Karin Cope is a Canadian poet, activist, artist and professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design who spends part of each year at sea. Previous publications include Passionate Collaborations: Learning to Live with Gertrude Stein and What we’re doing to stay afloat (poems).
What Seas Sing Through Our Bones is a journey poem and a queer love story that unfolds during a time of war, censorship and extreme border control. The poem’s narrators relate the marvels and disasters they encounter as they move from one language to another, and between land and sea.
Interviewed by Nancy Issenman
Nancy Issenman (NI): What propelled you to take on such a challenging adventure, as you say– “to quit these binding landlocks.” And how did you prepare?
Karin Cope (KC): I think the journey always starts long before you know anything about it. Melville opens Moby Dick by suggesting that the challenge of going to sea is the only cure for what he calls “the hypos,” which is to say “low feelings” or depression. There is no question that going to sea very effectively forces one’s attention from the many preoccupations and anxieties of land-based living to more immediate life and death matters. Perhaps my initial preparation was, then, in my young adulthood, to have become severely enough depressed that making big changes made a certain kind of sense!
But as far as this particular voyage went, some of the challenge was circumstantial—my partner found the used boat she was looking for across the continent, and so that bit of chance determined our next set of moves, in this case, a voyage down the outside of the Baja Peninsula and up into the Sea of Cortez. But to be fair, this was also not our first long voyage together. We’d been living and working in Montreal in the 1990s when Marike and our elder, Elisabeth, bought another boat in a bankruptcy sale in the Chesapeake. On that trip up the eastern seaboard to Maine and eventually into Atlantic Canada, I learned to navigate and fell in love with being on the water. In fact, in the wake of that voyage, we quit our jobs and moved to Nova Scotia, which was its own big leap. At first, driving on the land felt like a peculiar exercise that involved inverting the forms of the sea charts in my head; it was an important lesson in the changes that going to sea can ring on land-based consciousness.
NI: I was amazed by the reference section in the back of your book. It is unusually long and detailed–from Revelations to Hank Williams songs, to road signs and the use of Old English. And so much more! How did the research unfold and how long did it take to write the book given the enormous amount you compiled?
KC: I think that we humans are always gathering, looping, citing and recasting the words, plastic forms, ideas and phrases that we find; indeed, such promiscuous circulation is what makes anything matter to us. Or as Russian scholar of narrative and dialogue, Mikhail Bakhtin puts it, our words are always half in others’ mouths. Language and culture are our “mycelial network,” the hidden pathways that bind and nourish us and we dispose of or neglect these things at our peril. In this moment when large language model AI rips off and chews through everything humans have made in order to increase the power and profits of billionaires—and to shortcut the repeated necessity of learning to wrestle with our uncertainties, insecurities and failures as we make and write—it feels important to acknowledge as many of my interlocutors and cultural debts as I can.
Poetry is a way of doing something with the earworms and whispered prayers that bedevil me, the phrases that catch hold and won’t let go. Much of my poetry emerges from inner and outer conversations and intimate dialogues with things I am reading, seeing or hearing; I get seduced by various rhythms and patterns and figures and use them to build my own pieces. I wanted to make this shared vocalization visible and public, and hope that the references appear as another form of travel alongside the physical journey.
To answer your question about time more precisely, in one way, writing this poem took 22 years from the outset of the voyage, but also a lifetime of gathering, listening and reading. In another way, the actual writing involved several extended 3–4 month stints of drafting and redrafting from 2017 until 2025. It took a long time to get the rhythms and feel of the poems the way I wanted them. Patience in rewriting was the key to everything.
NI: It seems like you were greatly influenced by The Seafarer. When did you first come across this poem? Has it impacted you beyond the writing of this collection?
KC: Like the Odyssey, I first read this poem as a student, but more recently Caroline Bergvall’s poetry, which often makes use of old English words and verse, sent me back to The Seafarer where I rediscovered the inventiveness of its kennings, those vivid compound words like hwaelweg (whale road) or flodwegas (sea paths). I was struck by how the 10th Century narrator of The Seafarer speaks of leaving the world of human bustle and knowledge to go to sea, and how, as we had experienced, what the sea offers is its own realities, life forms and streams. The poem’s spiritual dimension too—its explicitly Christian witness, which Ezra Pound leaves out in his beautiful but partial translation of the poem, made me think about how almost every remembered or narrated journey tends to resolve along a “learned” or “spiritual” arc, whether Basho’s Narrow Road to the Deep North, Steinbeck and Rickett’s Log from the Sea of Cortez, the Odyssey, Ulysses, Melville’s works or Caroline Bergvall’s Drift; even Pound’s own poetry insists upon such “teachings.”
What seas sing is haunted by this question of how to relate a physical voyage, which is also a spiritual arc, without flattening, misrepresenting or overly neatening the journey. How do you recount or remember a linked series of experiences, while keeping in sight that there is much that you will never know nor understand? This is in part why I decided to make the narration a dialogue or conversation. Such plurality is also, among other things, a critical environmental stance—to hold open the possibility that what you think or think you see is in error; not to decide based on your own experience—or your power of naming!– that you know what something should be, is, or means. I think that to sail, to make art or to live fully, you have to make use of the guides you can find, but also be willing to venture where they don’t go, to toss yourself into risk….Queer life can feel like this, a letting go of known forms and moorings and setting out into an uncharted space. But so too can building a long-term relationship of any kind with other persons and places.
NI: And can you also speak about your connection with the Odyssey and its importance in this book.
KC: I returned to the Odyssey in 2017, as I was writing a review of poet Sue Goyette’s wonderful Penelope, and certain phrases entered my ear and stayed there (a flushing wave sang backwards from the bow). Then in 2022, night after night while Marike and I were sailing in the Mediterranean, I read the whole poem aloud—and yes, of course I am working on another multivocal poetry project inspired by that trip; I call it If Sappho were a sailor. Among other things, the Odyssey is a poem about war and the aftermath of war, gross inequality, greed, environmental devastation, and the rules of hospitality—what does a good guest or host look like; what does a bad guest or host look like? Spoiler alert: Odysseus occupies all those positions.
Rereading these great masculinist sea stories, from the Odyssey to Melville to Conrad to Steinbeck and Ricketts’ Log from the Sea of Cortez, made me want to center doubt as well as relational and environmental questions in my own poem. I wanted to ask, what are the impacts you have on a space to which your narrative or preferred forms blind you? For white inhabitants of the global north tourism is often figured positively, as a mental and spiritual self-stretching exercise. But moving across and between languages and geographical and cultural spaces can just as easily harden preconceptions and (mis)understandings as remove them. This was the point of a poem like an acceptable translation (gringo telephone), which repeats verbatim supposed “crucial information” relayed to us about traveling in Mexico, and my generalized obsession with various guidebooks, which however necessary, can be sometimes catastrophically inappropriate or mistaken. In tandem with What seas, I’ve written another book-length poem entitled Ghost boat of my heart sail for me, which interrogates collecting and accumulation as privileged but failed pathways to knowledge. I guess this means that I am always trying to indict myself and my own most cherished practices!
NI: Reading these poems gave me the feeling of a rhythmical flow as if I was literally on a boat in the sea. Anaphora, which you use frequently and richly, can produce this effect. Was this rhythm-making intentional or did it just naturally evolve during the process of writing and revising?
KC: I’m so glad! I worked extremely hard to fill these poems with the feelings and sounds and rhythms of being at sea, the return the lift the swell the slip into a new space just a little bit different than where you were before. Being at sea is a kind of being in love, a matter of constantly losing and having to reshuffle your bearings. Anaphora also functions a bit this way—each repetition of an anchoring word takes you not to the same point but to a slight lift or shift or swell elsewhere. Did I mean to use anaphora so much? Aside from the very intentional use of a ghazal to structure in this way you will know your iniquity I initially “found” or “arrived at” rather than “intended” most of the forms and rhetorical devices that show up in this book.
NI: Some of your poems muse about war, climate change and animal protection. Why was this lens important to include?
KC: What seas sing through our bones is a love poem, not only to and with a human beloved, but to Earth, her oceans and creatures, to the miracle that we are here at all. But as we know, certain kinds of human technology, including war, along with climate change, which is hastened still further by war, threaten these forms and loves with extermination. I wanted to underline the deep irony that a sailing vessel, the platform that frames this love poem and allows us access to some of the world’s remarkable wonders, is also a technology of war and destructive greed, including various forms of slave trade. There is no way to get away from these facts, these implications; there is no stance that will scrub this history and its legacies. Facing it is part of what we have to do. Likewise, even in our smallest gestures, no matter our intentions, to communicate as we do, every one of us on the planet today is bound up with the oil trade, with plastics, with consumer capitalism, with blood minerals, with the wasting of the very air, ground and water that sustains us. What seas sings of this complex inter-implication, and the ways we are underwriting our demise even as we’re trying to love and survive. It is then perhaps also an elegy, a song to a history of an experience of connectedness to earth and her creatures that is changing and slipping away thanks in part to our constant efforts to stay “connected”.
NI: In the afterword, you say of your beloved that she “hears the arriving echoes of almost every poem before I do.” Could you speak more about that and your collaboration with Marike.
KC: Although I have always loved the water in its many forms, I suspect that I would not be a sailor if I had not met Marike. Sailing is a passion for her, a necessity; the way she feels most fully challenged, at her limits and thus also herself. This is something that I have come not only to understand about her, but to feel for myself in some ways. I can also say that none of our voyages could or would have happened without our collaboration. Talk is part of this–some of the poems mimic night time conversations where we, as Zora Neale Hurston put it, “pass [parts of] the world through our mouths,” including others’ words–and many poems have their foundations in words one or the other of us has said or heard, as if on the wind, arriving from elsewhere.
I wanted the form of this poem to honour the extent to which this voyage required both of us (and many others!). As I say in the Afterword, there are very few sea stories narrated by women, still fewer that depart from the mode of heroic survivalist epic, which is at once individualist and triumphant over nature and other humans. It felt important to find another kind of voice and another way to tell this sea story, which after all, is not about some kind of victory, but rather, the many skeins and dreams and filaments and experiences of flesh that bind and cling to us.
Interviewer Bio: Nancy Issenman, a Jewish, queer writer, lives on unceded lək̓ʷəŋən territory. Her poems appear in Room, League of Canadian Poets, Scrivener Creative Review, a story in don’t tell: family secrets (Demeter Press) and a plaque with her poem in Alta Lake Park after winning the Whistler Poetry Pause prize, 2024.