Category Archives: Literature

Shark Poems & Literary References

Day 45: 8/9/13: A Very Brief History of Shark Gods

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I wonder if the 2010 Roger Corman-produced mashup Sharktopus had its  roots in a Fijian myth? (Trivia: Long before he produced Sharktopus, Corman made She Gods of Shark Reef.)

In the ancient story, Dakuwaqa, a shapeshifter and sometime shark patrols the islands hassling the innocent creatures of the reef and generally being a jerk. The Octopus God restores harmony to Fiji by wrapping  Dakuwaqa in a deadly tentacle hug until the shark  god agrees to not only protect the underwater creatures, but to guard Fiji’s divers and shark feeders as well.

1949’s Omoo-Omoo the Shark God, involves a ship captain who’s cursed when he steals the sacred pearl eyes from a shark god idol. Omoo-Omoo looks like one of those allegedly scary or cool movies that aired on Channel 56 and so vexed me as a child. I’d wait and wait for the monster promised in the title, only to find out its scenes had been mostly cut and the movie really consisted of two hours of ponderous dialogue between a buxom female scientist and an army captain who refused to take her seriously.

Today, I started thinking, as I do each time September rolls around, about a world beyond teaching. I am so excited about volunteering with Shark Angels. I started making a list of things I could do to help sharks. Then In a moment of synchronicity, just as I was wondering how I could I get started in non-profit work, an ad came on the radio for Antioch’s Masters Program in Nonprofit Management.

Maybe the shark gods are sending me a message.

Day 42: 8/06/2013: Sharks’ Teeth by Kay Ryan

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Everything contains some

silence. Noise gets

its zest from the

small shark’s-tooth

shaped fragments

of rest angled

in it. An hour

of city holds maybe

a minute of these

remnants of a time

when silence reigned

compact and dangerous

as a shark. Sometimes

a bit of tail

or fin can still

be sensed in parks.

Day 41 8/5/13: Poems for Shark Week: Beach Walk by Henri Cole

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I found a baby shark on the beach.

Seagulls had eaten his eyes.  His throat was bleeding.

Lying on shell and sand, he looked smaller than he was.

The ocean had scraped his insides clean.

When I poked his stomach, darkness rose up in him,

like black water.  Later, I saw a boy,

aroused and elated, beckoning from a dune.

Like me, he was alone.  Something tumbled between us—

not quite emotion.  I could see the pink

interior flesh of his eyes.  “I got lost.  Where am I?”

he asked, like a debt owed to death.

I was pressing my face to its spear-hafts.

We fall, we fell, we are falling.  Nothing mitigates it.

The dark embryo bares its teeth and we move on.

Day 35: 7/30/2013: God the Hunter

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I have a cold, so between guzzling ginger ale, filling out a volunteer form for Sea Shepherd and feeling mildly sorry for myself, I’ve been contemplating Mary Oliver’s vision of God in her mysterious and powerful poem “The Shark” (see whole poem below this entry).

A lot of literature that explores animal consciousness reckons with the basic and inevitable idea of speech/speechlessness and power/powerlessness. But Oliver does something really interesting with this idea:

“speech, that makes all the difference, we like to say.

And I say: in the wilderness of our wit

we will all cry out last words—heave and spit them

into the shattering universe someday, to someone.

Whoever He is, count on it: He won’t answer.”

God, like the shark hunter is lost in his work. But this total absorption isn’t transcendent oneness, but abandonment, loss:

“The inventor is like the hunter—each

in the crease and spasm of the thing about to be done

is lost in his work. All else is peripheral,

remote, unfelt. The connections have broken.”

There is so much more to say about this poem than my feeble stuffed up consciousness can muster at the moment. Oliver’s makes such a bold and striking connection far more unsettling than her work normally is. I don’t mean to suggest she’s usually a light, happy-nature-lady poet at all, but this one leaves me in a place without the comfort of easy answers or associations. That’s good. I keep  seeing an “old man in the sky” style God leaving his creation spinning like a globe, how great whites always felt like ancient displaced Gods to me,  and the “God” that the hunter becomes for that brief triumphant moment when he removes the fish from its world of water, drowns him in the air.

“The Shark” By Mary Oliver

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The Shark

 The domed head rose above the water, white

as a spill of milk. It had taken the hook. It swirled,

and all they could see then was the grinding

and breaking of water, its thrashing, the teeth

in the grin and grotto of its impossible mouth.

The line they refused to cut ran down like a birth cord

into the packed and strategic muscles.

The sun shone.

It was not a large boat. The beast plunged

with all it had caught onto, deep

under the green waves—a white

retching thing, it turned

toward the open sea. And it was hours before

they came home, hauling their bloody prize,

well-gaffed. A hundred gulls followed,

picking at the red streams,

as it sang its death song of vomit and bubbles,

as the blood ran from its mouth

that had no speech to rail against this matter—j

speech, that gives us all there may be of the future—

speech, that makes all the difference, we like to say.

And I say: in the wilderness of our wit

we will all cry out last words—heave and spit them

into the shattering universe someday, to someone.

Whoever He is, count on it: He won’t answer.

The inventor is like the hunter—each

in the crease and spasm of the thing about to be done

is lost in his work. All else is peripheral,

remote, unfelt. The connections have broken.

Consider the evening:

the shark winched into the air; men

lifting the last bloody hammers.

And Him, somewhere, ponderously lifting another world,

setting it free to spin, if it can,

in a darkness you can’t imagine.

 

7/24/2013: Day 29: A Shark Miscellany

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Things I would blog about if I wasn’t overwhelmed with fatigue:

1. The shark attack in Brazil captured on video

2. Reflections on a shark’s mouth being a gateway to another world (with much credit and admiration given to Joseph Campbell).

3. The complex emotions aroused in me by a shark attack

4.This line from Neil Shubin’s book “Your Inner Fish”: “Basically, we’re all modified sharks.”

5. How Shubin explains that divergent forms of the bones that support the upper and lower jaws in sharks, help us swallow and hear. The muscles and nerves that we use to talk and swallow move the gills in sharks and other fish.

6. The otherness and fear evoked by a shark attack juxtaposed with the fact that way back deep in the mystery of all things, sharks and people were sort of one

7. How a great white hijacked a whale watching expedition and how much I wish I had been onboard.

8. My action today: 8 signatures on the epic Shark Defenders petition.

Day 28: 7/23/2013: Sharks: Feel The Poetry

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Today I bought some shark educational materials for the Fall semester. I wanted to memorize which shark belongs to which family. Instead of studying, I became swept up in the beauty of names–all these sharks I’d never heard of:

the blind shark, the tasselled wobbegong, the false, the graceful, the grinning, ghost, honeycomb and lollipop cat sharks

and among the requiems: the blackspot, the dagger nose, the milk shark, the nervous shark, the night shark, the pondicherry, the hardnose, the big nose, the spinner

not to mention the sawback, hidden, ornate and angular angelsharks or the unforgettable dusky, sharpnose, sharp fin, whiskery, western spotted gummy, the flapnose, and humpback hound sharks

Did you know the smallest shark is the dwarf lantern (6.7 inches)?

Or that hound sharks hunt in packs or

that a school of hammerheads is also called a shoal or a shiver?

Wobbegongs are excellent ambushers

and once someone found

a doll inside a tiger shark

Day 16: 7/11/2013: Fear

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Today I started refining the central idea of this shark project.

I also studied my diving manual.

As I memorized facts about water pressure, I realized that my fear of encountering sharks in the water had been eclipsed by a terror of my lungs collapsing like a pair of dispirited accordions as fountains of shiny blood burst from my ears.

Then I realized the whole book I am writing is about fear. Beyond the fear of sharks, beyond drowning, beyond fear of my lack of athleticism or lung capacity, is the fear I feel that this book won’t sell or that while I am still grieving my father’s death, my mother, who is in frail health, will die and leave me incapacitated with grief, unable to continue.

When descending into the depths, the diver learns techniques to “equalize” the pressure of the sea, to survive in an alien place. It’s a powerful metaphor for our own daily descents, our singular journeys into the unknown. I thought of these lines from  Adrienne Rich’s famous poem “Diving into the Wreck”:

the sea is another story

the sea is not a question of power

I have to learn alone to turn my body without force

in the deep element.

Diver on the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, Bonaire.

Diver on the wreck of the Hilma Hooker, Bonaire. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)