Reading Steve Mentz’s “A Poetics of Planetary Water: The Blue Humanities after John Gillis”made me realize how rarely I think about water beyond the obvious. I know the ocean as something to swim in, lakes as places to relax, and rain as an inconvenience or blessing depending on the day. But Mentz pushes me to see water as a living, shifting presence that’s woven into everything. It’s unsettling but also kind of thrilling to imagine myself as part of this system of liquid, vapor, and ice.
What really stayed with me was his turn to poetry, especially Dickinson’s “An everywhere of silver” and Whitman’s surf-soaked embrace of the sea. Dickinson captures that fragile boundary where sand tries, and fails, to hold back the water. I’ve stood on beaches watching waves erase my footprints in seconds, and her words made me feel that same vulnerability. Whitman, by contrast, dives right in, almost seduced by the water. That image of surrendering to the sea made me think of my own swims—the way the first plunge into cold water shocks my body awake, and how quickly that shock turns into exhilaration. Mentz is right: poetry often describes that complicated mix of awe and danger better than science ever could.
Still, I felt a tension in the essay. The focus on poetry and philosophy sometimes floats above the material reality of water crises today. Rising seas aren’t just metaphors—they’re swallowing coastlines, displacing families, and reshaping entire communities. I wished Mentz had pulled more of those lived human struggles into the frame alongside Dickinson and Whitman. For me, the blue humanities feels most powerful when it connects personal experience, art, and the very real politics of climate change.
Even so, I walked away from this essay with a new sense of how water refuses to stay in one form, one place, or one meaning. That fluidity—sometimes comforting, sometimes terrifying—seems like the best way to think about our current moment. If poetry can help us sit with that instability, then maybe it can also help us imagine how to endure it.
This is a brilliant post, Martin– skilled close reading and well-written. You rightly point to what is suggested but needs more attention– the effects of the fluidity of water in our global climate crisis. You write, “The focus on poetry and philosophy sometimes floats above the material reality of water crises today. Rising seas aren’t just metaphors—they’re swallowing coastlines, displacing families, and reshaping entire communities.” This is important, and I hope you will continue to pursue these questions and critical writing skills.