Abstract

In his 2005 essay “Respecting the Chasm,” American poet Joe Wenderoth ascribes a sort of holy status to the experience of spatial confusion: “I write poems from day-dream, which is the state or mood that obliterates the kind of sense that registers specific locale. Day-dream space is illocal, to use a Dickinsonian term—it is wherein my ordinary sense of where I am is no longer operative.” My chapter, “Confusion At Sea,” will elaborate upon Wenderoth’s poetics of reverie (and the Dickinsonian sensibility that informs it), and ask specifically what role the poetic image plays in the dislocations that characterize poetic activity and feeling. I will propose, though, that we not abstract “image” from the more theatrical and materially energetic concept of scene. Here, having turned lyric inquiry into a mode of dramaturgy, I will focus on one of the wilder scenic transformations that underpins the production of poetic space—namely, the foregrounding of backgrounds, or the rushing into prominence of previously ambient elements of the environment. My chapter will then turn to water (!) and argue that no ocean has ever fully settled into a backdrop. Though we might identify a restlessness in all backdrops (and, indeed, many theories of media treat the instability of backgrounds as axiomatic), I will argue that with oceans this is exceptionally the case. I will illustrate with readings of fragments of works by Henri Michaux (who figures forth the oceanic sublime in the register of the ridiculous), Katsushika Hokusai (whose oceans tap the power of a less deranged wit), and Gustave Courbet (who tempers oceanic foregrounding along rhythmic shores).