ADVENA KEN’S IRONIC JOURNEY 

Starting with the title, ADVENA KEN, the poem. Is filled with ironies, unanticipated changes and questions about the poet’s life.  

The subject of the poem is the author and begins with not a recognition about him but with a request for the reader to call him, Advena Ken.  He associates his name with a ketch named Advena which he discovers in Seattle and eventually finds a home for in a “small boat harbor” in Wrangell, Alaska.   When I first read the title, I associated “Advena” with “Advent” which is the arrival of someone significant like Jesus at Christmas.  But I was wrong.  The Latin word “advena”  means “foreigner, immigrant, interloper”.  The Latin means someone who does not belong.  Did Ken make the mistake I did?  I doubt it.  The irony would not escape him.   

Ken writes several lines about the Advena, a “ferro-cement” ketch he bought for “seven thousand dollars” at an auction from a “bankrupt former owner.”  Advena is not a well appointed yacht!  Ken joked that he might paint the boat black with a yellow stripe down the middle and rename it “Highway”.  No, Advena is not a fifty foot classic  boat featured in the WOODEN BOAT magazine ready to take its new owner on an adventure. Not quite a derelict, but it is, indeed, a project!

This project boat with a cranky engine the poet ties to a “romantic notion” to sail across the Gulf of Alaska to Augustine Island and “climb its volcano.”  When Ken and I visited Advena moored at an auction dock, he raised the main and a Latin cross with a stylized dolphin billowed out on the sail.  Ken said, “It’s a sign.”  The name of the island, “Augustine” was another sign. He writes in the poem that this “romantic notion” is “in my heart a private, dangerous purging intent.”  To “purge” is to cleanse, to remove guilt.  To “purge”is to have a strong “urge” to get it done.

It’s interesting that Ken calls his anticipated journey a “romantic notion.”  A romance nearly always has a belief not verified by evidence.  A lover may see the loved as the perfect person until the rose colored glasses come off and then it’s oops time.  “How could I have not seen who this person really is?”

AN UNEXPECTED DESTINATION

Ken never sails across the gulf to the volcano Augustine and “A favorable providence sailed me not further than Wrangell’s Shoemaker Harbor.”  “Providence” can mean “good luck” or the “protective care of God or nature.”  What did Ken mean? A huge difference exists between “good luck” and “protective care.” Ken’s willful “purging” eventually becomes in the poem his acceptance of a “favorable providence.”  The poet sees it as “favorable” that he winds up in Shoemaker Harbor rather than on top of the volcano he imagined he’d climb.  The question is: How did the poet (Ken) interpret “providence?”  Good luck?  Careful protection from God? Nature?

Finally, Ken writes,

         “In lieu of climbing a mountain, 

           These tentative thoughts

           are what I have written.” 

So, what the poet will write (or had already written) replaces climbing the volcano. The poet tells us it was “favorable providence.”  Advena Ken finds a full life in Shoemaker Harbor, part of which he shares with us in his poetry and essays.

Tim Olson

 More next week . . .  Now to some photos of the year’s project to prepare the Advena for an adventure.