College Literature

Abstract:

In the late 1960s, poetry became curiously entangled with NASA's famous "Earthrise" photograph taken from the moon, which appears to show a united planet Earth rising over a desolate lunar surface. Tracing the relationship between poetry and the disenchanted moon of the Apollo era, this piece reveals the complicated discourses through which planet Earth became an essentially American artifact and the impact of this rhetoric on poets writing within and beyond the US. After exploring a range of US poems, the piece engages extensively with Kashmiri American poet Agha Shahid Ali, whose first major poem was about the "Earthrise" and who uses the moon throughout his career as a symbol of national elegy tied to the threatened poetic form of the ghazal. This transnational context reveals how contemporary anglophone poetry uses the moon to contest the ways in which the US universalized itself as the global norm during and after the Cold War.