans Remember (both audio)

December: 10 books, including Gabrielle and Perry’s The Bright Ages and Lehrer’s Golem Girl (both audio)

That’s 88 total, or an average of a bit over 7 per month. Most per month was 11 in September, least four in Feb.

Here’s a rough outline of plans for the seminar at #shax2020 in Jacksonville, FL, this coming April 2020.

October: All of the members of the seminar have introduced themselves & their projects to the seminar by email.

1 November: I circulated to the seminar some shared work by our two invited non-Shakespearean guests. From Molly Warsh, Associate Professor of History at Pitt, I circulated the intro and first chapter (on pearl harvesting) from her brilliant book, American Baroque: Pearls and the Nature of Empire, 1492-1700 (UNC Press, 2018). From Sid Dobrin, I circulated his chapter on global fishing, “Protein Economies,” from Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative (Routledge 2021), plus his Jacksonville-centric chapter, “An American Beach,” from the book  Florida. Ed. Jeff Rice. Parlor Press. 2015. 212-229.

late November: Molly, Sid, and I will record a Zoom-conversation about these works and how they might be helpful in shaping our shared conversation at the conference. I’ll record that Zoom, and circulate the recording.

1 December: All seminar paper-writers should submit provisional titles and short (250 word) abstracts to me. These can of course be revised in the New Year, but once they are finalized I will compile them and circulate copies at our seminar for auditors.

14 February: Final Deadline for completed papers (~2500 words). This is a firm SAA deadline so that each of you can be listed in the final SAA program.

1 March: I will divide the eight papers into two groups of four. Each group will have a designated respondent from our two invited respondents, Caro Pirri and Dan Brayton. We will circulate written responses to each paper within each group, as well as designating time during our seminar in April.

1 April: Deadline for written responses (ie, before anyone gets on a plane to FL!). We’ll also try to generate some shared questions for the full seminar by this point.

6-9 April: Our seminar will meet for two hours at a time and place tbd!

Further information about a trip to a clam shack, a 16th-century French fort, and/or a beach will be forthcoming closer to the date.

Here’s the link to these three Corona Sonnets, published on August 7, 2021.

And here are the poems themselves. Thanks to the Sonnet Corona Project for support and inspiration!

April 2020

Not our call, boy. Pronounce your own sentence,
And let its cold raw taste linger, bitter –
A stench of unform’d words and off syntax,
Sour milk fingers just now refresh Twitter.
And what about their words, that last longest?
Dead again today, pinned between covers,
Hot, in quarantine that lasts through August,
Verses of voyages, expiring brothers.
The Friar’s letter never was delivered.
The searchers of the town locked him in.
Slant-rhymes fish-like were silvered,
And burn hot in my throat like old man’s gin.
It is a mad thing to read on a book.
Outside’s a place not to touch but to look.

May 2020 

Is here again and I cannot hold them both --
Or “is” or storm: two choices only. All night 
The surge splatters my house. Third month
Of quarantine splashes disorder tight.
To shore curls a wave, delicate, reveal-
ing wind’s ruffle over ocean’s taut skin.
It traps dry feet on narrow shore, conceal-
ing routes beyond the seas they underpin.
Soliton waves don’t last forever,
Though they outpace horse and rider, pinch high
Through the narrows, vanish behind heather,
A twist in time’s river, bubbling, terrify --
Waves never break without shoreward going.
In my neighbor’s yard an ark is growing.

May 2020

I don't really know, but at least they're home.
That’s what I mouth to hollow pre-dawn air,
In vacant hours of teenage sleep syndrome.
My black coffee, meditation, despair
Hold me still in don’t-wake-them quiet -- nowhere
Or watching a poet’s pot that never boils
Because the burner’s in need of repair
Or the back garden’s full of gargoyles
That lure me to combat – I bring my oils –
With thump and thwack and splash and grab and screech 
Until the monsters’ heads hide ‘neath subsoils.
Conquering Dad-hero my task I preach: 
Hunker down or hightail to the highlands:
I cleave these two from so many thousands --

Steve Mentz is a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline and teaches in Queens. His poems have appeared in the Glasgow Review of Books, Underwater New York, Blood and Bourbon, and in the book Oceanic New York. His most recent book is Ocean, part of Bloomsbury’s Object Lessons series.

Every so often a book leaps to your attention like the strike of a fish on the end of your line: a sudden jerk, the hook sets itself, and you’re on for the duration. I’m not sure how the metaphor really works — am I the fish or the fisherman? — but in reading this book, I kept being reminded of the feeling every fisher know, that sudden tug from beneath the water. Yep, I’m hooked.

I first saw a pre-pub notice for the book sometime during the timelessness of 2020. I’m pretty sure I ordered it months in advance. Blue Ecocriticism and the Oceanic Imperative dives into the “ocean deficit” it diagnoses in twenty-first century ecocriticism and cultural studies. Along the way it explores the symbolism of the color blue, the ocean as hyperobject (in Tim Morton’s sense), protein economies, Object-Oriented Ontologies and the new materialism, Ocean as Object, writing studies and ecocomposition, and much more. What Dobrin calls the project of “unearthing ecocriticism” turns out to be a great ride.

Much of the material, for a blue humanities obsessive like me, is somewhat familiar, but the emphasis is sharp and, if I may repurpose one of Dobrin’s phrases about the ocean, compellingly adjacent to my watery work. Dobrin writes wonderfully about contemporary water cultures, including sport fishing in his companion volume Fishing, Gone? His writing on Google Earth (Google Ocean?), about OOO and the theoretical modes that engage with eco-ideas, and about the origins of the idea of a “world ocean” are all insightful.

Dobrin engages with many of my favorite blue humanities thinkers, especially Stacy Alaimo, Melody Jue, and Dan Brayton. He quotes me too, mostly my long-ago thoughts in At the Bottom of Shakespeare’s Ocean and “Toward a Blue Cultural Studies,” both of which appeared in 2009. He nudges me a bit on the question of how narrowly to focus on Shakespeare and on literature as such. I very much agree with the wider goals he sets for blue thinking — “Blue ecocriticism requires a more voluminous, heterogeneous trajectory beyond the sea of ink” (25). Exactly!

I’ve been noodling just a bit about whether there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the “blue humanities,” which is mostly the term I use these days, and what Dobrin calls “blue ecocriticism.” I’m not sure the differences are that great. Maybe there’s a way that “humanities” carries some all-too-human baggage, which might ask us to follow ecological ideas into post-human directions, or into alliances with nonhuman creatures and environments? I also think one of the values of the “humanities” broadly speaking is its reflexive habit of questioning what “the human” really is. I very much align with and recognize myself in “blue ecocriticism” in Dobrin’s description, perhaps especially because we draw on slightly different archives and methods.

One of the joys of this book, for me, has been finding a blue fellow traveler who also combines oceanic recreations with academic writing. Dobrin’s professional work comes out of the world of composition studies, which I admire and have learned much from but is not my academic home. I wonder, though — maybe time and tide will enable an eco-Shakespearean and an eco-compositionist to grab a beer later this summer, perhaps on a humid August afternoon in Florida when I’m visiting my parents? An afternoon casting for the elusive tarpon or body surfing might be even more fun, but all of us, even blue thinkers, remained bound by circumstances and time. Stay tuned!

One truth of these late-Covid days, around 18 months since the arrival of the pandemic to American shores, is that I’m really looking forward to the return of live theater. But in the meantime I loved streaming this one-woman show by Mohegan playwright and performer Madeline Sayet. And I did catch a snippet of her speaking live, in conversation on the New Haven Green, courtesy of the International Festival of Arts & Ideas, my local favorite Arts festival that is soldiering on through partial quarentine conditions.

Her autobiographical play, Where We Belong, carries Sayet from her roots in Eastern Connecticut as the daughter of Mohegans to England where, as she explains a few different times to UK customs officials at the border, she travels to study the works of William Shakespeare. The play explores the tensions between Sayet’s Mohegan identity and Shakespeare’s imperial reach. In conversation last night, she said the play combines three stories:

• Her own journey from wolf (which is what the word mohegan means) to bird (which is what her own Mohegan names means)
• The intellectual and spiritual journey of an Indigenous woman to England, the home of the colonizers who decimated her people during First Contact, which was not incidentally close in time to Shakespeare’s own day.
• The relationship between Shakespeare’s plays and colonialism/imperialism, which was the subject of her academic work in England

To me, the most compelling moments came in her lyrical meditations on flight and identity, the way repeated air travel loosened her felt connection with the earth of her people, at least temporarily, and the way Shakespeare studies, in its self-conscious efforts to become “global,” amounts to a view from the stratosphere that fails to know the land.

Her observation, repeated in last night’s public talk in New Haven, that Shakespeare’s writing, now cherished by so many people all around the world, was composed when the Mohegan people “still had all our words” was striking and powerful. The loss of native speakers of Mohegan and many other Indigenous languages is one of many horrors of conquest and settler colonialism, and it’s compelling to emphasize the contrast between words an English playwright invented and the words that a Native American people lost.

The Shakespearean refrain of her performance comes from Caliban: “You taught me language, and my profit on’t / Is, I know how to curse” (Tempest 1.2). My sense is that she has backed slightly off of her early claim that Shakespeare is an “anti-colonial” artist — I agree with her that the truth is more ambiguous, though certainly there can be and are many anti-colonial responses to Shakespeare — but she does an excellent job show how the poet’s language raises and complicates questions of identity and geography.

Since like Sayet, I own The Tempest as my “favorite play,” despite its patriarchal and imperialist baggage, I couldn’t help but think about the difference between quick airborne connections between North America and England, like those made by Sayet in the play and by me during non-pandemic years, and the longer and more uncertain sea voyages made by the Mohegan ambassadors whose grave markers she visited in Southwark and the colonizers who arrived in North America from Europe in the early modern period. What has the shift from sea travel as the primary driver of early modern “wet globalization” to the faster and less environmentally-connected practice of airline flights done to human geographical experience? Have airplanes broken something?

That’s a question I’ll keep puzzling, including through engaging with past and future work by Madeline Sayet!

Enjoy the live-stream of the play, which is available through July 11!

Would you rather steer a technological assemblage across alien seas? Or plunge your body into salt water, using repeated movements of your arms and legs to keep you up and propel you forward?

That’s the question I’ll be posing very early local time next Monday, as I lead a Critical-Creative workshop for registered students of NTU’s weeklong Creative-Critical Summer School. The program, hosted by the International Critical Poetics Research Group, will last from 25 June – 3 July, with a mix of public (free via YouTube) and private events. It’s an amazing line-up, and I am looking forward to catching as many of the public events as time zones allow.

My workshop will fit itself in between a “breakfast” poetry reading (9 am in the UK is 4 am locally for me, and I think the night before in Hawai’i) by Craig Santos Perez and a public talk on cetaceans and stranding by Astrida Neimanis. Our shared title for the day’s triple-header is “Care in the Anthropocene.” We’re all thinking about how climate change is changing everything.

Here’s my description of the workshop:

Living in the Anthropocene means immersing oneself in a hostile environment. In our era of rising seas and temperatures, are you a sailor or a swimmer? All participants will choose a team for the two hours traffic of our workshop. Sailors use technological prosthetics to engage their environments. Wooden sailboats are the icons, but the technologies could include anything from the alphabet to a MacBook. Swimmers, by contrast, use only their own bodies and formal patterns of movement as resources for survival. We will write as sailors or swimmers and discuss our writing both within our teams and in dialogue with a member of the opposite group. We will discuss what these two modes represent and how operate historically and today. Suggested readings include a poem by Craig Santos Perez and short essays by Astrida Neimanis (with collaborators) and Steve Mentz.

And here are the the three short suggested readings that I hope the group will have a chance to read:

• Susanne Pratt, Camila Marambio, Killian Quigley, Sarah Hamylton, Leah Gibbs, Adrianna Vergés, Michael Adams, Ruth Barcan, and Astrida Neimanis, “Fathom,” Environmental Humanities 12:1 (May 2020) 173-78.
• Craig Santos Perez, “Praise Song for Oceania” Habitat Threshold (Oakland: Omnidawn Publishing 2020) 66-72.
  • If you prefer the video for Craig’s poem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6fmeBerLZc
• Steve Mentz, “Swimming in the Anthropocene,” Public Books (December 2020): http://www.publicbooks.org/swimming-in-the-anthropocene/#_=_.

Looking forward to this event, including Astrida’s public lecture later at 1900 UK time Monday!

Some time during pandemic winter, it’s hard to remember exactly when, I was on Zoom listening to some St. John’s students reading their original poetry. One student, whose name I didn’t recognize because he started the PhD program during the year of social distancing & hadn’t taken a class with me yet, said that he had a book of poems coming out in 2021, and that he normally writes about the ocean, fatherhood, and ideas of orientation in a maritime context.

I thought for a minute he was introducing me. I don’t have a book of poems coming out, but — oceans, fatherhood, orientation? Really? I mean, I’ve heard of people who are interested in such things. I see their faces every morning in the bathroom mirror.

Earlier this week I received a copy of Celestial Navigation, Peter’s new book from Finishing Line Press. A few differences helped clarify the question of identity — he has four kids while I only have two, he served in the US Navy from 1999-2003 when I was finishing grad school, he lives on the southern side of Long Island Sound while I live on the north. He has an MFA; I have an MA and a PhD. He’s a bit free-er than I am with line length and positioning, but that may also be that I’ve been writing dozens upon dozens of pretty regular sonnets during these pandemic months. Blessed rage for order, as somebody says.

My favorite poem in this lovely little book is “Scattered White Horses,” a sixteen-line mini-epic about fathers and sons and the sea and a “proof of mythology” that gets passed down, or maybe doesn’t, or doesn’t need to be, because the objects that assume meanings cohere by themselves —

The strange thing is that mythology requires such few proofs

seagulls crying over my father’s house

my grandfather’s bent finger, a knife in my pocket —

& that these made the other side of the world less strange to me

There are gorgeous partly-found poems built out of Navy documents and manuals, moving poems about families and distance, poems about sea storms and breezes — the “scattered white horses” show up in another poem as whitecaps on the water — and on war and the Beaufort Wind Scale.

A lovely and moving book of poems that everyone should read!

Where’s the world, I murmur as cold water

Clasps pale thighs. It’s true, I’m no Achilles,

But the sloppy ancient sea’s my author

And guide, enfolds me wet, smells like lilies –

The festering kind, you know the ones. Worse

Than multitudes. And now in, in, endless

And still now, around me, cold, the world’s hearse,

Earth’s caul and blanket, silent and friendless –

For who dares friend the sea’s hungry limbs?

Like an old man’s weak arms around the knees

Of the sea-goddess’ boy death-child I swim.

I splash multitudes, the past, the faint breeze

That is history soaking flesh. Wet now

I embark. Tales of power to unknow.

My sourdough has been writing poems. Over the 400+ days of pandemic mostly-isolation out of which we’re just now emerging, I’ve neither learned to bake bread nor, despite downloading an app, to identify the songs of my local birds. But I have written somewhere north of 200 new poems.

This week I’ve had the a trio of those poems published in the Toronto-based literary magazine Blood & Bourbon. I’m especially pleased because when I submitted I didn’t mention my half-shelf of academic and para-academic books, but instead described myself as a writer who lives on the Connecticut Shoreline. Will I develop a new literary persona as coastal poet? Hard to say – the poems are about swimming, living with the nonhuman, and environmental connections. I’m not sure it’s all that different from my other writing! Fewer footnotes, I suppose.

But it’s fun to have a new creative outlet and to practice something creative on an almost-daily basis. I hope, over time, try to publish some more of these many poems, or maybe new ones, or maybe I’ll figure out a new way to cross-involve my critical and poetic voices.

Thanks to Raya Morrison, the editor of Blood & Bourbon, and to the members of the Sonnet Corona group on Facebook, especially Shannon Garner , Art Zilleruelo, and Maureen Daniels, for the encouragement.

The three poems in the current issue of Blood & Bourbon are “Of Thirteen Minds,” about swimming past a flght of cormorants sunning themselves on Whale Rock last summer; “Sea Music,” about an especially noisy corner of the surf in Negril, Jamaica; and “Soiled Poem,” which is mostly about the garden and my back yard. Here’s a image of the last one. You should buy a copy of the issue!