My digressive tendencies got the better of me last night following a good session in waist to chest high surf. I had a great time on Sam Bleakley's old mini-mal, and the consequence of surf stoke is always to induce an amiable, philanthropic world view. I found myself thinking of some lines from Marina Tsvetayeva, who wrote somewhere of "a wave like a kiss, wiping away memory," and then this got me thinking: who are the world's top surfing poets? The answer is, obviously, none of them, or, at least, none from the so-called canon because, unless I am wrong, poets have not habitually surfed (though I have been told that archive footage exists of John Betjeman riding a wave; on what, I do not know. Equally I should point out that Sam's father, Alan, is a fine poet and accomplished surfer). However, some poets strike me as being natural born surfers, albeit that they were born in the wrong era or country. Here are five poets who would, I am sure, have ridden waves - or, at least, written about those who do.
1. Pablo Neruda. The Chilean's biographer, Alistair Reid, says that Neruda is the most widely read poet since Shakespeare. How he knows this is beyond me but one thing is certain: Neruda loved the sea and wrote beautifully of its many moods. He also wrote an exquisite poem of lost love, the opening lines of which are:
Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
Write, for example, 'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'
Anyone who can write like that would have ridden a longboard with the utmost style and grace.
2. Fernando Pessoa. The high priest of modernism may, to the casual observer, have a little too much of the Kafkaesque clerk about him for surfing. He wrote The Book of Disquiet which is, I admit, surf-free. But Pessoa was a man who combined passion with understatement, whose influence extends to the likes of Jose Saramago and Antonio Tabucchi and beyond. Another longboard style master.
3. Marina Tsvetayeva. Her disturbed childhood contributed to extraordinary poems of intense brilliance which she correctly predicted would be "savoured as are rarest wines/when they are old." Unfortunately Tsvetayeva hailed from Russia, and although Moscow has its fair share of the surfing corporates the land of Tolstoy & Co has yet to be associated with performance (or, indeed, any) surfing. This is a shame. Tsvetayeva would have ripped on a shortboard.
4. Samuel Taylor Coleridge. A propensity for opium reveals a willingness to experience the highs and lows of life, though perhaps confines the formidable Romantic to an observatory, post-slumber role on the beach.
5. John Masefield. Not for nothing does Sea Fever appear on Beach Bum's home page:
"I must down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gul's way and the whale's way where the wind's like a whetted knife..."
Clearly a man who wouldn't have cared what board he was riding so long as he was in the ocean. And that, folks, is what matters.
See Killer Dana for info on Paper Shredders, an anthology of surf poetry that may, or may not, contain work by the five hotshots above.