instruments of destruction unedited lyrics

#Instruments of destruction unedited lyrics full#

Our own split globe.” These lines question the limits of human imagination to think beyond our own boundaries. Niu suggests that humans will “praise / anything with hemispheres,” anything that mirrors “our soft, halved / brains. The poem’s first two words, “As if,” carry a heavy load, introducing both a postulation and a critique. “As if,” Niu says, the universe must be perceived by human senses in order to exist in a meaningful way. Niu recognizes humankind’s tendency to use ourselves as a baseline for understanding what life is––how it manifests, exists, and interacts with other life. Much in the same way that Smith recognizes that “we like to think of it as parallel to what we know, / Only bigger,” Niu suggests that humankind is prone to looking for self-identification as we look toward outer space: For example, Niu is interested in the anthropocentrism that Smith also critiques in her poem––the concept that humans are at the center of the universe. In this way, Niu is enacting a mode of homage I might call an “update”––a response poem penned years later that reshapes and responds to similar themes. Yet between the publication of Smith’s poem in 2011 and Niu’s in 2020, the world has seen massive progress in the scope of space exploration as well as existential events that have shifted how many of us perceive space and time. So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back. A reader can hear the two lines in unison, Smith’s final lines and Niu’s first, as if nothing but a blip, a single stanza break, has occurred between them:

#Instruments of destruction unedited lyrics full#

“By These Things We Live” is nearly an extension of “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” especially when you consider the similarity between Niu’s opening lines and Smith’s last moment of revelation. Rain, earthquakes, the bark of wild dogs. Until its round tips redden and drop off.Īway in space, they play our best and proudest sounds: They are enough, and drive home from work. Unfinished, spells his name in the notes, Niu’s poem first appeared in the literary magazine Inverted Syntax :Īs if the universe would not be much without usĪnything with hemispheres, a waist.

This is where “By These Things We Live” by Stephanie Niu, an homage poem to Smith’s “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” begins. Smith’s long poem culminates in the stunning final moment when the Hubble Telescope sends home its first clear pictures: “My God, It’s Full of Stars” comprises five structurally and sonically distinct sections of verse that each approach how we comprehend the incomprehensible factors of space and time.

Of an outmoded design,” to “those last scenes of Kubrick’s 2001 / When Dave is whisked into the center of space / Which unfurls in an aurora of orgasmic light.” Indeed, the poem touches on many past attempts at communicating with alien life––in both reality and in art––from the interstellar “Arecibo” radio broadcast in 1974 (“This message is going out to all of space. Across nearly 100 lines, “My God, It’s Full of Stars” attempts to metaphorize the beyond, including my personal favorite, as a rural library in which all “the pencils / In a cup at Circulation gnawed on by the entire population.” But the poem is also an exercise in remembering how the future was anticipated by previous generations, visions that often seem quaint and out of touch with contemporary anticipations. On set, it’s shot after shot till Kubrick is happy,Įach of these homages represents a different means by which Smith grapples with her cataclysmic grief in the wake of her father’s death, which she explores throughout her book Life on Mars (Graywolf, 2011), in which “My God, It’s Full of Stars” appears humanity’s place within a vast and unknowable universe and our desire to capture outer space and its mysteries through scientific and artistic means. Smith borrows the title of her poem from the novelization of 2001 that also followed the short story: perfectly at ease in the never-ending / Night of space.” The poem also alludes to the actor Charlton Heston, who, as critic Andrea Rogers aptly notes, serves as “a stand-in for a bygone era, desperately peddling an outdated model of the future.” (“For all I know, I was the last true man on this earth,” Smith’s Heston says, referencing his leading role in the 1964 zombie apocalypse film, The Last Man on Earth.) And, notably, the poem pays homage to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Arthur C. It eulogizes her father, who worked on the Hubble Telescope, “bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find. Smith’s poem “ My God, It’s Full of Stars” enacts several modes of homage.