An ocean cruise (days of no possible escape from the company of people one will probably deeply dislike) was my idea of hell long, long before the Ruby Princess horror unfolded.

Imagine then my nods of agreement, my murmurs of "Right on baby!" when in a new essay in the online Public Domain Review I find quotations from enthusiastic cruise-boycotting armchair travellers.

In his luxuriantly illustrated piece Postures Of Transport: Sex, God and Rocking Chairs (how could anyone resist reading a piece with a title like that!) scholar and wit Hunter Dukes quotes a wise man recommending in 1884, "Get a packet of sea salt and put it in a pail of hot water beside you."

"Then recline on a rocking-chair after having devoured hastily a fat ham-sandwich. Rock yourself violently and inhale the salt steam. It's every bit as good as a steamboat journey, and a great deal cheaper."

Still on that theme, the superiority of armchair sea travel over actual travel on actual sea in actual ships, Dukes has this lovely passage. He notes how in an 1885 novel by Joris-Karl Huysmans the novelist's "reclusive protagonist Jean des Esseintes fingers rolls of nautical sail; inhales lime and salt steam; reads [while sitting in his rocking chair] guidebooks [about the sea]. The result? Something like virtual reality."

Huysman describes how "Thus, without stirring he [Huysman's protagonist] enjoyed the rapid motions of a long sea voyage ... The secret lies in knowing how to proceed, how to concentrate deeply enough to produce the hallucination and succeed in substituting the dream reality for the reality itself ... What is the use of moving, when one can travel on a chair so magnificently?"

Dukes' whole essay is great fun to read, especially his funny, explicit discussion of sex and rocking chairs, causing me to think quite differently of my own home's old rocking chair, the adventures it may have had before I found it, characterfully scratched and stained, in a second-hand shop and brought it back to my chaste home in my sexually inhibited Canberra suburb. How dull it, my rocking chair, may be finding its present life. Very sturdily built, it is bound to outlast me and may one day go on to a better, more bohemian home.

Overall, though, Dukes' piece's celebrations of armchair/rocking chair travel seem especially timely in these times when true travel to far away places is impossible. Here is a sweet verse by Arthur Macy that Dukes finds in a 1907 edition of the magazine The Youth's Companion. It is good advice for us all.

When I do not wish to stay

At my home I go away;

And my trusty rocking chair

Knows the road to everywhere.

Up and down the parlour floor,

Travelling twenty times or more ...

Then I make believe that we

Are two thousand miles at sea.

As well as being ideal for sexual activities (if Dukes is to be believed) rocking chairs are great to sit in/ride on while reading poetry.

I read a great deal of poetry and was saddened this week by news of the death of the wonderful US poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti.

I had been hoping to ask his advice about creating and establishing the position of Canberra Poet Laureate. Appointed as San Francisco's first poet laureate in 1998, he lived almost all of his wonderfully provocative and iconoclastic writing life in that city. He died there on Monday. He was 101.

MORE IAN WARDEN:

As I renew my occasional campaign to have Canberra establish a role of city poet or poet laureate (I have thundered about this for some years and the popular triumph of USA National Youth Poet Laureate Amanda Gorman at the Biden inauguration gives me a reason to thunder anew) poets like Ferlinghetti are much on my mind.

Ferlinghetti is just the kind of poet whose poems one would use when evangelising about poetry (on behalf of the City Poet cause) to people (like most of the ACT's MLAs) who are frightened of poetry and/or imagine they could never be given a beguiling buzz by it.

One would never try to evangelise to these unfortunates with the very finest poetry (of Keats, say, of Wordsworth or of Emily Dickinson) for one feels sure they would find it too difficult to understand. Instead one would evangelise to them with Ferlinghetti's poetry because much of it, written to be performed to fun-loving poetry-tickled audiences rather than be read by lonely scholars in their studies, is rollicking and approachable.

His famous poem Underwear will be a good one to evangelise with.

For a start, everyone with a pulse pricks up their ears at the evocative word that is the poem's title. Yes, I think I will e-circulate it today, to tenderise them to the idea of a Canberra City Poet, to the members of the Legislative Assembly.

If it is the first poem they have ever seen they may notice, reading it, how it doesn't bite them, how it may even make them laugh. They'll see too how it manages to say the occasional profound thing but without shirtfronting you as it says it.

So, for example, in Underwear we find Ferlinghetti insisting that "poetry is the underwear of the soul".

How profoundly true that is.