Coffee Sips 2

Coffee Sips 2

10/24/2001

This next poem was written after I'd finished reading a book called "Ahab's Wife". It's a take on Moby Dick - that seminal book of America. Reading Moby Dick is supposed to be a defining moment in any Lit student's life and dealing with the after effects takes a lifetime. So here was an attempt to think about America, coffee and haikus: Prologue (moby dick* was often sighted off the coast of Japan sailing to get him wasn't just a matter of coming off the west coast of America cause ships were based in Nantucket, on the east coast. Effectively, you had to get "around" the Americas before you had a chance at moby dick. ) By what means has America crossed (not upon whaler but commerce) itself and ended up this side of the Pacific? place cleverly named after the Puritan who rode as number 2 aboard Pequod's ill fated spars. Leaving Mary: 'Sconset**, poor, alone. No traces here of puritanical insistence "come choose what you want." First mate downs coffee neat : add anything, it's sin. I drink, she drinks; we Drinking the dregs of commerce mixed up in myth: Aye! Ahab^ drinks to that! *-name of the white whale and book - meant to be allusive in all senses **-off Nantucket on the eastern seaboard of the US ^-the faustian "hero" of Moby Dick whose ambition is to kill the white whale Form has a place in poetry. This one tries out the haiku in each stanza. While haiku is merely syllabic and supposed to be self-contained, writing haiku stanzas doesn't force you to make the revelation by the third line and you can stretch it off a little. If heirachy in discovery is important, then the haiku stanza might work with its odd numbered line form rather than the clear call and reponse of the couplet or other interlocking forms. In terms of what the poem says, significant background knowledge is required to understanding the poem. Moby Dick is required, a sense of the US's post WW II interest in the vaibility of Japan (therefore the haiku form) and SEA as a capitalist bastion against communism also helps.