Literature and fishing may seem like odd bedfellows – but trolling deeper you understand the romance.

There’s a classic precedent in Samuel Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” which captures the intensity, the life and death struggle, the importance of symbol, luck and tradition on the open sea.

The ancient mariner as a young man killed an albatross which his shipmates believe led to the becalming of their vessel. They all die, except the mariner, who with the dead bird strung around his neck comes to understand his fate.

The spell is broken and, by sorcery or angelic powers, his shipmates come eerily to life just long enough to sail the ghost-ship back to the mariner’s home waters before it sinks and he is rescued.

Haunted by their deaths, he carries the burden of telling the tale to others.

Which Came First – Poet or Fisherman? Living and working on the ocean generates great stories.

Long days at sea leaves time between exhausting bouts of work to ponder the wiles of nature and the feats and defeats of man – perfect conditions for incubating poet-philosophers.

But which came first, the poet or the fisherman?

Geno Leech, fisherman and poet, says of himself, “I’ve always been a reader. I managed to get out of high school – well, they kind of pushed me out – but I always read. I was always in the library.”

“I went to sea to fish, but I always had a book with me.”

Before DVDs and electronic gadgets provided music, movies, and games, “at sea guys had dog-eared books and passed them around,” says Leech

“I liked music too – country and folk – I scribbled lyrics.”

Waiting for fish gives you time to think and “scribble.” His “Panther on the Prowl,” about another boat fishing the same spots as theirs, was how it all started for Leech.

A Return to His Roots “I grew up in an academic household and we were summer people in Maine,” says Jay Speakman, crabber, fisherman and writer.

Maine folk are born storytellers; the rhythms of “Down East” and what Speakman calls the Maine brogue are unique to the ear.

“I didn’t have much of an interest in writing poetry. Nothing jumped out and grabbed me,” he says.

“But my mother was the high school yearbook poetry editor, I found out later. My father had a Ph.D. from Yale.”

“I was born at Yale and spent my childhood on and around campuses – three years at the University of Beirut, three years at Harvard,” he continues. “I learned to write through letters. My family was getting mail all the time, from all over the world.”

Although Speakman turned away from his academic roots first becoming a surfer, then fishing in Alaska and British Columbia, as he says, “the seeds were there.”

Boy Poet Harrison “Smitty” Smith, who grew up in Lowell took a more pragmatic route to his poetry writing.

“I’ve been a poet since I was four years old,” he says. “I found out early that if I wanted something and could rhyme it, my mother might give it to me.”

“I discovered early how you could juggle words around,” he says.

Smitty is blessed to have a partner of 30 years, Lorrie Haight, who has been cataloging, printing and hand-binding Smitty’s poetry into books.

Smitty’s early regard for poetry as a means to an end shifted as he grew up. He became more political and more passionate about the natural world.

“I write about how humans treat animals,” he says. “What gives us the license to change an animal’s destiny? I’m a champion of the underdog.”

From a career as a Philco technician he became a charterboat pilot; then borrowed a rig for a month and loved it. Then he bought his own boat, the Sea Miner, and, finally, built with Lorrie the 53-foot steel-ketch Akvavit in a barn overlooking Stillaguamish Slough.

“We almost didn’t come back,” says Haight about their Akvavit sail, “but eventually we got bored. It was summer all the time.”

Fisher Poets’ Craft The 13th annual Fisher Poets Gathering is this weekend in Astoria. Stop by one of the four venues to experience the fishing-literature mash-up.

The ballad has a long tradition in English. It’s a story told in rhymed verses of four- or five-line stanzas, called quatrains or cinquains, sometimes with a refrain/chorus.

This great early poem of Smitty’s called “Sea Lion,” a theme still relevant today, illustrates different kinds of rhyme:

Whiskered face and brown fur

coat

Surfacing beneath the

boat

A stolen fish shaking,

flailing

Gull diving for the pieces

trailing.

Within me dwells a strange

emotion

For the fellow fisher of the

ocean.

Why do I have an urge to

kill

One who possesses fishing

skill?

My shot is wide and in

summation

My fury turns to

admiration.

Smitty chose a sequence of rhyming couplets – two metered lines that end in a rhyme – and has utilized two types of rhyme.

One syllable rhymes like “kill/skill” and “coat/boat” are called masculine. “Flailing/trailing,” “emotion/ocean” and the beautiful and surprising last pair “summation/admira-tion” are multi-syllabic or feminine rhyme.

Note that he has chosen to give the end-rhymed words a line of their own on the page to visually accentuate the sound in this clever poem.

Smitty is following the long tradition of the balladeer – rhymed verse is easier to memorize and to deliver aloud, let’s say from the nearest bar stool.

Sound and Sense Rhyme schemes vary and are noted by assigning a capital alpha-order letter to the first sound in the pattern. Every following end-word with the same sound gets the same letter. A new sound gets the next letter in sequence.

For instance, this five-line first verse from Hobe Kyter’s classic ballad “Nugget Hauled the Seine” follows the pattern ABCCB:

I’ll ne’er forget those Jim Crow Sands,

Where my thoughts will long remain

With a team of horses there:

A gelding and a mare,

A-hauling on the seine.

Kytr’s chorus has a different pattern, AABBC

And though I’ve grown old & gray,

No, I’ll ne’er forget that day.

No, I never can forget,

Though his bones were cold & wet,

How Nugget hauled the seine.

Some might say that “seine” rhymes with “gray/day,” sometimes called “off-rhyme” or “slant rhyme,” in which case the rhyme would scan as AABBA.

The repetition of beginning consonants, also a memory technique, is called “alliteration.” Leech is a master of this sound game. From his poem “Seasick:”

I’ve been down in the gurry and mud on my hands and knees

Pukin’ in the sea slopped scuppers

I’ve puked in a lava soap scummed galley sink

As the crew gnawed snow tire steaks for supper.

Note the use of “s” through this quatrain; and the “g” in “gurry” and “galley” picked up again in “gnawed” nicely bookends the verse.

Leech has a fine ear.

Time Stands Still Some of the fisher poets also write prose. Let’s end with a couple of selections illustrating Speakman’s capacity to paint a picture with words (from “Awakening,” published in Moving Mountain, 2008):

Roused from sleep at midnight I go on deck to find the boat surrounded by a vast school of herring. Humpbacks have herded them into the shallows near shore. From all sides comes the eerie sound of countless fish flipping on the surface. It is a soothing, strangely familiar sound, not unlike summer rain falling on still water, and if it weren’t for the breathing of whales in the darkness, it would be easy to forget the immediacy of the struggle going on just beneath the surface.

Note the personification of “time” – giving time human qualities – and the sibilance of the “s’s” in Jay’s selection from “White Corks on Blue Water.”

The net block creaks adding its music to the steady splattering of water and jellyfish wrung from the net as it runs through the sheaves. Time, as if pausing to catch its breath, seems to stand still.