Is Your Heart Then A Nuclear Reactor?
In Ars Poetica on 2 November 2009
Nifty bloggy social media stuff: Seattle poet , whose poem, “Crystal Radio” I wrote about last week, to that post and also to the post of Jenn Eakin, an artist who, inspired by the same poem, has created an illustration of the poem. Take a look at the on Jenn’s blog, and note how she picked up on something I didn’t really touch on in my comments on the poem — the image of the nuclear reactor which, of course, relies on the breakdown of molecular structure to generate its energy. The poem’s closing image, of a town filled with people realizing they’re the source of light, is informed by this, and it raises a question the speaker of the poem maybe doesn’t want to explicitly address — in the poem the speaker tells us the people are the source of power. But at what cost? The poem offers this progression: coal to diamond, then an unstable isotope of carbon to a stable one — both instances of movement from instability to stability, but with opposite outcomes — a diamond or nuclear waste. Interesting, yeah?
The other point of interest is the poem’s title, which I literally didn’t know until reading Karen’s post this evening — another image that is never explicitly addressed in the poem itself — that of a crystal radio, which was an old radio that used a zinc oxide crystal as the tuner circuit. Yet another image of something whose structure determines its function. And, like the lightbulb, something that performs its function by being a conduit for energy. I had a crystal radio when I was a kid (and wrote a very bad poem about it, actually) and the process of finding a station is very inexact — doing it successfully gives one the feeling of accomplishing some feat of magic, because even though I’d read up on the science of it, when I was actually performing the task of finding a station, it didn’t feel like science. It felt more like praying.
Now (and I avoided this in my last post) what is the speaker getting at? Far from being the simple “power to the people” statement it seems to be at the end, the images are doing a lot of work to imply that while, yes, we light up our own nights, we do so at a cost, and mysteriously, and as part of something much larger than ourselves. The image of the network is important here — we’re not lighting up the night as little individual light bulbs all alone, but as part of a giant grid, a constellation. We need each other. That’s the power the speaker’s all about in the poem.
