Sailing without Ahab

Ecopoetic Travels

Steve Mentz

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781531506322
  9781531506315
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781531506339
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Journey through uncharted literary waters and explore Melville's epic in bold new light

Come sail with I.

We're not taking the same trip, though you might recognize the familiar course. This time, the Pequod's American voyage steers its course across the curvature of the Word Ocean without anyone at the helm. We are leaving one man and his madness on shore. Our ship overflows with glorious plurality—multiracial, visionary, queer, conflicted, polyphonic, playful, violent. But on this voyage something is different. Today we sail headless without any Captain. Instead of binding ourselves to the dismasted tyrant's rage, the ship's crew seeks only what we will find: currents teeming with life, a blue-watered alien globe, toothy cetacean smiles from vasty deeps. Treasures await those who sail without.

This cycle of one hundred thirty-eight poems—one for each chapter in Moby-Dick, plus the Etymology, Extracts, and Epilogue—launches into oceanic chaos without the stabilizing mad focus of the Nantucket captain. Guided by waywardness and curiosity, these poems seek an alien ecopoetics of marine depths, the refraction of light, the taste of salt on skin. Directionless, these poems reach out to touch oceanic expanse and depth. It's not an easy voyage, and not a certain one. It lures you forward. It has fixed its barbed hook in I.

Sailing without means relinquishing goals, sleeping at the masthead, forgetting obsessions. I welcome you to trace wayward ways through these poems. Read them any way you can—back to front, at random, sideways, following the obscure promptings of your heart. It's the turning that matters. It's a blue wonder world that beckons.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Etymology (Supplied by a late consumptive Professor)
• Sailing Without
• Headless Travels
• Loomings
• Out of Place
• Fishing
• Change
• Vision
• The Street
• The Chapel
• The Pulpit
• Storm and Wreck
• A Bosom Friend
• Ideas
• Mapping Oceans
• Houses in Houses
• Nantucket
• Chowder
• Who’s on the Ship?
• Intermittent Fasting
• Sea Living
• The Prophet
• Tomorrow!
• Going Aboard
• Merry Christmas
• The Lee Shore
• The Encounter
• Oil
• Politics
• Knights and Squires
• […]
• A Scene on the Quarterdeck
• No Pipe
• Queen Mab
• No Book
• Lines of Succession
• Dinner
• The Mast-Head
• A Spring Rose
• Sunset
• Dusk
• First Night Watch
• Forecastle—Midnight
• Moby-Dick
• Great White Evil God
• Devils Who Never Sleep
• The Chart
• The Kind of Harpoon I. Throws
• Not Seasick
• Weavers
• The First Lowering
• Testament
• Fedallah
• The Spirit-Spout
• The P. Does Not Meet the Albatross
• How to Speak Whale
• The Town Ho’s Story
• Monstrous Pictures of Whales
• Cetacean Errors
• Whale Rock
• Blue Dreams
• Squid
• The Line
• Stubb Kills a Whale
• Authorities
• Wooden Bodies
• Eating Whale
• Cannibal Old Me
• Two Shark Stories
• Whales and Other Humans
• In the Whalelight
• Whalefall
• The Whale’s Head
• No Tail on the Jeroboam
• The Monkey-rope
• Brothers in Arms
• The Sperm Whale’s Head
• The Right Whale’s Head
• I.’s Blue
• Let the Oil Out!
• Birthing Tash
• Read It If You Can
• A Hill of Snow
• The P. Meets the V.
• The Honor and Glory of Whaling
• Jonah Historically Regarded
• Just a Little Farther
• How We Breathe
• The Tail
• The Grand Armada
• A Love Story
• Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish
• Heads or Tails
• The P. Meets the Rose Bud
• Ambergris
• The Castaway
• A Squeeze of the Hand
• The Cassock
• The State of the Ship
• The Lamp
• The Search
• No Doubloon
• The P. Meets the Samuel Enderby of London
• The Next Voyage
• Inside the Skeleton
• Measurements of the Whale’s Skeleton
• The Fossil Whale
• Save the Whales!
• Glass Foot
• The Carpenter
• What the Carpenter Says
• Starbuck in the Cabin
• Q. in His Coffin
• The Pacific
• The Blacksmith
• Making a Harpoon
• Calenture
• The P. Meets the Bachelor
• The Dying Whale
• When It’s Almost Possible To See
• The Quadrant
• Swimmer in Storm
• The Deck Towards the End of the First Night Watch
• Midnight—The Forecastle Bulwarks
• Midnight, Aloft—Thunder and Lightning
• Errors in a Book
• At Sea
• The Log and Line
• The Life-Buoy
• Coffins
• The P. Meets the Rachel
• Pip in the Cabin
• No Hat
• The P. Meets the Delight
• The Symphony
• The Chase—First Day
• The Chase—Second Day
• The Chase—Third Day
• Epilogue
• A Critical Postscript: Cyborgs, Whalemen, and Other Voyagers in Moby-Dick
• Acknowledgments