Space junk poetry: Kinsella's Skylab and the Theory of Forms

Today, I am making final revisions to my Skylab paper for a special issue of the Journal of Australian Studies, edited by Ursula Frederick and Kylie Message, on the theme of media and materiality. This poem is the star guest. I'd quite like to write an exegesis of it, as there are so many finely nuanced metaphors in it, but that will have to wait for another day .....

Skylab and The Theory of Forms

John Kinsella

For Jeremy Prynne

We didn’t make it but we ended up getting it,

or parts of it at least.  I’ve seen chunks

and my wife’s father brought some home

for them as kids.  In the tradition

of those splinters of the True Cross

held in reliquaries around the world,

if you added all the chunks

together there’d have been an entire

city in space. There’s a novel simmering

in its iconic resonance, the charred black

remains the talisman that starts

or in the very least attracts a cult.

Like the Aum Supreme Truth Cult,

that had a place out there, somewhere

where the land is less fertile and not so

closely scrutinised. Members may

not have known about Skylab

but the prospect of the world

crashing down on their neighbours

would have spurred them on.

But Skylab’s not like them,

nor like the couple from the Subcontinent

who names their newborn in its honour,

being American it’s as good as having

Elvis or Marilyn paraphernalia dropped

in your backyard. People pay

good money for stuff like this.

Kids of my generation remember

the diagrams in magazines

and newspapers. The neat bodies

of astronauts suspended in the neat

compartments. Small had great potential.

And it looked much more modern

than anything the Ruskies

put up there. But maybe now

we can see that such assumptions

were merely a matter of taste.

Soviet Space Trash is also

worth a fortune, and promises

the exotic in the subtext

of THE modern novel.  A kind of

accidental empire building,

an occupation of the vacant spaces.

Like Woomera. A roar that fills

the void of Terra Nullius.

From Kinsella, John 2003 Peripheral Light. Selected and New Poems.  Fremantle:  Fremantle Arts Centre Press pp 73-74