Blog Post #12

"Life on Mars" by Tracy K. Smith (pg. 37-42)

This poem caught and held my attention more than any of the other poems in this collection for a few reasons. Originally, I thought "Life on Mars" was the name of the whole collection; I didn't know there was an actual poem called "Life on Mars". When I came across it, I was surprised that it was itself a poem. My first thought was "I better really pay attention to this one. It's gotta be important I mean it's what the whole collection is named after". I soon found that the more I tried to understand the poem, the more confused and disoriented I got. The first stanza got me hooked as it talked about dark matter and I thought it was going to be kind of sciency (which is probably the only type of poetry I could understand). I got completely thrown for a loop two stanzas later when it talks about a father who held his daughter and others captive in cells beneath his house. The rest of the poems snaps back and forth from a calm scientific discussion to a the ugly “prison” scene (I can’t really tell what context the different prisoner scenes are in and if the two main ones are even the same. Why is there this mixture of despair and almost pleasure? Do these prison cutaways have anything to do with sex?) to heavy existential analysis and questions. To say the least, this poem is jarring. Just when you think you know what’s going on and what’s coming next, it throws you a curveball. I felt uncomfortable while reading this I could barely make sense of what was going on. Then I had this thought that maybe that’s the intention. I tried to find out what the title had to do with anything because Mars was never even mentioned. Then it hit me. The poem is meant to make our own world’s different moving parts seem completely out of place in the context of one another. The productive scientific discussions are juxtaposed by the near-barbarism we see in the prison scenes. The poem seems like it is meant to show how alien our own planet is to itself, almost as if we are all living on Mars in a way. There is so much unknown about our world, so many anomalies, so many atrocities and delights happening side by side that everything seems alien to one another. Even the poem has out of place words to further get this point across. “The guards were under a tremendous amount of pleasure. I mean pressure” seems to contradict itself. Do the guards enjoy the situation or dread it? Later on in the same stanza, it says “Just kidding. I’m only talking about people having a good time, blowing off steam”. This basically undermines everything the speaker as said before. What can we believe, if anything? Is this a positive or negative environment? What does that have to do with anything else explored in the poem, such as the deep existential questions it asks? This poem really messed me up and I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone else thought to see if I am completely misinterpreting everything. For now, here’s an actual picture of me trying to understand this whole collection.