GPT
A departure poem that treats travel less as freedom than as a rough code of endurance, self-invention, and danger.
It reads like a sea-going credo after the larger manuscript's ordeal: stripped down, restless, and still suspicious of comfort.
Claude
'Shipping out' strips the South Seas of romance from its first line - 'The South Seas were not any place or planit' - and renders the voyage as menace and torpor: 'Expectations were slow and southern without a rainbow', 'Danger leaped like corn in the ranks', the crew 'Extinct as turtles we hung hard below the blidges' and 'refusins to work' across the deck. It heads toward 'the cradle of civilization' that the men 'cared less' about, then turns to blunt counsel - 'Find your worth and find your folly, make life simple, / and as dangerous as you can' - and ends on a flat self-sufficiency: 'no camera is better than you'.
The poem is a voyage rendered as anti-pastoral, every cliche of tropical escape negated - not a planet, no rainbow, the seven seas with 'no way out'. Its strongest images fuse the natural and the military: danger leaping 'like corn in the ranks', cannons that 'like wind blow sneeked since the turn of the century', so the sea itself becomes a battlefield with a long history of ambush. The crew's near-mutiny is given in passing - 'across the deck we slept refusins to work' - making refusal a posture of exhaustion rather than rebellion. The closing imperatives convert all this into a worker's creed: simplify life, court danger, find both 'worth' and 'folly', and trust direct experience over any recording of it, which is what 'no camera is better than you' insists - the lived deck outranks the picture of it. The rough spellings ('planit', 'blidges', 'refusins', 'lauckluster') are kept as written; in a poem about unmediated experience, the unsmoothed surface is part of the argument. As the second piece in 'The Hell Ship Trangie' sequence, it sets the indifferent ocean against which the title poem's livestock-ship horror will land.