Lost in the Pacific, by J.D. Isip
What This Poem Means to Me
Intro
Listeners, I’ve always loved the ocean and especially swimming in the ocean. I know there are dangers involved in doing this. Sharks. Jellyfish. Riptides. Nevertheless, I’ve always braved those things for the joy of frolicking with nature.
Or, at least that used to be true.
Then, one day, a few years ago, when I was living in Costa Rica, I went out swimming in the bay of Playa del Coco. It was a sunny morning during the dry season. The sky was clear, and the water was relatively warm and I spent a good half an hour just floating on my back looking up and watching birds. Then I decided it was time to head home and I flipped myself over, put my feet down to start walking towards the shore and immediately felt a stabbing pain in my heel.
The sensation was immediate and searing. I thought maybe I had stepped on a piece of broken glass. Then I thought maybe it was a jellyfish, but I had never seen a jellyfish in the bay. My leg was starting to go numb, and I dragged myself towards shore and up to one of the restaurants on the beach where a waiter I knew came to look at my wound. We sussed out that I had probably been stung by a mantarey.
It turns out the cure for a mantarey sting is just to put hot water on the wound. The waiter brought me a bowl of hot water and as soon as I put my foot in it, the pain went away. As soon as I took my foot out, it came back.
I had no long-lasting damage you could see. I’d like to say that even after that experience I kept going in the water and swimming my little heart out in the ocean, but the truth is, after that, I was afraid of going out too far. I bought water shoes. I tried to think of all the times I had gone swimming without getting hurt. But it didn’t help. After that, I could only stay in the shallow water where I could see where I was stepping.
This is one of those pivotal experiences that change you and the way you see yourself and how you relate to the world.
That’s probably why I resonated so well with this poem by J.D. Isip, from his book, Reluctant Prophets.
Lost in the Pacific I never thought I’d be so tired. Jules, St. Elmo’s Fire Before I was afraid of the ocean, I’d swim in it. No thought of the depth or its many ways of killing me. Once I was young and brave or foolish, kept going away from the voices onshore telling me to stay where it is safe, to stay close to land close to home close enough until it all went silent. Out so far the voices stop, you look around and cannot find your way, what seemed so clear just moments before an impulse kept you moving in any direction than the one you knew. When you pass the shallow waters the bright buoys the rope marking where you should end, you start to feel tired, the seascape a cold, black unknown that goes on forever in all directions, your panic a ripple on the surface that dies out before it reaches back to land. Look up at the sun, catch your breath, listen for the seagulls for the clicking pod of dolphins who somehow don’t terrify you even though they are enormous, could bat you down twenty feet below, could be you’re too tired to care, could be it wasn’t dolphins at all. But then how did you get back? And how can you explain what it was like out there? Why you don’t swim anymore. You’re afraid? You’re wiser? You don’t have to.
Is This A Metaphor for Something Else?
You might ask, reading this poem, is this only about swimming, or is it about something else, bigger than that? Is the Pacific a metaphor for life in general?
In a lot of poems with extended metaphor the speaker of the poem usually says something to let you know they are using a metaphor. Emily Dickinson says “Hope is the thing with feathers.” In Langston Hughes’ poem “Mother to Son” the mother says “Life aint been no crystal stair,” so we know the staircase is a metaphor for life.
In this poem by J.D. Isip, the speaker of the poem never says that the ocean is a metaphor for anything specific. It is very possible that the speaker of the poem is just describing an experience where he went out swimming and possibly went too far. However, I always tell poets in the workshops I facilitate that if they put a story or an object in a poem, they risk making of that object or story a metaphor for something else. Readers might be tempted to think that the ocean in this poem isn’t just the ocean, but also an emblem for all of the unknowns in life, and swimming as a metaphor for all the adventures we have, going into unknown places.
This poem comes from a book, Reluctant Prophets, where the speaker of the poems recounts personal stories of going into the armed forces, discovering that he is gay, making and losing friends, becoming a college professor, and ultimately teaching poetry. In the last section of the book, I get a sense of a person looking back on their life and realizing that they have changed as they have gone through adolesence and become a fifty year old man.
To me this poem is about swimming in the ocean, but it’s also about aging, and about changing over time as a result of our life experiences. Reading the poem with this in mind, the shore represents a place that is safe, a place where things are known. The shallow water, the bright buoys, the ropes, are all things that keep you hemmed in, supposedly safe in those known places. Subsequently, the ocean represents a place or an experience that is less safe, full of things that are unknown.
There are fins which may indicate dolphins, but they could also indicate sharks. Both are actually dangerous. And then there is the ocean itself. It’s cold and it goes on forever. There are no guardrails and no maps or signs of where to go. It’s an utterly foreign location to someone who lives on land.
What the speaker of the poem comes to though, more than fear, is a feeling of fatigue. They start with the line “I never thought I’d be so tired,” from a character, Jules, from Saint Elmo’s fire. The speaker’s main worry seems to be, not the possibility of sharks or unknown dangers in the water, but more a fear of being too tired to care anymore, and too tired to fight off whatever might try to attack him. This, I think, is a result of expending so much energy just to get out into the water that far. Once you’ve gone past the buoys and the ropes, you find you don’t have a lot of fight left in you for going any farther or for battling any extra battles.
Ending with Questions and Possible Answers
One of the things I really enjoy about this poem is that the speaker leaves room for ambiguity about what the ocean is and what his experience in it was like. Instead of trying to explain it or what this experience means, he ends the poems with more questions. “How did I get back?” How do you (I) explain why I don’t go swimming anymore?
Instead of coming to a conclusion that narrows our focus, the speaker gives several options. He’s afraid, or wiser, or just doesn’t have to anymore.
I read the last lines of this poem, again, as being about swimming, but also about facing a lot of the challenges that people tend to face when they are younger. Going away from home and braving unknown experiences. There are usually multiple reasons why people stick to the shore or stay home more when they are older. Sometimes it’s fear, sometimes it’s fatigue. Some people might call that wisdom.
Ultimately though, a big reason is that typically, you don’t need to as much. Theoretically, when you’re younger you need to explore the world to find out who and what you are. This can be exciting, but it can also be exhausting. As you make these discoveries though, you might find that your urge to go out starts to wane. You’ve found what you need to find. So you stay closer to the shore now.
In a world where we tend to celebratete heroes and adventure, this, staying closer to the shore might look like fear. Wisdom, in fact, might look like fear, or like fatigue. But, it could also represent a kind of satisfaction. You don’t go out, because, you don’t feel the need to anymore.
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SEARCHING FOR ART IN A POP CULTURE WORLD with Cynthia Atkins (she/hers)
“Sometimes the little times you don't think are anything while they're happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.” -- Andy Warhol
“We are not just Art for Michelangelo to carve, he can't rewrite the agro of my furied heart-- Lady Gaga
Our Pop Culture is determined by the everyday signs we give each other—the music we listen to, clothes and fashions we wear, the slang we use, greeting rituals, gifts we buy. Pop Culture are those ubiquitous icons that follow us in our lives. Pop Culture can both a blessing and a curse to the finer Art forms, as it can be full of schlock and cheap thrills. But when used selectively as a tool in writing, pop culture can be a playful and aesthetic device to deploy that narrative arc in the work. Because these iconic things in our world are metaphors and symbols for the complexity and dimension of any story or human situation. These iconic talismans can mark history, personal and otherwise, tell us where we were and what time period and what political climate?—all cues and important references the writer plants seeds for the reader. We all bring a context, and Pop Culture to the narrative, and allows us to make associations, and useful ‘mind tags.’ Blurring the lines of Art and artifice, we will aim for the finer craft and aesthetics--with an eye towards image, metaphor, tone and craft.
Imagining New Narratives: Writing Ekphrastic Poetry
Ekphrasis is a word many poets are familiar with—from the Greek, “to speak out”—
it has become synonymous with “the art of describing art”.
While ekphrastic poetry is often defined as the writing of poetry about works of visual art, the tradition is truly focused on the close observation of objects and experiences, observation which connects with writing about the world, the environment, and the self. This makes ekphrastic poetry a beautiful venue for deepening one’s relationship to art.
What do you see? What is absent? Where is the self in the image? Where is the not-self? Writing from art can be a challenge in seeing, sensing, and feeling into the image—not only what was intended, but what is there.
Join poet Meghan Sterling, author of These Few Seeds (Terrapin Books) and View from a Borrowed Field (Winner of the Paul Nemser Poetry Prize) for a workshop on writing ekphrastic poetry to expand your poetic toolbox—a world of discovery lies inside responding to the image.