If you like pop music, sci-fi, and unknowable terrain
Life on Mars by Tracy K. Smith
VIOLETS’ PICKS 003
Where I Found It
I was beginning to worry that I wasn’t reading “real” poetry. I had been defending poetry but did I even know what I was talking about? What didn’t I know? What hadn’t I felt? Was I just at the tip of the good poetry iceberg? I knew I hadn’t actually read “all poetry”. Not even close. And I wanted to get closer. I decided to go through a list of award-winning poetry collections and pick a few that sounded interesting and had nice covers. (Yes, my very important criteria.)
In a parallel non-poetry reading timeline, I’d also been obsessing over all the images that had come back from the James Webb space telescope, spilling all the secrets stars had been keeping for billions of years. So of course, down the list of award-winning and expert-approved poetry and coming across this, I found what I hoped to be a Venn diagram of things of wonder: language and space. An ultra wondrous pack, perhaps?
First Impressions
The first thing you see is the striking space image. Love it.
The second thing you see is a big gold sticker: Pulitzer Prize winner.
See above. I was wary of award-winners, not because I don’t think they deserve their accolades, but because they’re already well celebrated, their talent well-confirmed, their work beaming in the narrow and low-wattage spotlight that is a poetry prize—yet still, a spotlight. I often find myself not “getting” award-winning writing, my brain too trained in the direction of shiny objects that anything too complex or abstract tends to fly over me, but, after retraining my brain to read words and not just glance at pictures, I wanted to see if I was ready to test my limits.
The last thing you see is the title. Heard it before? Yeah, it’s the same name as that very famous Bowie song. Poetry, space, and pop music? Was I looking at an Ikigai hot spot and not just a run-of-the-mill Venn diagram of fun and wonderful things?
They Said It
With allusions to David Bowie and interplanetary travel, Life on Mars imagines a soundtrack for the universe to accompany the discoveries, failures, and oddities of human existence. In these brilliant new poems, Tracy K. Smith envisions a sci-fi future sucked clean of any real dangers, contemplates the dark matter that keeps people both close and distant, and revisits the kitschy concepts like “love” and “illness” now relegated to the Museum of Obsolescence. These poems reveal the realities of life lived here, on the ground, where a daughter is imprisoned in the basement by her own father, where celebrities and pop stars walk among us, and where the poet herself loses her father, one of the engineers who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. With this remarkable third collection, Smith establishes herself among the best poets of her generation.
-From the publisher
Lines to Remember
He leaves no tracks. Slips past, quick as a cat. That's Bowie For you: the Pope of Pop, coy as Christ. Like a play Within a play, he's trademarked twice. The hours Plink past like water from a window A/C. We sweat it out, Teach ourselves to wait. Silently, lazily, collapse happens. But not for Bowie. He cocks his head, grins that wicked grin. Time never stops, but does it end? and how many lives before take-off, before we find ourselves beyond ourselves, all glam-glow, all twinkle and gold? The future isn't what it used to be. Even Bowie thirsts For something good and cold. Jets blink across the sky Like migratory souls. -From “Don’t You Wonder, Sometimes?”
Sometimes, what i see is a library in a rural community. all the tall shelves in the big open room. and the pencils in a cup at circulation, gnawed on by the entire population. the books have lived here all along, belonging for weeks at a time to one or another in the brief sequence of family names, speaking (at night mostly) to a face, a pair of eyes. the most remarkable lies. -From “My God, It’s Full of Stars”
You lie there kicking like a baby, waiting for God himself To lift you past the rungs of your crib. What Would your life say if it could talk? -From “No Fly Zone”
You Might Like This If…
You were also struck, stopped, stretched by the James Webb images reaching as far out as billions of years ago and brought back down to earth for our naive and brief lives to see. When you listen to music, the sounds of words that just “go” together, in surprising and delightful ways, make some kind of magic in your brain and your body. Bowie is your hero. You’re a pop music aficionado who sometimes feels a little too serious or contemplative for the music you like—but whatever, when you’re at the end of the line, you want orchestral pop to be playing. You always thought being an astronaut would be the coolest thing ever but then you learned all about what it really takes and decided to stick to earthly pursuits, living vicariously through entertainment. Maybe some Kubrick and Coldplay. Occasionally, you’re reminded of the grand scale of the universe and you still can’t tell if it scares you or stills you. You let out a soft gasp when reading “My God, It’s Full of Stars”—and it took you a while to get past the title, five words that hit you deeper and deeper until it feels like your entire brain has changed. A slowed pulse? New synapses forming? You don’t know. Something.
This Was the Colour Of…
Darkness and the fractals of light moving through space and dust: blue, red, orange, purple, gold. How can something so wide and open contain within it so much vibrancy? How can something so empty contain so much? All the hues and sheens of metal and gloss and molasses, oscillating between light and shadow but mostly shadow, all its crescendos and minuets and thrums captured in colour.
Details
Year: 2011
Author: Tracy K. Smith, who first watched 2001: A Space Odyssey when she was four
Location: USA
Publisher: Greywolf Press
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
