{"id":1179,"date":"2012-02-23T13:42:31","date_gmt":"2012-02-23T13:42:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/?p=1179"},"modified":"2022-06-24T01:55:18","modified_gmt":"2022-06-24T01:55:18","slug":"richard-dey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/d\/richard-dey\/","title":{"rendered":"Dey, Richard"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Richard<\/a>by Leah Feldman<\/em> (2013)<\/p>\n

DEY, RICHARD (1945-) is an American poet born in 1945 who writes of New England and the West Indies. As a teenager he sailed in the Schooner Tabor Boy<\/i> out of Marion, Massachusetts. After serving in the US Army as a journalist in Washington DC, he graduated from Harvard College in 1973, where he was poetry editor of The Harvard Advocate<\/i>. In the summer of 1971, while working as crew in a charter yacht, he first visited Bequia, a dependency of St. Vincent in the Grenadines. The island proved to be the inspiration for many of his works. After college Dey worked as an offshore lobsterman out of Westport Point, Massachusetts, and as a writer in the Windward Islands. During this time, he started publishing poems in Poetry<\/i>, Harvard Magazine<\/i>, and Sail<\/i>, among other publications, and articles in Harvard Magazine, Yachting, Sail<\/i> and the Boston Globe<\/i>, among others.<\/p>\n

Subsequently, Dey worked in publishing and as a professor of maritime literature and history in Long Island University\u2019s SEAmester program. He has written two collections of poetry. The first and larger has focused on Bequia and in various iterations includes Bequia Poems<\/i> (1988) and Selected Bequia Poems<\/i> (2009). The second is a northern counterpart to his Caribbean work, The Loss of the Schooner <\/i>Kestrel and Other Poems<\/i> (2012). He edited The Schooner<\/i> Pilgrim\u2019s Progress: A Voyage around the World 1932\u20131934<\/i> by Donald C. Starr (1996). His non-fiction account of the life of Morris Nicholson, Adventures in the Trade Wind <\/i>(2009),<\/i> is touted by Llewellyn Howland III as \u201cthe next best thing to running south from Martinique to Grenada with Nicholson as your watch mate.\u201d This narrative of Nicholson\u2019s career as a charter boat skipper reflects the growth of the industry from a single yacht in Antigua to hundreds run by companies such as The Moorings. Adventures in the Trade Wind<\/i> also captures the change in the islands from neglected colonial outposts to independent mini-states and demonstrates the importance of charter yachts to their economies.<\/p>\n

In his \u201cPreface\u201d to The Loss of the Schooner <\/i>Kestrel and Other Poems,<\/i> Dey identifies his goal in writing poetry as choosing incidents and situations from coastal boating life and describing them in language used by sailors that is still understandable to landsmen. His work utilizes many of the conventions of sea literature as well as marine imagery. His aim is to create what he calls \u201cThe Offshore Perspective\u201d\u2014a sailor\u2019s view of the human condition. Dey\u2019s poem \u201cExploring the First Map of Bequia\u201d exemplifies both his immense love and respect for the island as well as his ability to craft prose appropriate to his \u201cOffshore Perspective\u201d:<\/p>\n

a sailor lost<\/em><\/p>\n

as if to a lover\u2019s moist eyes
\nwide in the golden tropic light,
\nyet to go ashore or write
\nbut found-out, taken by surprise,<\/p>\n

aroused. I could have had no clue
\nI was coming to a second birth
\nor that, at an end of the earth,
\nI\u2019d start a life\u2019s work, charting the view.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Dey’s preface also brings to light a problem found in all sea poetry\u2014that for centuries sea poetry was written rarely by sailors but by \u201cthe observer class\u201d and that only in recent times have sailors been educated, and the educated included sailors. It is out of the latter group that Dey emerges, one of the first\u2014if not the first\u2014literary yachtsman (and commercial fisherman) to write serious poems about yachts and yachtsmen.<\/p>\n

Selected Bequia Poems<\/i> (2009)<\/p>\n

Google Books<\/a><\/p>\n

Adventures in the Trade Wind <\/i>(2009)<\/p>\n

Google Books<\/a><\/p>\n

keywords: white, male, army<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Leah Feldman (2013) DEY, RICHARD (1945-) is an American poet born in 1945 who writes of New England and the West Indies. As a teenager he sailed in the Schooner Tabor Boy out of Marion, Massachusetts. After serving in Continue reading &<\/span> text links<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":770,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[25917],"tags":[53756,53785,53778,53766,34916],"class_list":["post-1179","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-d","tag-20th-century","tag-caribbean","tag-maritime-history","tag-poetry","tag-video"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/770"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1179"}],"version-history":[{"count":28,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6289,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1179\/revisions\/6289"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1179"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1179"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/searchablesealit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1179"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}