Poets in Space: the First Writer-In-Residence of the Night Sky
an application to be the first Poet in Space, by Emily Blair
Nikki Giovanni took a boat of poets and artists to Antarctica. When Nikki wants to do something, it’s a good idea and a mandate, a need and an opportunity. As a professor, she often spoke in metaphor, shook the conversation to its roots. Being in a room with her is to experience her voice for a moment. And she talked about Antarctica, and how they needed poets there.
I hadn’t thought, before, that poets were needed anywhere. We simply existed, silly, idle, tinkering with language like marionette makers, I thought, doing not much, but that’s because I had only read Frost, T.S. Eliot, some Plath. It felt like a project, writing poetry, like needlepoint. I knew I wanted it to be different. In many ways, having Nikki Giovanni as an Intro to Creative Writing professor saved my interest in writing, because I couldn’t go on much longer pretending like I understood the opaque poems boys around me wrote, flexing their muscles. Instead, I needed a need.
**
As a child, someone bought me a subscription to National Geographic Kids magazine. I remembered the glossy spreads, dainty magazines always themed narrowly. Maybe my great-aunt gave me the subscription as a gift; I loved to read almanacs, atlases, and encyclopedias cover to cover. Between weekly library trips in the summer, I read gardening guides and handyman how-to books, learned how to repair clogged toilets and polish silver and eradicate pill bugs.
One National Geographic was about space. Little cartoon kids carried oversized helmets and climbed up a cartoon space shuttle filled with facts. I still love facts. Every National Geographic Kids edition had some graphic like this, some upright picture for the kids to climb and show different numbers of things increasing. One of the little cartoon kids stated that astronauts had to have a certain natural eyesight, which NASA has since revised as a requirement, but back then, my eyesight was already nearsighted 20/70 in third grade and fated to get much worse.
I realized I could not be an astronaut. It was the first thing that I had ever been unable to dream of, even if I wanted to.
**
I watch a lot of documentary television. One series, Netflix’s Chef’s Table, follows one extremely successful and famous chef per episode. These chefs are always beautiful because they can make beautiful dishes from the ingredients that you and I could not. They are always interesting because this is television. Most shockingly, they always have loads of archival footage of them as children, videos and pictures. When these intentionally glitchy and yellowed frames fill the screen, I wonder how the conversation goes, these chefs with their parents, about needing this footage. I wonder if parents ever take a video thinking, This will show my child who they are later. This will remind them of themselves.
A Season 6 episode of Chef’s Table follows around Sean Brock, a famous and talented chef who I had never heard of, even though we are both from southwestern Virginia, a relatively narrow slice of the world. Brock worked his way up with no background in the culinary world and now owns beautiful Southern restaurants and makes beautiful Appalachian dishes. The camera lingers on jars of pickled things, plates with carefully dolloped sauce, and high exposure cuts of meat. But Brock also goes to farms and picks out what will become food.
I have an interest in space like Brock has an interest in a pig farm – I don’t care how it gets done, but I care about the results. I have to go there and make sure what I need gets to me, to all of us. With a moral conviction that strong, sometimes you get a little irrational.
So, I think I should be the writer in residence of the night sky, beginning my term at the International Space Station.
**
I keep writing about my wife and me floating in space, tethered together by a life-giving, air-supplying cord. It’s quarantine, which doesn’t mean anything yet, because we don’t know how futile this time is, or how necessary, and we won’t know for years.
I don’t want to write about Covid-19 because I don’t want to write that I baked bread or that I had a lot of time to reconnect with myself and then my dad die, because my dad is still going to work every day at a factory, and then I have this essay in the world talking about making fucking focaccia in this I had this blissful, cozy quarantine and really my dad is dead, and I’m mourning an incalculable loss while this essay mocks my former smugness at my seemingly secure place in this pandemic.
I say my wife because we’re engaged, and we’ll be married soon, and because I think of my fiancé like my wife already. I don’t know what it means to be a good wife to anyone because I never expected to marry, never wanted to, don’t want children, have no interest in the adventurous, afraid of heights, no plans to live abroad, have never wanted even for a moment to live an uncomfortable life. I want a comfortable life. My wife makes me feel adventurous and comfortable, at once. I think of space the same way – some comfortable and beautiful leap.
I’m a penny pincher because I want the security, but other people who want comfort spend all their money on things. I wish I found comfort in objects. I’m learning to spend my money on things, and by “things” I mean a washing machine, a couch, a dining room table, none of which comes flat packed as particle board. I don’t own many things, but the books in my house sit in piles and piles, too many for the four bookcases, spilling over on every topic. My wife tolerates the books in part because I tolerate the houseplants, fifty and counting, which they bring home. They love that part of Lowe’s where plants are placed to die. The plants are cheap, and sometimes they live and sometimes they don’t. Some bird eats our sunflower seeds right out of the ground and I want to cry but I don’t. When I plant a row of onions at 9:00 p.m. one night, because I am sad and frozen all day, my wife says I will write a poem about this in a year. This is how I know I am a poet. My wife found me in that dying plant part of Lowe’s too, I think, and tended to me tenderly, made me bloom for the first time.
When I say space, I don’t mean science. I think of space how Sean Brock must think of farms – a collection of sustaining pieces. A means to a delicious end.
I haven’t stopped thinking about that episode of Chef’s Table since I watched it weeks ago. It’s that I recognized Brock’s hometown, sure, and he cooks Appalachian food, something I didn’t know existed until I was in a college classroom forty-five minutes from my Appalachian home, where I had been born and raised, but this isn’t news to me anymore. No, I don’t think of Brock’s Chef Table episode because it’s a new idea.
Maybe it’s Brock’s need to cook, in-born and seemingly of himself entirely, that makes my chest hurt. Other Chef’s Table episodes are insufferable in their pretention – so-and-so studied at the French Laundry, so-and-so’s familial safety net sent them to New York City without a care in the world, so-and-so’s gastromolecular pea foam revolutionized the restaurant industry at a price point far, far away. Watching Brock cook on the back of his pickup truck, covered in tattoos and in an ever-present trucker cap, he looked a lot like the guys I have smoked cigarettes with on back porches between punk show sets. He left home and went to Charleston, South Carolina for culinary school, and I imagined he had done so at great risk. He discusses how hard he worked, he almost worked himself to death, and then nearly to death again with the alcohol to deal with the illness that followed, and he didn’t understand how everyone else wasn’t working seven days a week, sixteen hours a day.
I don’t understand how anyone says they want to do something and then doesn’t do it. That’s why I’ve stopped saying I want things in the poetry industry – because then, I have to fail.
**
In the presence of Nikki Giovanni, everything is possible. When Nikki said that she wanted to go to Antarctica, I knew she would go to Antarctica. Nikki is of every part of this earth. Her voice should reach every corner.
I want to go to space because I need the material. Except that I haven’t said everything I need to say about this earth yet. But if it’s so life altering, shouldn’t a poet do it?
Which is to say, a PR firm can’t do anything for me. I don’t trust them. I don’t trust NASA, because bless their hearts, they are still of the government, as much as we want to think of them as loveable, dorky, nerdy boys in some basement in Florida. Scientists should do science and speak science into the world, but we need poetry books about space, about looking down at the whole world.
And the night sky! In the next fifty years we may obliterate it completely not only with light pollution, a known scourge that hides the stars from most of us, but by super-bright SpaceX satellites, which could drown out stars if they go unregulated.
Scientists can talk to me about lumens and refractions, about reflections and lightwaves, and I won’t understand any of it, no matter how much you try, but I think I can say something about the night sky, if you give me a chance. I think I have to – I think you need me to. I think we all need a poet in space.