Metaphors, Vehicles, Submarines

I have a book of poems coming out soon. It is also a book full of submarines. One of the side benefits of writing about submarines and the history of technology is that I get asked “why write poems about this subject?” very frequently. And I’ve gotten to think a lot about how we find the vehicles—the metaphors, since this word originally comes from the Greek “to transfer” or “to carry across”—that serve our projects.

Here are just a few of the reasons I started writing about submarines (and not just writing, but reading stacks of books and driving hundreds of miles to visit decommissioned submarines) in early 2018:

I’d been writing a lot of poems set in airplanes, but I was starting to feel that these were in danger of becoming stale. So I asked myself what the opposite of an airplane would be, and my answer was a submarine.

I was interested in the word ‘nuclear’—how it could be used to describe a family or a weapon, what it might have to tell us about nearness, power, and conflict.

I had some big questions and anxieties about the role that technology plays in our lives, but when I tried to write about algorithms, for example, or media echo chambers, my work felt flat and full of opinions. I didn’t have the distance I needed to observe the situation clearly. When I researched the history of submarines, I found that they gave me a new way to ask questions about how it feels to rely on machines and what happens when we trust our survival to them.

I was looking (these days, who isn’t?) for a way of navigating extreme and uncertain environments.

Submarines seemed an ideal vessel for getting out of a logical, land-locked mindset and diving into subconscious creative depths. (I was raised by psychoanalysts and can’t resist reading into homonyms.)

Then in 2020-2022, nuclear submarines suddenly became a great imaginative lens for understanding containment, isolation, contamination, and resurfacing.

I’m researching other things now and I’m curious to see how my research obsessions will shape my current projects and how they’ll shift with the passage of time.