Steve Mentz

THE BOOKFISH

THALASSOLOGY, SHAKESPEARE, AND SWIMMING

  • Home
  • Steve Mentz
  • Humanities Commons
  • Public Writing
  • The sea! the sea!
  • The Bookfish
  • St. Johns

Swimmer Poetics

September 18, 2012 by Steve Mentz Leave a Comment

Here’s the opening couple paragraphs of my ecology piece for O-Zone, which thinks eco-literary thoughts while narrating the Great Chesapeake Bay race last June.

Into the warm salt water splashed the six hundred. Not all of us knew we were diving into a theoretical paradigm.

 

We crowded up to the water’s edge like figures in a Robert Frost poem. Or whale-killing philosophers in Battery Park. We were swimmers, come to Chesapeake Bay in June 2012 to race four-point-four miles from western to eastern shore. Covering that distance in the water carves out a nice block of time, a discrete chronology to feel fluid dislocation on an intimate level. I wasn’t there to win. I wanted to think some things through.

 

My hope, then and now, is that swimming can model or inspire a dynamic ecological poetics for our age of crisis. The prolonged experience of immersion, its difficulties and pleasures, parallels how we must learn to live today. Being in the water forces the physical realities of this terraqueous globe onto your skin, adding urgency to the need to move beyond comforting green eco-visions.  The blue world ocean, as literary culture has long taught us, is unstable, dynamic, and inhospitable. But the gray-green silty waters of Chesapeake Bay proved survivable, even pleasurable. Dare I say philosophical?

Filed Under: Blue Humanities, Swimming

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About Steve

Steve Mentz
Professor of English
St. John’s University
Read Bio

Twitter Feed

Steve Mentz Follow

Shakespearean. Ecocritic. Swimmer. New book Ocean #objectsobjects Professor at St. John's in NYC. #bluehumanities #pluralizetheanthropocene

stevermentz
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
21h

I bought my ticket to this play a day before @SAAupdates secured this discount - but you should take advantage of it now!

Reply on Twitter 1638264709878099970 Retweet on Twitter 1638264709878099970 Like on Twitter 1638264709878099970 3 Twitter 1638264709878099970
stevermentz Steve Mentz @stevermentz ·
17 Mar

So great to see this book out in the world! I’ve got a shipwreck piece in it, alongside great stuff by Graham Harman @wracksandruins @peterbcampbell & many others!

Reply on Twitter 1636731402031976448 Retweet on Twitter 1636731402031976448 7 Like on Twitter 1636731402031976448 21 Twitter 1636731402031976448
Load More

Pages

  • #shax2022 s31: Rethinking the Early Modern Literary Caribbbean
  • OCEAN Publicity
  • #SAA 2020: Watery Thinking
  • Creating Nature: May 2019 at the Folger
  • Audio and Video Recordings
  • Oceanic New York
  • Public Writing
  • Published Work
  • #pluralizetheanthropocene

Recent Posts

  • Endgame at Irish Rep (NYC)
  • Responses to the NYer’s Doomcast
  • Water in the Desert
  • F22 at the Landhaus!
  • On Paradox by Elizabeth Anker

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in