Deckhands and Shipwrecks, Poetry and Tragedy
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The Shipwreck Cycle
Over the past few years, several poems of Morgan’s Shipwreck Cycle have appeared in poetry journals. Rice is working with 14 of them for the musical adaptation. I’ll list the poems below, and link to the ones that you can read online. Others can be found here, and I have added a few more at the end of this post. The entire cycle of poems is currently under contract for publication.
- “Chicora, 1895” (see below)
- “Deckhand: Scent Theory”
- “Pewabic, 1865”
- “Phoenix, 1847” (see below)
- “Myron, 1919”
- “Francisco Morazan, 1960“
- “J. Barber, 1871”
- “Waldo, 1913” (see below)
- “St. Lawrence, 1878”
- “Deckhand: Color Theory”
- “Rouse Simmons, 1912“
- “Omar D. Conger, 1922“
- “Deckhand: Dream Theory”
- “Epilogue [Nameless]”
The Commissioner, Lake Michigan. Photo by K. Bigger
Rice’s rendering of “Rouse Simmons, 1912” has already debuted musically, as the first part of his collaboration with Morgan, which is part of the Voicing Poetry project at Michigan State University. A schooner, the Rouse Simmons was known as “The Christmas Tree Ship,” and its sinking took with it 17 sailors and 5,000 Christmas trees bound for Chicago. Morgan’s poem and Rice’s song invite us to imagine the tragedy by telling the story around it, rather than telling the story itself.
I was fortunate to be able to sit down with Morgan and Rice for a conversation about their work and their collaboration, as well as a few thoughts about turning these historical mishaps and disasters into meaningful, and perhaps tragic works.
Murder Ballad Monday interview with Cindy Hunter Morgan and Philip Rice
MBM: Cindy, what drew you to these shipwreck stories as subjects for your work?
Cindy Hunter Morgan (CHM): I grew up in Michigan, camping along all of our lakes, swimming in all of our lakes. My grandma grew up in Oceana County, near Lake Michigan. Her dad was a farmer, who also had a wood lot near the farm. Although the farm changed hands, the woods stayed in the family. We have forty acres along a creek not far from Lake Michigan, and we used to camp there every summer when I was a kid.
Every time we camped, we went to the lake, and every time we went, I looked for the skeleton of a shipwreck just off shore. Every summer it was always there. The mystery of that shipwreck just kept deepening. I don’t know what wreck it was, and I might not ever know. That’s OK. I kind of like not knowing. But that wreck – that mysterious shape – is part of my childhood memories.
Driftwood/wreckage. Photo by Cindy Hunter Morgan
My great-grandfather, whose land this was, sailed the Great Lakes on a U.S. Corps of Engineers tug in the 1920s to send my grandmother to college. Well, he sailed the lakes to pay for her education, and also probably because he had always wanted to sail them. I would have loved to have included a poem about that tug in this collection, but it really doesn’t fit. His tug was scuttled in Florida to form a reef, which was a far less poetic end.
The history of this fascination is part of why and how I came to this project.
MBM: How did you find the individual stories?
CHM: I read and read and read. A lot of the books about this history are either too dry or too simplistically dramatic, but every now and then I’d find something fascinating. With the exception of the “Deckhand” poems, the poems all contain a nugget of historical accuracy. After that moment of historical accuracy, however, they are fully imagined. This is dangerous, right, to get your history from a poet? You can see the risk there.
Grand Traverse Lighthouse. Photo by K. Bigger
The imagination is important for a lot of reasons. There are generally only a few causes of shipwrecks: a collision, a fire, a storm, or an explosion. The initiating action is pretty limited, so the imaginative element is what keeps these stories alive. It’s a way into another life through empathy and imagination.
So … the poems begin or include moments of historical accuracy and then move into imagination. It’s there in the imaginative moves that I really explored these wrecks. Tony Hoagland said one of the powers of poetry is to locate and assert value. That’s what we do with history as well.