Tuesday, August 30, 2011

News at Eleven: In "The Universe: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack,"

she [Tracy K. Smith] realizes--or maybe just hopes--"Everything that disappears/Disappears as if returning somewhere." On the first day the Hubble's "optics jibed," she writes, "We saw to the edge of all there is--/So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back." It's hard not to hear an echo of Nietzsche in those lines--"And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee"--but for Smith the abyss seems as much a space of possibility as of oblivion:

from New York Times: Poems of Childhood, Grief and Deep Space

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