Gander’s artful, formally innovative poetry often concerns perception; what happens when one is looking, listening, touching or otherwise sensing the world. “Immigrant Sea” might perhaps be read as a phenomenological description of an encounter by the sea, an encounter which is itself like the sea in that recognition – of the other and of oneself – pulsates like the waves as the experience oscillates between familiarity and strangeness.
The poem opens with a description of longing. An anonymous “he”, the protagonist of the poem, contemplates the mystery of another human being’s presence. An anonymous “she” is standing right next to him, but in her separate being she is infinitely distant. He would like to reduce the distance, so that more of her life might live inside him. He yearns for their separate selves to mingle. She is close – in space – but inaccessible otherwise than through a longing so powerful it causes his self to flow and ebb – like the sea.
The encounter is sensual before it becomes intellectual. The protagonist can feel the energy coming off the woman’s wet scalp – perhaps she had just come out of the sea? Typically for Gander, the human actors cannot be set apart from their more-than-human environment, even though, as humans, they are “foreigners” in this setting. The protagonist’s subjectivity cannot be reduced to the immaterial, rational cogito of Descartes, rather, it is an embodied process of becoming, in relation to the other human, to the sea, to the dynamically changing landscape.
The whole scene is charged with energy, with electricity. As the woman explains, grass is positively charged, and pollen is negatively charged. The charge is erotic. Eros is in the world, it is wild, it causes human bodies to attract each other just like grass and pollen attract each other. As Gander writes elsewhere, Eros may also be “the fundamental condition of that escalation of meaning necessary to poetry”. Poetry thus grows out of nature, nourished by the same energy that drives the growth and evolution of plant and animal bodies.
The poem, whose physical shape on the page reflects the flow and ebb of the sea and of consciousness, closes with the protagonist’s renewed recognition of himself. The encounter with “the immigrant sea” of another soul has made him who he is in this moment, summoning him from the recesses of his individual being to the realm of intersubjectivity, where both Eros and meaning reside; where human lives unfold.
Click to read the poem by this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Poetry winner.
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