Sea shanties were working songs. Sailors sang them to keep their hauling in time, while the sea stayed a hostile backdrop. Dave Bonta's "Notes for a postmodern sea shanty" turns that arrangement inside out. The sea becomes the main character, and in place of a rousing chorus we get twelve unpunctuated lines of quiet, offhand reflection. The title sets this tone. "Notes for" promises something unfinished, a sketch rather than the finished song, and "postmodern" suggests a form that knows it is looking back at an older tradition from a distance.
The first stanza opens with a large, old-fashioned claim: "the sea was a great horror." That is the language of the traditional sublime, the sea as terror. But the poem undercuts it at once. The sea is "of the same / mind as any / to be altered," and the grammar here is slippery. It might mean that the sea has a mind like any other mind, and minds can change. It might mean that the sea is as ready as anything else to be altered. Either way, "great horror" is in the past tense and already losing its force. The lowercase, unpunctuated lines make the thought feel as if it is changing shape as we read, with "though" turning the sentence against its own opening.
The second stanza pushes the deflation further. The sea "did not know how / to retire and live / a private life / ready for the evening." Setting a vast, monstrous force beside the small domestic idea of retirement is funny, and it is also slightly sad. The sea becomes something like an old worker who cannot stop working. "Retire" carries a second meaning, to withdraw, which suits water that goes out and comes back, so the verb can be read as a pun on the tide. The last line is also oddly built. "Ready for the evening" has no clear owner. It could describe the life, the sea, or the speaker, and it hints at the end of a day or of a life. The poem never settles which, and that vagueness gives the stanza its soft, dusky feeling.
Then the tone changes. The third stanza begins with the plainest statement in the poem: "it matters." After so much drifting, this short phrase works like a hand brought down on a table. What matters is not the horror but what the sea "delivered": "the best-spoken people / for a song." The verb "delivered" has several meanings, including carrying cargo, rescuing and giving birth. I'd suggest that each one adds something to the sea's role. The phrase "for a song" is an idiom for something obtained cheaply, but here it also names the poem's own form. The poem does not say who these people were or where they came from, and I think that silence is deliberate. Their voices, "best-spoken," are what survive the voyage and become the song.
The sound and shape of the poem support this movement. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, only three quatrains of short lines, mostly three to six syllables. Long vowels recur and give the poem a slow, watery hum, as in "sea," "be," "people," "evening" and "delivered." The poem also moves from a longer opening line ("the sea was a great horror") to ever smaller, humbler phrases, and ends on the two-beat "for a song." The poem's final word is "song," the very thing the title said these were only notes toward.
What makes the poem interesting is how much it does in so few words. It takes a worn-out subject, the terrifying sea, and a traditional form, the shanty, and neither is allowed to stay grand. The sea is shown as tired, almost human. The real value shifts from power to speech, from the thing that threatens people to the voices it carried. Because the poem is only "notes," the reader is left to finish it, to decide whether "for a song" is a bargain, a loss or both.