‘The Whale’ by Cassandra Farrin

First, I felt Cassandra Farrin’s poem. Second, I went back around to feel it again, running my mind through the expanse of it, marveling at the sensations: the surge of ice cold images, the line of light that cuts the dark depths, and the salt-crusted ridges of the sound. I went back a third time to pin each turn of phrase to a corresponding moment in Moby Dick—and while that exercise increased my appreciation of the poem it dried out the experience with academia. So, I let it go. I let it not be Moby Dick. It’s correlative to the classic in idea rather than form. Line breaks and caesura evoke the voice of an animal, an ancient creature of the deep, breaching the line of water to sing a response, an ode to the inextricable intertwining of fates between animal and man.

Frontier Poetry