Chewy landlord dialect and punctuation bits and bobs.
From pages 18-19 of the first edition, as reproduced here.

"Wall," said the landlord, fetching a long breath,
"that's a sarmon for a chap that rips
'balmed heads (great curios), he's sold but one,
for all the airth like a string of inions."

cannibal business dead idolators?
"that harpooneer is a dangerous man."
"He pays reg'lar," was the rejoinder. "come,
it's getting dreadful late, —it's a nice bed:

Sal and me were spliced two in that bed;
almighty big. Come, I'll give you a glim;"
"I vum you won't see he —come along then;
do come;" up stairs we went, cold as a clam,

and sure enough, with a prodigious bed,
enough for harpooneers to sleep abreast.

From page 16 of Moby Dick, 1st ed., as reproduced here.

"Landlord! I've changed my mind.—shan't sleep with him.
I'll try the bench here."
"as you please; But wait,
I've got a plane, and an old handkerchief,
The shavings flew; The landlord was near sprain.

the bench, too short; but mended with a chair.
too narrow, and the other higher than—
the bench along the wall, a draught of air
under the sill a series of whirlwinds

Thinks I, I'll wait awhile; he must drop in.
we may be jolly fellows after all—
But though the other boarders kept coming in,
no sign. It was now hard on twelve o'clock.

"Can't sell his head—What a bamboozingly?"
"stop spinning that yarn to me—I'm not green."

From page 14 and 15 of Moby Dick, first edition as reproduced here. We are introduced to the hot but peculiarly written Bulkington.

I seed her in the offing this three years
Enveloped in their shaggy woollen beards
stiff with ice, an eruption of bears
a pitch-like potion of colds and catarrhs

ice-island. liquor mounted to their heads,
arrantast topers newly land from sea,
aloof, desirous sober as the rest.
a noble chest like I have seldom seen

such brawn. His face was deeply brown and burnt,
making his white teeth dazzling; while his eyes
announced that he was a Southerner,
fine Alleganian revelry of his height

he became my comrade on the sea.
began a little previous to me.

I have been listening to the Jonathan Epstein audiobook. It is very good to have Melville's sentences parsed for me, particularly by him.

Carved from pages 11 and 12 of Moby Dick (first edition, as reproduced here)

The opposite of this entry was hung all
over with heathenish monstrous clubs and spears
set with teeth resembling ivory saws;
others tuft with knots of human hair;

and one was sickle-shaped, a vast segment
You gazed, what could have gone death-harvesting
with such a horrifying implement
Mixed in with these were rusty old whaling

harpoons all broken elbowed fifty years —
so like a corkscrew flung in Javan seas
and run away with by a whale, years
a restless needle of full forty feet

this corner-anchored ark rocked furiously
with cracked glass cases, dusty rarities

From the first two pages of "The Spouter Inn"

gable-ended Inn, condemned old craft.
large oil-painting so thoroughly defaced,
understand its unaccountable mass
shades that you almost delineate

But what most puzzled and confounded you
was a long, limber, portentous black mass
of something hovering in the centre blue,
dim, nameless yeast. A squitchy nervous tract.

—It's the Black Sea. —It's the four elements.
—It's a Hyperborean winter scene.
—a faint resemblance to a giant fish?
a Cape-Horner in a great hurricane;

half-foundered with its three dismantled masts
a whale, impaling himself upon the mast

Wizards vs. Lesbians did Moby Dick! (their justifications for it were as dumb as you'd expect.) Listening affirmed my feelings that any good poetry I dig out of here is cuz I started with good materials. It's Melville's sandbox and I'm just playing in it, etc. etc. But fwiw I like today's poem a lot :)

Scrimshandered from the last three pages of The Carpet Bag

I heard a forlorn creaking swinging sign
with a white, faint word — "The Spouter-Inn"
dilapidated wooden swinging sign
a gabled palsied leaning sharp bleak wind

these eyes are windows, this body the house.
What a pity they didn't stop up the chinks
But it's too late to make improvements now.
The verse is finished; the copestone, and the chips.

Euroclydon! pooh! What frosty night;
how Orion glitters; northern lights!
talk of oriental summer nights
Can he warm blue hands by northern lights?

Let us scrape the ice from frosted feet
and see what sort of place this "Spouter" may be.

Constructed of pages 7-8 of Moby Dick

Now having day, and still another night
It was a dubious-dark and dismal night,
gloom towards the north with darkness towards the night,
dear Ishmael, be sure to inquire the price

too jolly the red windows of "Fish Inn",
there came such rays, to melt ice inches hard,
asphaltic pavement,— Too jolly, again
I followed streets that took me waterward

the cheapest, dreary streets! blocks of black
a smoky light proceeding from a door
which stood invitingly a careless look,
I stumble over an ash-box in the porch.

—this, then, must needs be the sign of "The Trap".
a negro church; I back out of "The Trap"

I'm very endeared to rhyming a word with itself, and hope it seems less hacky in the context of black-out poems. I would dig doing a ghazal like this, but I would need to use a super common word like "whale".

I haven't settled on what to do with Melville's dated and racist language. Here I didn't want to erase that it's a black church specifically that Ishmael mistakes for a hotel, and whose ashtray ("trap") he trips over as he does. What a goober!

EDIT 4/22 - on the reread, Ishmael stumbles upon the black pastor delivering a sermon on blackness in all its forms, so it's a setup/mirror for iirc the sermon on whiteness that will be delivered in a few chapters at the (white) Nantucket whale church! I would definitely give this passage another cycle through the sonnetifyer.

scrimshandered from the tail end of Loomings

Chief among these motives was the whale
portentious and mysterious monster roused
the undeliverable perils of the whale;
a thousand Patagonian sights and sounds,

I am tormented with an everlasting itch for things remote.
I love to sail forbidden seas, and land on barbarous coasts.

Ingredients: Pages 3-4 of Moby Dick

passengers get sea-sick—don't sleep nights—
do not enjoy themselves, as a general thing;—
I never go as a passenger or the like
And as for cook,— I never fancied broiling —

No, when I go, I go before the mast,
plumb down into the forecastle, aloft
the royal mast head spar to spar, like grass
in a May meadow. unpleasant enough.

some old hunks of sea-captain orders me?
What does indignity amount to, weighed?
Do you think Gabriel thinks less of me,
cause I obey old hunks? Who ain't a slave?

The sea-captains may order me about—
so the universal thump is passed round.

Me and Melville are throwing a punctuation party, and you're all invited. Bring your favorite em dash.

A blackout sonnet made from pages 2-3 of Moby Dick

Say, you are in the country; land of lakes.
Take to there the most absent-minded of men
plunged in his deepest reveries—on his legs,
if water be in all that region.

a metaphysical artist. He desires
the dreamiest, shadiest most enchanting bit
thus tranced, though pine-tree shakes down its sighs
eye fixed upon the magic stream fore him.

Why did he need a trip to Rockaway Beach?
Why s every boys soul crazy to go to sea?
Why d Persians hold the sea holy? Why d the Greeks?
Surely this is not without meaning.

Narcissus drowns in oceans. this is key.
Now, I am in the habit of going to sea.

This one is pretty bad! Melville is using self-consciously romantic, fussy language here, whose ironic spark, if it had one, is killed dead by the sonnet ray. The volley of questions that comes afterwards makes for more interesting poetry.