In February of 2023, McFarland Books published the first book-length treatment of an old US Navy tradition of writing the first deck log entry of the New Year in verse. Titled Midwatch in Verse:  New Year’s Deck Log Poetry of the United States Navy, 1941–1946, the book focuses on WWII-era logs. The Midwatch in Verse website followed the book’s publication with the purpose of making all things “midwatch poetry” available in one location. We are pleased to announce some changes and additions to the site and provide information about things to come.

First, we have added “Project” to the title of the website, so it is now called Midwatch in Verse Project to reflect the ongoing nature of work related to the deck log poetry tradition.

Second, Dave and Gary welcome Ken Keith as a new member of the project team. Like Dave and Gary, Ken is a retired university professor who has extensive editing skills and knowledge of poetry. Every year during National Poetry Month, we look forward to Ken’s social media being graced with a daily haiku that he composes. We are pleased to have him as a team member. Check out his bio.

Third, as a service to the writers of deck log poems, we sometimes attempt to locate them or their family members to provide a copy of this bit of US Navy tradition. We find that surviving deck log poem writers rarely remember their small slice of service in which they took on the mantle of a bard. Family members of deceased writers are usually delighted to receive their relative’s attempt to wrangle the complexities of a deck log into a coherent verse.

Finally, our most recent work involved downloading post-WWII deck log poems (1947-1979) from the National Archives. The Archives maintains the vast collection of logs between the years 1947 and 1979. However, not all the logs are digitized and available online. We downloaded over 10,000 deck log poems representing the time frame mentioned above giving us an excellent sample of poems from pre-Korean War through the Vietnam War.

Initially, we are organizing poems into groups that address a set of themes that recur over time: for example, mimicking classical poems, complaining about having to write a poem, absence of alcohol and women, and others. Some log authors graced their New Year’s entry with illumination and calligraphy, while others composed poems that could be sung to popular tunes (e.g., one log is modeled after Petula Clark’s Downtown). Using these themes, we will be looking at how these young officers deal with the requirement that certain technical information is required in a deck log–location, speed, source of power, other ships present, etc. Over the course of the four decades following WWII, the treatment of technical details in the midwatch poems is amazingly similar, which is perhaps to be expected. Certain patterns of often repeated imagery and rhyme have arisen from the challenge of making things like ship names and designations, unit identifications, and so forth fit smoothly into a poem. However, many officers found unique and interesting ways of rhyming mundane information. At times, poem writers expressed political views related to world events that impacted their deployments. We view all of this through the lens of what the poems say about the men, the ships, and the historical context in which the poems were written over four decades.

Stay tuned for future announcements about the project!