 |
| Steven Durkee |
Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
Hidden
Treasures
found
poetry
Provincetown
Arts Press
Provincetown,
MA
ISBN:
0-094-854-65-6
119
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Up
from the bottomless buzz of swirling current and sea-foam, a whale’s
fluke breaks the surface of our consciousness and reaches toward some
exultant and forbidden heaven, and, dammit, it changes everything.
Stephen Durkee, in his posthumous book, Moby-Dick Hidden Treasures,
trawls through Melville’s metaphysical masterpiece seeking,
finding, and resetting poems of high caliber and higher interest. The
separation of these lines from their original prosaic context
counterintuitively enriches them with new powers of artistic
independence (such as slow-walking both images and lyric) and a
capacity for creative, far-flung allusions. Who knew?
As
one who has confidently (read smugly) denied the very existence of
the “found poetry” genre, never mind its validity, Durkee’s
book has been an unsettling enlightenment. Could this be the
exception which proves the rule? Not bloody likely.
Early
in this collection the poem November in My Soul appears. It details
pent up male aggression and its antidote, at least for seamen.
Adventure, after all, is a survival mechanism, built into mankind
with good reason. Of course the downside must be death for some.
Consider Melville’s reset words as spoken by his protagonist,
Ishmael,
whenever
I find my self involuntary
pausing
before coffin warehouses,
and
bringing up the rear
of
every funeral I meet;
and
especially whenever my hypos
get
such an upper hand of me,
that
it requires a strong moral principle
to
prevent me from deliberately
stepping
in to the street,
and
methodically knocking
people’s
hats off---
then,
I account it high time
to
go to sea as soon as I can.
Durkee’s
discoveries, like the selection above, besides their discrete poetic
offerings, often do double duty as commentaries on the densely packed
novel itself. It was in this same first chapter of Moby Dick that
Ishmael lamented his farcical circumstances in comparison to other
worldly happenings of high tragedy including a “Bloody Battle in
Afghanistan” (not much has changed since). In its totality, the
reset poetry deepens this farce with an added, understated irony on
the nature of free will.
Remember
Philip Larkin’s lines in his poem, This Be the Verse, “Man hands
on misery to man./ It deepens like a coastal shelf.” Melville
expresses that same pessimism, and in much the same way. I would
never have connected the two without reading Moby-Dick Hidden
Treasures. Here are Melville’s pointed words, from a poem Durkee
titles Able Bodied Seamen,
however
they may thump
and
punch me about,
I
have the satisfaction
of
knowing that it is alright;
That
everybody else is
one
way or other
served
in much the same way—
either
in a physical or metaphysical point of view, that is;
and
so the universal thump
is
passed around
No
simple description of olfactory erotica suffices in Durkee’s
selection entitled They Bloom Like Their Own Roses. After praising
New Bedford’s beauteous women, Melville turns the heat up a notch
describing the charm of Salem’s females, all the more effective
because of the cultural irony embedded in the last line. The poetry
speaks directly,
…in
Salem,
where
they tell me the young girls
breathe
such musk,
their
sailor sweethearts
smell
them miles off shore,
as
though they were drawing nigh
the
odorous Moluccas
instead
of the Puritanic sands.
In
Beneath the Green Grass, Melville seems to create a limbo for seamen
whose remains, lost at sea, never can give comfort to family and
friends. To many civilizations funeral rites are essential.
Agamemnon’s Greeks could not enter Hades without them. Even that
high king could not deprive his traitorous warrior Ajax from
receiving them. Grave-less bodies beg too many questions, leaving
only uncertainty. Speaking of the families left behind, Durkee
concludes the selection this way,
ye
know not the desolation
that
broods in bosoms like these.
What
bitter blanks in those
black-bordered
marbles
which
cover no ashes!
What
despair in those
immovable
inscriptions!
What
deadly voids and unbidden
infidelities
in the lines
that
seem to gnaw upon all Faith,
and
refuse resurrections
to
the beings who have placelessly
perished
without a grave.
Melville
ditches the anthropomorphic God in favor of a Deity with the likeness
of a sperm whale, the whale having but few noticeable features such
as noses, ears, or facial expressions. His seagoing god is beyond our
mortal comprehension. Size and generality define the divine. Durkee
sets the poem entitled You Feel the Deity to convey Melville’s
concept,
But
in the great Sperm Whale,
this
high and mighty god-like
dignity
inherent in the brow
is
so immensely amplified
that
gazing on it, in that full front view,
you
feel the Deity and the dread powers
more
forcibly then in beholding
any
other object in living nature.
Separated
from their relentless predator, man, Melville portrays whales with
sympathy and awe, even associating their actions with monotheistic
Zoroastrianism. The whales, so different from man in visage and
habitat, appear quite like their blasphemous adversary in many other
ways. In Crimsoned Sky and Sea the poet explains,
I
once saw a large herd of whales in the east,
all
heading toward the sun,
and
for a moment vibrating
in
concert with peaked flukes.
As
it seemed to me at the time,
such
a grand embodiment of adoration
of
the gods was never beheld,
even
in Persia, the home of the fire worshippers.
As
Ptolemy Philopater testified
Of
the African elephant, I testified of the whale,
Pronouncing
him the most devout of all beings.
Durkee,
born and brought up in Salem, Massachusetts and a descendant of a
famous sea captain, knew his subject well. More importantly, his muse
and Melville’s seem to have got along just grandly. Durkee’s
value-added settings themselves consistently inspire with verve and
artistic majesty. Additionally, converting “found poetry”
doubters like myself is not an easy chore. For that victory I
especially congratulate him. Durkee’s manuscript was on the way to
the printer when he died.
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