You Were the Ship and She Was You: Joan Wickersham’s No Ship Sets out to Be a Shipwreck, Reviewed by Linda Michel-Cassidy


From the poet’s intro statement: “I wasn’t really interested in going to the museum.” Wickersham writes that her husband had remembered  the story of a sunken ship from an article in National Geographic (January 1962) thathe’d read when he was a child, and they were going to see the museum in Stockholm where she (the ship) was held as part of their travels. Wickersham went along, as one does, “to be a good sport.” That visit to see the remains of the ship, Vasa, became the catalyst of this book.

I am particularly captivated by a “project” book that arises of its own force from an event or topic in which the writer has not sought out. Caught unaware, an obsession is born. It is clear when reading the book, that Wickersham was overcome. This was no poet in search of a topic, but rather, it was a haunting, a thing that could not be left alone. But first, the facts. 

The ship, Vasa, sunk mere minutes and less than a single nautical mile into her 1628 voyage, and was soon after forgotten. In the 1950s, she was rediscovered in the Stockholm Harbor by Anders Franzen using a grappling hook and a homemade core sampling tool—apparently, Franzen was obsessed, as well. In 1961, she was salvaged, hull somehow largely intact and full of artifacts and human remains. She eventually was housed, in 1988, in what is now called the Vasa Museum in the Royal National City Park in Stockholm.*

No Ship Sets out to Be a Shipwreck opens with a brief essay about the author’s first visit to Stockholm, giving an impression of the city, then depositing us at the door of the museum. The body of the book is sectioned: The Reckoning, The Exhibits, The Dry Dock, Furthermore, and Shipworm—an organizational approach that guides the reader through the text as if we are moving from room to room in an exhibit. What follows is all the best features of ekphrastic poetry mixed with the research, engagement, and the imagination required by persona poetry. To clarify, I include in my personal definition of ekphrasis any artistic-sensory experience that takes the viewer to that state of emotional and sensory engagement that one experiences with what is more traditionally thought of an art object. So yes, a sunken ship can be the unnamed sculpture that inspired Rilke’s “The Archaic Torso of Apollo” (fight me later).

We enter the museum with the speaker in “First Sight of the Ship in the Museum”:

Polished waxen ghost of a ship,

But you are the ship.

How can an absence

Fill up all this space?

Awe reverberates through the brief poem. From there, the inquiry expands in all directions. The speaker addresses the shipbuilder’s widow, the person whose skull was found, objects discovered in the wreckage, the men who did the salvage dives. In “Grappling,” the speaker addresses Anders Franzen (the man who found the wreck), conjuring up the years Franzen spent trying to locate the vessel he knew had to be resting somewhere just below him:

You were the fool in the motorboat,

The guy with the grappling hook.

Oh, him. The treasure-seeker.

The scholar. The obsessive.

The sucker for a good myth.

As reader, I wished alongside Franzen, also wondering why Werner Herzog hasn’t yet made a movie about this quest. Then, “One day the grapple caught on something.” We already knew this, but still there is relief; Franzen’s doggedness may have paid off after all: 

The probe brought something up.

A plug of oak. Black oak.

That moment when you called 

and got and answer,

Prosaic and inaudible to anyone but you,

You knew her voice and what she meant.

The story swung into view,

And you and she were its first readers.

In the section titled “Exhibits,” the speaker examines the artifacts in the museum and addresses the owners directly. The attention is careful, as with an art object or heirloom. In “The Owner of the Skull,” the speaker “talks” to the human or maybe the spirit of the human whose skull rests in the museum:

I mean you. Not the museum

Or the Swedish government, but you,

The man who lived in it, in whom it lived.

The speaker “tells” the skull’s owner about himself, based on the placard. The skull has been used to recreate an historical human from the time of the ship’s sinking, “You never thought they’d build another man / using your scaffolding.” At the end of the poem, the speaker contemplates this recompositing, and the poem takes an amazing turn towards the personal:

(…) Maybe being found, restored,

is just another way of being lost. Come back,

I want to say, to my father and mother.

Be who you were and not who I try to make of you.

Other items examined include: a bronze cannon, a key, “The Smallest of Vasa’s Sails,” a silver button with a pelican embossed on it, and amazingly, “The Twenty-One Cardboard Boxes Filled with Herring Bones.” In that poem, the speaker images the process in making the exhibit:

Whose crazy project was this? Who sifted and sorted

these miniscule wisps of bone—each no bigger

than an eyelash—into cardboard boxes

according to type: one for jaws, another

for dorsal fins, another for spines and ribs?

Here, as in other poems, Wickersham, through attention to detail, shows us the objects, imagining the processes used to restore and exhibit them. When we can feel the object, here by imagining the act of sorting, we are one step closer to knowing the centuries-gone people who used them. The speaker turns to the cook from the vessel:

The cook in Vasa’s Galley never had a chance

to scoop the herring from the barrel—never 

saw the fish, never saw anything beyond 

the number of barrels

Attention turns to the barrels of fish—oddly more poignant that thinking of the chef, “Some herring were sent back to sea in a barrel and submerged / in the hold of a sunken ship for three hundred years.” The linking of objects and people—the chef from hundreds of years prior, the archivist, the poet/ viewer at the museum, the reader who encounters the poems—it works like a very efficient and tight evidence chain, a chain held together by dainty fish bones. One of the many remarkable things about this book is how the poet makes something so open and full of possibility from the artifacts of an event several centuries ago. 

The section entitled “Furthermore” contains poems I’d call tangential, or maybe codicils. Not quite afterthoughts, but things “related to.” Other wrecks, the way museums collect, the dive chief (in an essayistic prose poem). 

The final section, “Shipworm,” contains poems with more contemporary settings. We see the speaker using the lens of the present overlaid with the history of the ship. Think of the way the optometrist slides phoropter lenses over each other until finally the eye chart is clear. Or maybe you just can’t tell which setting is correct, because it is all so subjective. From “Unseen”:

I’m on the lookout. Sea and sky

at the horizon, but always the sense

of the unseen that’s out there, to be sighted

doubted, it will get clearer,

closer, larger, certain.

A collision is coming

with the infinite

In one of the final poems,  “The Last Room,” we are in what, I assume, is the final part of the museum. The speaker is on the way out to the current world, yet fully immersed in the past. Displayed are Franzen’s clothes, his briefcase, anchor cables and other relics. “Nothing survives except by accident. The future is an ossuary—everything jumbled”. An 80-year-old diver returns and finds his name written in charcoal on a board from the dive shack. He recalls the divers’ telephone (which may or not be the one in the exhibit) and that the salvage diver, Fälting, “used to speak from the surface to them, the divers, working below in darkness, reminding them, if they panicked, to breathe.” The poem points to another, “The First Dive,” which appears earlier in the book. Hope and time and mystery merge.

*More from the Smithsonian