What Sparks Poetry

In “A Moon’s Moon,” there is a “you” who is writing a poem at her desk on the surface of the moon in winter. Of course, most people don’t think of the moon as having seasons or being a convenient place to write a poem. It is hard to get to the moon, and many poets have resigned themselves to write on it from a distance. But sometimes it is winter on the moon, and you are writing a poem in it—that is what this poem says. What could that mean?

As it happens, I wrote this poem in April on the earth, though it was an unusual April. The pandemic lockdown of 2020 had begun the month before, and the world as we knew it had been shorn of normalcy. I was writing at a kitchen table on a laptop I had brought with me to the two-room cottage in the backyard of my partner’s parents’ house, an hour from the apartment in Brooklyn where we lived. Spring break at the art school where I had just begun to teach had been extended by two weeks, and for all I knew it would be extended indefinitely.

What I remember most about those early weeks, more than their terror and uncertainty, is the giddiness I felt as I wrote at that kitchen table. It resembled the thrill of those snowy winter mornings in my childhood when I turned on the television and saw the name of my school district scroll across the screen, which meant the school day had been canceled. “The absolute absence of burden,” writes Kundera, “causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”1 In those first weeks, unburdened by my usual obligations, I wrote with a fluency and freedom I hadn’t felt since childhood.

Of course, I was afraid that I would lose my job, that my parents and friends would die, that the parts of the world I loved would never return. My sense of lightness depended on having health, insurance, a resourced kinship network, a job I could do from home, and no children. It depended also on the sense that many of these could change, and on the fact that so many institutions I had depended on to project and work towards a future could suddenly be felt as fragile. My freedom was a function of a future that had begun to flicker. Gone was the guilt about the emails I had failed to answer, the prizes I had failed to win, the boxes I had failed to check: what could these matter when it was an achievement to get home safely from the grocery store?

At the end of May, my lightness and fluency would vanish suddenly. The news of George Floyd’s murder by the Minneapolis police produced in me (and clearly not just me) a kind of moral whiplash—a violent reminder that the worst of the structures from the pre-pandemic world had not gone anywhere, and that I was as enmeshed with them as ever. “A Moon’s Moon” was written a couple weeks before that happened and revised in the months after.

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That April, I came across an interview the poet Mary Ruefle had given in the early weeks of the pandemic in which she put her finger on what I too had been feeling:

Social isolation is a writer’s dream. It’s a writer’s dream come true. Everyone I’ve talked to among my writer friends, we all are kind of ashamed, but we have to admit, we love it. But it’s also fraught with a great deal of anxiety and pain, because we pay attention, and we are aware of the illness and death and the loss of income for people….When your dream is fulfilled through such terrible suffering, it becomes a very strange thing. Does that make sense?

It made sense to me. Like her, I had been thinking about that tension between the dream of writing in a room of one’s own and the knowledge that part of what the writer is supposed to do is “pay attention” to the world outside that room. The problem of poetry’s relation to the social—and particularly concerning that poetry called “lyric,” which has often been idealized or demonized as turning away from the social as such—had been on my mind long before Covid, but quarantine renewed it in surprising ways.

Early in the writing of “A Moon’s Moon,” I realized it would be a poem that thought about the figure of someone working, as Agnes Martin put it, “with [her] back to the world.” I found myself thinking also about what Adorno calls “the lyric work of art’s withdrawal into itself, its self-absorption, its detachment from the social surface,” which, he adds, “is socially motivated behind the author’s back.”2 If you are writing a poem on the surface of the moon, you would likely have your back to the world, at least the back of your head: while you are absorbed in the poem on your desk, you are looking down, and the world is floating in the sky above you, as if its immensity were weightless. A blue balloon.

But the “you” doesn’t stay absorbed for long. At the end of the very sentence where we meet her, her absorption in her work is broken by the sight of “a cloudy planet floating in the sky.” First, the poem says, you see the slowly turning continents and oceans visible on that planet’s surface, but then the mind leaps from the visible to the imagined: “There must be people taking a subway.” And this train of thought continues through a litany of other forms of social life that must be there. Suddenly, you want to be where the people are. You imagine traveling towards that world in the cockpit of a spaceship: “with a few keystrokes, up you go, lifted by a bright white stream of snow and ash.” But then the poem reminds you that this departure “does not actually happen,” that in fact “you are still seated at your desk on the surface of the moon in winter.” In many other tales of flight, the protagonist’s dream is to leave their life on earth for some more fantastical location, like the moon; in this one, it is a social life on earth that is the dream.

From a certain perspective, it is a naïve dream. Just look at how much of the social it leaves out. The “you” does not imagine a bomb exploding in a refugee camp, or a headless child dangling in her father’s arms, or any of the other images brought to me lately by my phone from Gaza. It doesn’t imagine a police officer pressing his knee on the neck of a Black man who is saying he can’t breathe. There isn’t even a traffic jam. Instead, the images trend toward a happy sociality where competition takes the form of play, where people are brought together to see and hear each other, even to pray for each other. A subway, a basketball game, a poetry reading: forms of public transportation, each depending on some degree of trust across strangers and their differences. One could accuse this “you” of using the cloudy planet as a screen on which to project what she desires, which often happens when one dreams of a distant place or looks at clouds.

But if we listen to those who have been to the moon, we learn they often experience something that makes them feel unusually connected to their fellow travelers on earth. In the 1980s, Frank White called this phenomenon “the overview effect,” a cognitive and emotional shift that happens when one sees earth from a high orbit, leading to a sense of self-transcendence and a broadening of one’s social identifications. Descriptions of it make it sound a bit like samadhi and a bit like taking ecstasy—a drug whose name comes from the Greek ekstasis, “to stand outside of or transcend oneself.” Here is Edgar Mitchell, an astronaut on Apollo 14, describing his experience of it:

You develop an instant global consciousness, a people orientation, an intense dissatisfaction with the state of the world, and a compulsion to do something about it….You want to grab a politician by the scruff of the neck and drag him a quarter of a million miles out and say, “Look at that, you son of a bitch.”3

“And to be fit / for the world, one must periodically leave it,” writes Geoffrey G. O’Brien, perhaps with a version of such a departure from the world in mind: an away that leads back towards.4

My poem didn’t begin with anybody on the moon. The first draft began with the sentence “I’ve always wanted to compose a poem out of ash and snow, but never have.” But as soon as the moon arrived, I started to read through testimony by astronauts about their experience of seeing earth from space. And it occurred to me that this heart-opening experience they speak of, this “people orientation,” could be just what is needed by a person on the surface of the moon in winter. How lucky they are that the earth is waiting for them right there in the sky.

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The surface of the moon in winter is a figure for isolation. It could be a happy isolation, the kind that writers and artists often seek to do their work, which we often dignify with the name “solitude.” Its “winter” could imply what Wallace Stevens had in mind in “The Snow Man,” a state in which one sees “nothing that is not there”—that is, without projection or illusion.5 But that isolation might also be the kind that isn’t happy. It could be the kind that comes with being close to people in the wrong way, or the one to which you flee when you have experienced wrong closeness, where intimacy is a vector for harm. And the winter of wrong closeness is a different sort of winter. It can make for icy or ashen states of feeling: loneliness, hatred, fear, despair. Its isolation is what happens when you try to protect yourself from the pain of these feelings by going numb or running away to a basement or a mountain, to a screen or drug or book or “work,” to an idealized heaven or an idealized past or some other winterization of the mind. All these are flight paths to a moon where you don’t have to deal with the otherness that gives you pain, or with the otherness whose warmth towards you would threaten to thaw your heart enough to let that pain rise to the surface. “The deft skirting of despair,” writes Louise Glück, “is a life lived on the surface, intimidated by depth, a life that refuses to be used by time, which it tries instead to dominate or evade.”6

One of my poem’s models for the person who runs away was a muscular blue man named Dr. Manhattan, an Oppenheimer-esque superhero in the graphic novel Watchmen (1986), who flees to Mars when his life on earth gets complicated. His complications have a lot to do with some familiar tropes of American masculinity. On earth, he leaves his aging lover for a younger woman—he himself is frozen at thirty—and is later accused on live TV of being the reason she has cancer. He is responsible for the deaths of countless people at home and abroad while working during the Cold War as a superweapon for the Pentagon. (“The morality of my activities escapes me” he says, as if watching himself on television.)7 His young lover leaves him in a rage when she discovers that, while they were having sex, there was another manifestation of him working on his research in the lab next door. (“Laurie, my work is at an important stage!” he protests.)8 His ex tells him, “Jon, you know how every damn thing in this world fits together except people!”9 “I’m tired of this world; these people,” he says.10 “I’m tired of being caught in the tangle of their lives.” And in a flash, he’s millions of miles away.

In a spread of frames I had in mind while writing, he is sitting naked in a lotus position with his back to us, hovering a few meters above the surface of a desert of pink sand on Mars, a landscape degree zero. Beyond him is a night sky full of stars. “Below me, in the sand,” he says to himself, “the secret shape of my creation is concealed, buried in the sand’s future.”11 Over the next few frames, he uses his power to raise a massive chrome palace from the sand, its architecture adapted from the morphology of mechanical devices for keeping time: an hourglass, the gears inside a watch, its pointing hands. The palace is symmetrical and without interior, a figure of perfect order rising from entropy, conspicuously free of life. The product, perhaps, of what Dickinson has called “a formal feeling.”12 As it rises across the spread of pages, its maker remains seated in a lotus position at the center of each frame—an unmoved mover, the Buddha sitting in a lotus flower, a figure of detachment, purity, enlightenment.

And not just enlightenment but the Enlightenment. In her introduction to The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt writes that the widespread public reaction to the 1957 launch of Sputnik into space as “a step toward escape from men’s imprisonment to the earth” lays bare a Luciferian impulse in Western scientific modernity for “rebellion against human existence as it has been given” in exchange “for something he has made himself.”13 I think we see that same fantasy of autonomy in the naked blue man on Mars: a superpowered scientist who felt trapped by his entanglements on earth, and who has escaped to a place where he plans to make all he needs for himself out of himself alone. And if there must be some source material, some otherness from which to generate, it is the proto-matter of that particulate pink sand—a figure for atomic particles and the empty time an hourglass keeps. Playdough that no one has played with yet.

Maybe people go to the moon to say goodbye to “human existence as it has been given”—as if they wouldn’t bring it with them. To the moon, or Mars: some putative tabula rasa where we think we won’t have to deal with the messiness of otherness, of our entanglements with others, of the ways we have failed them and been failed. Just look at the poem that person on the moon is writing: one negation after another, as if one could achieve a mind of winter by getting rid of the wind. But when she sees the moon’s moon in the sky, she forgets her desire to sweep things clean. She desires instead to be present again to others on the earth.

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While I was writing this essay, I watched a video on Instagram of a UK-based poet and rapper named Usaama, who was reacting to another video he had embedded in the corner of his own. The embedded video showed a man in Gaza, the musician Mohand Al Ashram, playing guitar for a circle of children in an alley. The children are singing and clapping along; they seem to be having the time of their lives.

Usaama was trying to explain why images of joy and play like this one hit him harder, in some ways, than the images of death and destruction that the Israeli siege of Gaza has given us in abundance. “I feel like I’m experiencing these kids for who they are, not what was done to them,” he says.14 “I’m seeing a glimpse of how they look in the light of freedom, and it’s too much.” And then he connects the “too much” of this feeling to a pattern of running away from moments of joy and play with children in his own life:

I struggle with moments of joy and play, I struggle with holding them. And I found myself actively distancing myself from moments of joy and play because it’s too much and I’ve got work to do. And holding those two realities simultaneously was too much. And I don’t really have a bandage for that other than to say that when I have apologized to people for my lack of presence, they have understood my apology. And that children don’t hold grudges. They just carry on from where you left off. They’re just happy that you’re here, you know. They don’t ask you why you didn’t text in the way that adults do.

I felt an immediate connection across the mediation of these frames: to the children dancing, to the man playing guitar so the children can have some joy, and to the man watching this with wet eyes, struggling to hold the happiness of this moment alongside the hell in which these children have been forced to live. I have the sense he is fighting his impulse to hide invulnerably away on the moon so he might stay present to these children, to us, and to himself.

“We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope?” asks Isabella Hammad.15

After October 7th, I cried every day for three weeks. I cried alone in my office so my partner would not see me. I found myself actively distancing myself from moments of joy and play, though “actively” implies more choice than I felt I had. I felt dead inside and far away. I cried for the horror of what Hamas had done, for the decades of occupation that made them believe such a horrific act of violence was worth doing, and for the horror of what, even before the bombs began, I knew Israel would do, and which one year later it is still doing. I cried for the Israelis whose own hearts had been so hardened by trauma and loss that they had learned to live with occupation and were going to live with their military waging a genocidal war in Gaza—killing tens of thousands, wounding and maiming a hundred thousand, displacing nearly the whole population, starving them, exploding whole buildings full of people, demolishing the infrastructure that makes life possible, flooding the world with images of pulverized children and parents in an agony so unspeakable it feels shameful simply to look at them and shameful to look away.

I cried also because I had seen something like this moment coming two decades ago, when I lived for a year in Jerusalem and witnessed the occupation for myself. I had gone there because the violence of the second intifada had opened a wound in that land that was also somehow a wound in me, a Jew born in America, and I needed to figure out how deep it went and what I could do to heal it. I wanted to fight the occupation, and I tried in the ways I could find—by direct action in the West Bank, by listening to Palestinians speak their experience and trying to get others to listen, by writing angry, hopeful poems. But eventually, because I saw Israel careening hopelessly to the right, and because I was tired of feeling angry and helpless every time I read an Israeli newspaper, and in the end because I had come back to America where there were plenty of other things to worry over and enjoy, I put my despair about that world on ice and went on more or less with my life. It was a very ordinary thing for an American to do.

Is “A Moon’s Moon” an angry, hopeful poem? It is certainly a lonely one. And it ends in disappointment, with the “you” returned to her sole self:

You picture yourself in a helmet of glass, and a silver suit with copper buckles, strapping into the seat of a cockpit aimed at the little world. With a few keystrokes, up you go, lifted by a bright white stream of snow and ash. Of course, this does not actually happen. You are, after all, still seated at your desk on the surface of the moon in winter, which shows no signs of abating. And weeks pass by like windows on a moving train.

But then I think, no, it is too simple to say this poem is all disappointment. It is true that the person on the moon in winter is stranded there. But the images of happy sociality she dreams of going toward, though they are in the sky, are not those of some utopia or heaven: they are images drawn from an ordinary social life on earth. That life is available to us right now, we who live “in the light of freedom.” And we have seen this life is still alive in Gaza too; it is not too late for us to decide it is precious and protect it. I think it is very hopeful that a person on the surface of moon in winter—whether she has gone there after great pain or simply because she was free to go—should be able to desire to leave it.

1. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, 5.
2. Theodor W. Adorno, “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” 343.
3. “Edgar Mitchell’s Strange Voyage,” People Magazine, 8 April 1974
4. Geoffrey G. O’Brien, Metropole, 4.
5. Wallace Stevens, Frank Kermode, and Joan Richardson, Wallace Stevens, 8.
6. Louise.Glück, Proofs and Theories, 134.
7. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-) #4, 14.
8. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-) #3, 5.
9. Alan Moore, 5.
10. Alan Moore, Watchmen (1986-) #4, 25.
11. Alan Moore, 26.
12. Emily Dickinson, The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, 162.
13. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd Edition, 2–3.
14. “Usaama (@yousaama) • Instagram Photos and Videos.” https://www.instagram.com/p/DARDUc9IJbQ/
15. Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger, 60.