The poems in Future Ship are largely autobiographical in the sense
that they are based on personal experiences from childhood and
adolescence when the personality is still in a molten form and being
shaped by events and experiences that leave a lasting mark on the adult
sensibility. The term "autobiographical" is slightly misleading, as any
poet knows personal material exists to be molded and transformed
according to the needs of the poem. So imagination is the midwife of the
past, and whatever actually happened is colored by time, memory, and the
exigencies of art. In order to access material which is essentially
narrative in nature, and produce poetry rather than short fiction, it
was necessary to adopt a form that allowed for flexibility both spacious
enough to allow the narrative to develop, yet controlled enough to
create some tension in the lines. So the form of alternating long lines
with short lines was adopted to answer this requirement. The short lines
are lines themselves, and not indented phrases clipped off the ends of
the longer lines in order to fit into the marginal format of the page.
After allowing the narrative to stretch out in the longer lines, the
short lines are meant to act as pivots, or fulcrums, that propel the
reader on to the each next long line. They are also meant to supply
pauses, breathing spaces, in the extended narrative carried by the
longer lines. Other poems in Future Ship are more traditional in
lineation, but all the poems, in one way or another, are meant to serve
the main theme of how the past informs the present, which then points
directly toward the future the trope being a ship that arrives finally
to voyage away containing all the accumulated facts, events, and
characters that have marked a life. So the self is imagined as a kind of
ark, bearing a lifetime's experiences into the future. One hopes, of
course, that the closer one gets to personal experience if it is real
and honestly felt the more it will become universal and represent, in
some way, the experience of others.
