Preface to I Was a Shipwreck Scholar

I am a poet of place. 

My place is Cape Cod, the flexed arm of Massachusetts that curls 65 miles north into the Atlantic Ocean. This glacially sculpted, low-lying, sandy peninsula is characterized by outwash plains, dunes, and cliffs. Its waters are ocean, bays, and kettle ponds. Its materials are sand and gravel.

Although geologically young, humans – both Wampanoags and white – have continuously lived here longer than most other parts of the country. Although the land is dynamic and fragile, the people inhabiting it for centuries are change resistant and hardy. My identity and sensibility are intertwined with the living symbiosis of the physical, historical, social, and familial realities of this place. Wind, tide, and salt are constantly at work on the coastline and on me. 

I am drawn to the New England Realist tradition that contemplates moral and physical geography, history, inheritance, and labor with emotional gravity and elevated plain speech. Here in me are Robert Frost, Donald Hall, Galway Kinnell, and Richard Wilbur. I am drinking from and swimming in their waters.

This collection studies the forces that shape a life: time, nature, human connection. Time warps memory; memory distorts time. The natural world, especially the sea and what is at its edges, becomes the sublime when we immerse in it. Connection, especially with family, finds meaning as forcefully through loss as it does through love. Weightlessness takes meaning from the experience of bearing great weight.

It also explores the power of loss and the restorative effects of coping and hoping when faced with it. It gives the same embrace to impermanence and isolation as it does to immovable truths and human kinship. The belief is that the loss of time, nature, and love induces transformation fueled by hope, a renewable energy. Hope is a story set in the future in which we’re a character, safe and sound. 

Stories also provide the rationale for what was. As the New Yorker’s Adam Gopnick observed: 

We have merely a self-deluding, ‘narrating self,’ one that recites obviously tendentious stories, shaped by our evolutionary history to help us cope with life […] We are made up of stories – and we make them up. 

Oliver Sacks, too, wrote about his hit-and-miss efforts to make meaning out of the swirl of things. In a private letter to his friend, the philosopher Hugh Moorhead, he describes how his cycle of reckoning with the elusiveness of meaning is driven by loss and wonder. His vast array of writing – his storytelling – embodies this philopsophy:

I do not, at least consciously, have a steady sense of life’s meaning. I keep losing it, and having to re-achieve it, again and again. I can only re-achieve – or remember – it when I am inspired by things or events or people, when I get a sense of the immense intricacy and mystery, but also the deep ordering positivity, of Nature and History […] I do not believe in, never have believed in, any transcendental spirit above Nature; but there is a spirit in Nature, a cosmogenic spirit, which commands my respect and love; and it is this, perhaps most deeply, which serves to explain life, give it meaning.

This collection reflects Sacks’ notion of uncertainty wrapped in certainty, or vice versa, in its three sections – loss, reckoning, and wonder. One poem is not reliant on the ones that proceed it. Each should stand on its own. However, there is a thematic progression, or movement, that follows an arc from beginning to end: what happens to us, how we come to terms with it, and the marvels that help us rise above all of it.

Why poetry? Because, for me, it’s the literary form best suited to sending flares of beauty, however unrefined or simple they are. There is beauty in the finding of it during the writing process; also in the end state when it is revealed. 

***

Poets, critics, and scholars have been writing about poetry’s demise since the middle of the 19th century. Industrialization, realism, secularization, and societal fragmentation assailed it during that century and into the next. Then mass media and the dominance of the novel threatened to quash it. Academic elitism made it abstract and confined it to universities and salons. By the turn of this century, it had become a subculture disconnected from mainstream readership and public discourse. 

Today, reports of its decline continue. Over the past twenty-five years, and especially in the last ten, many have documented the slow, steady dissipation of formal or “literary” poetry from school and university curricula, as well as from the non-digital public domain. Small poetry presses, long a vessel for the art, have disappeared under the pressure of unsustainable economics, distributor collapse, and reduced public grant support. It is a form of exclusion, be it intentional or unintentional. With the vanishing forums go the mediating voices, the teachers, the standard bearers. 

However, and meanwhile, evidence of a recovery in – or because of – the digital domain is abundant. Its virtual presence has expanded exponentially; the internet has democratized the art. Everyone can find or create a platform to be, or appear as, a poet. The inclusion of voices, which is a good and necessary thing, enabled by the low-to-no bar of self-publishing and the internet’s open borders and land grab has enlarged the environment in which poetry exists. 

So, between decline and recovery we can see where poetry is and is not living. From a topographical perspective, it looks like habitat change – with both losses and gains affecting the form itself. 

Increasingly, the chosen form is the formless or, rather, the form is the performative space in which the performer often sets the rules. Also, so much written today is shaped to look like a poem on the page, but under quick examination is prose chopped up into lines and stanzas to appear like a poem, without many of the qualities that earn it that label. 

I will stop here and will not wade into the century-old debate about what is versus what is not poetry. I will put a toe in, though: some of the forces shaping poetry today have thrown my own views into relief – made clear why it interests me as a form over other literary genres. It is the formal qualities that inspire me, including when choosing to ignore them.

What happens when intentionally working with the spatial, visual, audial, and temporal attributes of form? When the templates of its formal history and traditions, like rhyme and meter, inform the work? The challenge presented by poetry’s relative constraints draws me in. Poetry thrives in small spaces on a page and is thin on a bookshelf; much is left to wide margins and thick novels. The eye can take it in on the page, see its shape. It is meant for the ear’s brief attention, which can hear it like a song for a few minutes while listening for patterns and expecting an end. For the reader, its temporal footprint is small. Much of its power can come from ellipsis, from what is not written, which is an ultimate form of constraint.

This condition of brevity in an effective poem causes an inversion: from single lines it expands us geometrically. Often the expansion starts with a surprise, the spark of which can come from fire-striking one word against another, or from connecting two unexpected lines to create the hum of a current. This is a unique effect of poetry: much from little. Also, the better poetry is not fleeting. The poet wrote it to last, and it lasts, like a pilot light, in the reader.

The intent is not to attempt a unique perspective. Others have expounded on these qualities at far greater length and to great effect. Nor is it to bemoan change, quiet voices, or quash experimentation. The yin and yan of whatever forces are affecting poetry in any given era are both essential and constant. The intent is to cast these qualities in relief against the intensely and purposely momentary structure and nature of internet media, which is still a relatively new phenomenon. It is literally designed not to last. It rewards ephemera. In the background, it is training our brains to quickly dispense with what’s now for what’s next. Every 3 to 20 seconds. Ephemera is the reward. Adapt to habitat change or vanish. Both have costs.

East Orleans, MA