Dear Herman Melville by Candice M. Kelsey

I want you to know

Moby-Dick is now considered a classic.

            I’ve read it twenty-six times,

            fell in love with Queequeg but fantasize about Ahab’s wife

            alone in that four-poster bed beneath a gabled roof

            under a Nantucket moon.

I hate your beard but can’t imagine you without it.

You’re remembered as an abolitionist, 

            but the thirteenth amendment didn’t abolish racism;

            your portrayal of Fedallah, Cook, and Pip is problematic at best.

You’d like Toni Morrison.

She defended you, arguing that you were

            questioning “the very notion of…racial superiority,

            of whiteness as privileged place in the evolutionary ladder of humankind.”

You should know

that you give us educators a lot to talk about.

I use hot pink duct tape on the spine of my Norton Critical Edition

            because my dad called it a boy book.

            My 12th graders always end up admitting you’re hilarious.

            (You should see their homemade Doubloons.)

You might be tickled to learn

thousands of people attend Moby-Dick reading marathons on both coasts.

            I’ve read “Chowder,” “Knights and Squires,”

            and “Queequeg in his Coffin” virtually and on Venice Beach.

Don’t worry—we know you wrote other stuff too.

I have been wanting to tell you

I also love the ocean,

            often substitute the sea for pistol and ball, have an Ishmael soul.

You might not understand

why your work has been commercialized,

            the white whale as spouting cliche,

            how the New Yorker can’t stop with the cartoons,

            and a trendy Netflix character must read Moby-Dick

            to inherit her mother’s estate. (The writers get it all wrong.)

Oh, I wish you could join me at the Met

to see Jake Hegge’s Moby-Dick: The Opera.

            One critic claims it’s “slow to set sail

            while another praises the libretto for “cutting through the blubber.”

I guess I really want a lot of things when it comes to you, Herman,

but the one that swallows me whole,

            the one that dismasts my vortex heart,

            is the need to sit beside you on Arrowhead Farm

            where together we’d grieve the loss of so many goddamn whales

            and everything they symbolize.

Candice M. Kelsey (she/her) is a bi-coastal writer and educator. Her work has received Pushcart and Best-of-the-Net nominations, and she is the author of eight books. Candice reads for The Los Angeles Review and The Weight Journal; she also serves as a 2025 AWP Poetry Mentor. In her free time, she relies on anxiety, outrage, and counting-the-days.

In her own words: “I write because America is a fever dream I can’t wake from—and honestly, I’ve developed a taste for the absurd glow it gives. My poems are part field notes, part confession, part overheard hallway chatter from the high school where I teach. Language is how I make sense of this beautiful, bewildering mess—and sometimes how I make it more bewildering on purpose.

I live in long skirts and oversized sweatshirts, roast vegetables like it’s a sacred ritual, and wear black not out of mourning, but because my late father-in-law once told me it’s not my color. My writing thrives on contradictions: the sacred in the mundane, the poetic in the pop-cultural, the joke that turns on itself halfway through.

I’m drawn to the overlooked and the offbeat—what a student blurts out when they think no one’s listening, or what a wilted grocery store flower might say if given a stanza. Poetry for me is anthropology with a sly grin.”