Reformatting Melville

Like Kayla in her post about Ahab's Poetry I was drawn to the idea of creating poetry out of Moby Dick based on Digitally Mediating Literary Texts. However,  I approached it a little differently than Kayla did because I was also partly inspired by my friend, who is an art teacher. She told me about "block-out" poetry, and you can see her example here in which she used Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. This artistic media, altered books, allows the artist to create an environment that surrounds the theme of their poem/text.

I mixed these two methods of finding poetry in prose, and in the section I used from Moby Dick, (in the very first chapter, "Loomings") I jumped around throughout a few consecutive paragraphs to find the phrases that I felt had the most meaning for the intended message. It's far from perfect, but here is what I came up with:

Water

Were Niagara but a cataract of sand,

would you travel your thousand miles to see it?

Why upon your first voyage as a passenger, did you feel such a mystical vibration,

when first told that you and your ship were now out of sight of land?

Here is an artist.

What is the chief element he employs?

It is the image of the ungraspable phantom of life;

and this is the key to it all.

What is the one charm wanting?

Yes, as every one knows,

he will infallibly lead you to water.

There is magic in it.

Surely all this is not without meaning.

Meditation and water are wedded forever.


This ends up being a lot shorter than the type of poetry that Kayla did, but I feel like it also has a different purpose. Kayla created a new way to directly read the text, but I like that we can find underlying themes this way. After I looked at this chapter through the idea of a poem like this, I started to get more of the sense of wonder about the sea that Ishmael/Melville is trying to convey. What do you think? Does this make you feel different things about the original text? Does it even change anything at all for you?