Week 6 Poem of the Week: “sending yearning to mars” by Claire Laurence

sending yearning to mars

after teaching the captive area 51 alien specimen about love,
loss, sex, jealousy, possession, desire, desperation, the gap
between you and me, monogamy, the human vulnerability to
extremes of temperature and shifts in time zone, the need for sleep
and someone to hold you while you sleep, hours, romance, family, forever, the
vast expanse of space that separates us and them, then and only then do i
arrange my flashcards and say so. so now we will learn about yearning.
when they watch me they are still. all the time inside the room is mine
and still i feel i’m running out of it. i think about the bed i left this morning
and the you-shaped gap i found in it, and all the ways to touch you and
the chances that i didn’t take. their maybe-eyes don’t blink at me. i think,
how must it feel to stay inside this room? back home, did you have space
to roam, mars fields and mars lakes, towering mars skyscrapers, a mars house
and mars family? did you promise to love them forever, which on mars
is twice as long as it is on earth? i think, i said i’d love you forever and i meant it.
twice as long as on mars. i say, to yearn is to miss a thing you loved and lost.
when they watch me they are still. their maybe-eyes don’t blink at me.

Image credits: Keira Quirk

After reading her “Tumblr poetry” style poem, we spoke to Claire to find out more.

From the get-go, Claire raises some interesting points and poses us some key questions when I ask her about the inspirations behind sending yearning to mars. “I think modernity is increasingly presenting this massive conundrum: is it better to turn inwards, to close personal relationships, or look outwards, to enormous global conflicts, issues, and solutions? I don’t think the two are antithetical or incompatible, which is the idea this poem tries to get at.

“There’s hints of brutality and exploitation in the ‘capture’ of the alien, who function in the poem kind of as a synecdoche for all the beautiful things humankind – and especially the West – have destroyed in the name of ‘progress’. In the poem, the ultimate height of this ‘progress’ is the implied colonisation of Mars, the increasingly popular project of which epitomises, in my opinion, the human capacity for destruction and abandonment.

“But there’s also a strong link between the emotionality of the speaker and the emotional life of the alien, which the speaker imagines as being equivalent to their own. And of course, the speaker is complicit in this violence; they’re literally indoctrinating the alien! I didn’t want to position myself or the speaker outside the discourse or make them appear superior. The blessing and curse of modernity is that everything is bound to everything else, and it’s almost impossible to extricate yourself from those systems of exploitation.”

Image credits: Keira Quirk

After conceding that her first attempts at writing poetry when she first became a teenager were “of course, abysmal”, she notes that she now writes “quite a lot”. “The overwhelmingly recurrent theme of my poetry at the moment is just how terrible and yet magical it is to exist as an individual human being and a species in a world absolutely skewered with existential threat. I think it’s very rare and beautiful and painful; it’s also, at the end of the day, the only thing we actually can do, to continue to exist. A lot of my poetry at the moment is end-of-days climate apocalypse poetry, asking the question “What now?”

Adding that she’s wholly aware that in the current climate her poetry might seem to some to be “insanely tone-deaf”, she makes a point of highlighting, “I’d like to just note that I’m conscious of how incredibly privileged I am. For many people in the West, the looming threat of environmental devastation is a creeping tragedy which will probably see its most extreme manifestations a couple of generations after we are dead. There are millions of people on Earth who are not so lucky, and for whom death is a reality of the present moment. I can’t begin to understand the complexity of such a position.”

“In no particular order”, Claire then offers us a list of her inspirations: “Emily Dickinson, Leonard Cohen, John Clare, Li Shangyin, Mary Oliver, Charlotte Mew, Robert Frost, Mahmoud Darwish, Christina Rosetti, and Karen An-hwei Lee, who has the greatest poem ever written about June.

Image credits: Hannah Huang

“All poets of the small place, the lost and questioning self, the quiet moment, the intensity of love, the dark forest, the hazy twilight, the glittering morning, the ripe fruit, the Biblical and pagan, the summer, the winter, the frost and the grave and the ghost. All poets with some good answers and some fantastic questions.”

In particular, in a good poem she looks for “imagery that pushes beyond the expected. A good poem can have an interesting image or comparison; it might intimate a question or wonder vaguely about an idea. But a great poem always moves those things beyond the obvious, into the moment where your hair prickles on your arms and you sit up a little in your chair and you go around for the rest of the day with a line or a thought thrumming repeatedly in the back of your brain like a plucked string. That’s what I look for, mainly. I can’t write them, but I look for them!”

That’s a wrap for our Poem of the Week feature for this week – if you, too, would like to see an original poem of yours featured right here in The Tab, we would love to hear from you: submissions are open now, just email your poem to [email protected] (submission guidelines outlined in the original article here). We can’t wait to hear from you!

Feature image credits: Keira Quirk

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