Poet researched Great Lakes’ wrecks for new collection

By KATE HABREL
Capital News Service
LANSING — A 200-pound ship’s radiator interrupted a funeral in 1922 when it plunged from the sky and into the Falk Undertaking Parlors on Military Street in Port Huron.
It came from the Omar D. Conger, a ship blown to pieces when its boiler exploded while docked at Port Huron.
“That part is accurate! It happened! And that’s just bizarre!” said poet Cindy Hunter Morgan, an assistant professor of creative writing at Michigan State University. “When I read that, I thought, I’ve got to build a poem around that.”
And she did. From that poem:
“There were some who said the coming
of the radiator was an expression
of God’s solidarity with those who grieved
and some who said the coming
was the beginning
of an eleventh plague.”
The wrecks of the Conger and 33 other ships find poetic life in Hunter Morgan’s new book, “Harborless” (Wayne State University Press, $16.99). Each poem is informed by a different Great Lakes shipwreck, titled by the lost vessel’s name and the year it went down.
Hunter Morgan’s interest in shipwrecks began as a child camping on her grandmother’s land in Oceana County. Every year, she saw a shipwreck at the channel where Stony Creek empties into Lake Michigan.
The wreck’s origins remain unknown. But the inspiration remained.
Hunter Morgan did thorough research before writing. She read about each ship and visited the museums at Thunder Bay National Marine Sanctuary on Lake Huron and Whitefish Point on Lake Superior.
After so much reading, many of the wrecks started sounding the same. The decision of which wrecks to include eventually came down to the details.
“Every now and then, I would come across some nugget of information that just felt like a little gem,” Hunter Morgan said. “The poems, in some ways, become this playful exploration of language associated with disaster. But the historical nuggets of disaster are still in the poems.”
These disasters reach from the wreck of the Erie in 1841 to the 1989 wreck of the Mesquite. Most of the ships sank thanks to poor weather, fire or a collision, she said.
Perhaps the strangest wreck was that of the wooden schooner W.W. Arnold in 1869. The ship met with a winter storm on Lake Superior only hours after departure from port and vanished.
One month later, a mail carrier whose route followed the shore reported he’d found a ship beached near the W.W. Arnold’s planned route, prompting men from the Masonic Order to search for the captain’s body.
They arrived to find the beach littered with debris. They found scraps of clothing and canvas, but were too late to recover the bodies before they decomposed.
“We have men who are scattered, a search party which is lost, the bodies that are scattered and this sense of confusion,” Hunter Morgan said. “So for this poem, I chose a form that is in fact fragmented, and has a kind of scattered visual quality.”
Readers can find her sources and more historical information in a notes section at the end of the book.
The heart of “Harborless” lies in its imaginative poetry. Just like the wrecks, no two poems are alike. Some span pages. Others run only a few lines.
Since each poem is unique, they’re all memorable to Hunter Morgan for different reasons. But one, the Pewabic, sticks with her because of its vivid imagery.
“That ship went down and for a long time, nobody could find it,” Hunter Morgan said. “They did eventually, and what they found was life paused. Divers came into one space and found a table with three passengers, skeletons, still seated around the table. In the pockets of their trousers, divers found coins. It’s a weird kind of preservation.”
The book also includes six “Deckhand” poems unrelated to any specific wreck. They are fictional accounts of an unnamed crew member meant to anchor the collection.
“The Deckhand poems are working in that way that section-breaks work in other books,” Hunter Morgan said. “But he’s somebody alive — we follow him throughout, and maybe he gives a reader a little hook, a little something to hold on to, when everything else is sinking.”
No one can know what sailors thought as their ships went down, she said. No one knows the true cause of many wrecks.
But through a combination of art and history, books like these help readers imagine what might have happened.
“I think one of the wonderful things about poetry in general is that it allows space for mystery,” Hunter Morgan said. “It would be impossible to eradicate mystery from these wrecks — and also, inappropriate. It is part of their allure. It is true that there are things we will never know.”
Kate Habrel writes for Great Lakes Echo.