The Poetry Of Space
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“Beyond Earth’s Edge: The Poetry of Spaceflight,” Ed. Julie Swarstad Johnson and Christopher Cokinos, 2020.
Space exploration, this book suggests, is frequently seen by the general public in the same way as some hard-nosed engineers might look at poems – something to be interested in until you “grow up” and get to grips with the “real things” in life. It’s a theme this book explores and quickly demolishes.
If anything, humankind did not grow up until it moved outward from Earth, and reflected upon the experience. Just as photos capture wonders of space exploration far more movingly than any engineering report ever can, so poetry can capture elements a photo is incapable of sharing. And of course poetry, one of the earliest human art forms, has adapted for millennia. When the space age began, it was perfectly primed to capture the unknowable – the first steps into a wider cosmos.
There’s a strong link between science fiction and actual flight that is explored in the book – a reminder that the human imagination often traveled to places long before the reality. But with that also comes cynicism – particularly in the late-1960s-poems – as the moon, long seen as remote, pristine, and unreachable, is scuffed by bootprints and seen as a real place for the first time. Other poets, however, find a new, different sense of wonder. Can the romantic moon of old and the scientific moon that people visited coexist? Yes, they can. The indignation of footsteps “stamping the moon mortal” was as fleeting as the human visits. And just as elegiac as the brief loss of the romantic moon are the thoughts of poets reflecting on what was lost when humans stopped journeying there. While an explorer can describe what the moon is like, a poet can describe the sheer alien absence of the familiar in a way that pierces the heart. In two beautiful instances in this book, these spheres combine and the poet also happens to be a real spacefarer, writing first-hand.
Yet the beauty of this wonderfully diverse collection of poems, spanning the whole era of space exploration, is that on the whole these are not space folks attempting poetry. Instead, these are skilled poets adapting to news events, wondering how these new headlines fit into an already complex world of earthly concerns.
I’m surprised – although perhaps I shouldn’t be – to see how many famous poets glanced upon the space age. Did you know that WH Auden – albeit an old and curmudgeonly Auden – wrote about the first moon landing? And Neruda – the great Neruda! – deeply contemplated an early space mission. Updike gave a voice to the voiceless – the robotic probes exploring the solar system’s outer reaches. He reminds us, just as poems outlive the poets, that space probes will outlast us all.
This is a book to read slowly, and savor each page. There are elusive moments captured here – fragmentary glimpses I never thought could be said so well. The stitches of a spacesuit, for example, described as worn like a life-saving caress of the body. I would say their genius is poetic, but of course it is – they’re poems, after all.