Peter Reading's Cetacean

Peter Reading’s “Cetacean”

Poet Peter Reading was born on 27 July 1946 in Liverpool, England.

He worked as a school teacher in Liverpool (1967-8) and at Liverpool College of Art where he taught Art History (1968-70). He was Writer in Residence at Sunderland Polytechnic (1981-3) and he won a Cholmondeley Award in 1978. His collection Diplopic (1983) won the inaugural Dylan Thomas Award. Stet (1986) won the Whitbread Poetry Award and he was awarded the Lannan Award for Poetry in 1990 and again in 2004. In 1997 he held the Creative Writing Fellowship at the University of East Anglia. The collection Marfan (2000) was inspired by his tenure as Lannan Foundation Writer in Residence in Marfa, Texas, in 1999.

Peter Reading was a highly original poet - his style was innovative and experimental, while his blunt outspoken tone and ‘grotty’ subject matter proved controversial.

He was also incredibly prolific - from the mid-1970s, he produced almost one volume per year. His deeply compassionate and humanistic concern for the suffering of individuals and the decline of modern society (as he saw it) was expressed in his poetry with fiery and passionate outrage, black humour and irony. He was not afraid to offer candid, grotesque and shocking images of the worst recesses of society, and his outraged concern for human suffering was combined with despair at humankind’s capacity for self-destruction.

Peter Reading died in November 2011.

https://literature.britishcouncil.org/writer/peter-reading

Cetacean 

Noun. a marine mammal of the order Cetacea ; a whale, dolphin, or porpoise.

The Farallon Islands, or Farallones (from the Spanish farallón meaning "pillar" or "sea cliff"), are a group of islands and sea stacks in the Gulf of the Farallones, off the coast of San Francisco, California, United States. The islands are also sometimes referred to by mariners as the "Devil's Teeth Islands," in reference to the many treacherous underwater shoals in their vicinity.^[2] The islands lie 30 miles (48 km) outside the Golden Gate Bridge.

Let’s read through the poem step by step, but all the while imagining what it would be like to be on that boat with the speaker.

Note the following points:

First stanza reads as a list, as a breathless accumulation of journal-entry-style details: Fisherman’s Warf, Sunday, early, our vessel, bow to stern etc.

Second stanza goes straight into similar journal-style listing of facts. The speaker is knowledgeable – speaking directly to us, accepting we will understand and visualize the details of marine biology.

The difference in pronoun use between the two stanzas: “our” and “we” in stanza one and “they” in stanza two. As each stanza is 3 lines and contains similar information, man and beast are now equal.

Speaker’s use of simile (“like” or “as”) but more for practical means than for metaphor imagery: “grey as slate,” and “blows were as straight and slim as upright columns.”

There is no rhyming structure – the poem is written in free verse – and the use of enjambment means that the details given spill from one line onto the next, giving a breathless feeling. Equally, notice though, each stanza finishes on a full-stop/period which shows a certain control – as if the speaker is pausing to think between each stanza. Equally, the first line of stanza 3 also contains an end-stop, showing the speaker pauses after the heads of the whales break the surface.

Concrete Poetry : poetry in which the meaning or effect is conveyed partly or wholly by visual means, using patterns of words or letters and other typographical devices.

Look at the poem visually. From stanza 4, Reading will use devices of concrete poetry. Consider the lines:

            Expanse of their backs hove into our view – about twenty feet longer

                 Than the vessel herself.

Smile. The first line could be the whale which is so much longer than the second line, the boat.

Also, the word/verb choice of “hove” is unusual as we don’t normally conjugate the nautical term “heave” into “hove.” The uniqueness of this word choice emphasizes the uniqueness of the image of the whale pulling itself up into the air – and importantly pulling themselves into the view of the spectators.

The use of the dash – also creates a breathlessness, as if the speaker is awed by the full size of the beast:

 A Blue Whale swimming beside a 75ft boat (reddit.com)

Now the poem changes form, just as the whales form a vertical, head-down shape in the water. The visual effect isn’t exactly the same on the page but – still – we have an inversion in the presentation of the words on the page. In the last three stanzas I would argue that the words slide to the right-hand side of the page (stanza5), before coming somewhat back into the middle (stanza 6), before almost coming back to the original placement (stanza 7). Here reading is clearly breaking with traditional poetry layout and I would offer that that is because he wants us to share in the experience of seeing the whale tilt and descend, and of beauty happening.

Language choice. I appreciate that Reading doesn’t include overly romantic or metaphoric language to describe the whales. He doesn’t philosophize about the experience or connect it to how he feels about his mother! Instead, he lets the beauty of the moment represent itself. I find beauty in the scientific precision with which he’s chosen his words (bow, stern, 63 feet, shallow angle, mottling, dorsals, broad flat heads, vertical sprays). He is showing his respect for their existence by employing the correct and specific terms we use to capture their existence. He is going as far as straight-forward and direct language will allow him to travel, without personifying the creatures or even giving an emotional-weight/emotional charge to the experience.

If the last six of the seven stanzas concerns the experience of watching the whales rise out of and dive into the water (twice), it is worth noting that the first and last line of that group ends with the words: “at a shallow angle.” His words are caught, geometrically, within the rising and falling angles of their movement. There is a beauty in such a precision and so, again, we again share in the experience of watching the whales through our reading of the poem.

He carries us through step-by-step a moment that would only last seconds. He is encouraging us to engage with the visual process. Really reread the last 3 stanzas.. and go through the process of seeing the head going into the water (and so the end of the air being blown into the air), the back with its tiny dorsal fins sliding into the water, and then its back and its tail… then, allow for a pause as the whale swims under water (the time of the switch between stanza 6 and 7) and the relief as they surface, blowing air/flukes… before seeing them dive again.

Note, the repetition of ‘arched backs’ and ‘arched their tail stocks’ and feel the power and the determination in the whales.

And feel the contradictions of the last stanza: “visible” versus “vanished” and “into the deep” versus “shallow angle.” Also, humans normally “slip” into shallow water, while the whale is “slipping into the deep again.” Reading doesn’t draw attention to these contradictions – he definitely doesn’t over-dramatize them – but he does let them exist. And so we are reminded that the whales are beyond our realm of logic… and have a logic, a beauty and a mystery of their own.

In conclusion, I feel that Reading helps us experience this event by mimicking the elegant precision of the whales, by providing us with a visual/audible movement of the text which is unsettling, and by making his language – like the whales - as “grey as slate.”