High Voltage Poetry

Hirshfield’s poem begins as a seemingly straightforward description of a real-life experiment conducted by Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield aboard the International Space Station. However, while this playful demonstration of zero gravity is all well and good, the poet seemingly has more ethereal destinations in mind. With the words “On earth,” the poem eschews the strangeness of outer space, turning—momentarily—toward the terrestrial, and thus twisting the experiment’s revelation into a metaphor for the soul, the emotions that, on the one hand, make up almost all of who we are but, on the other, also cannot cohere without us. Water droplets, suspended weightless around a wrung towel, and hands, and wrists—and, by extension, the entire body, the whole self—become those unshakeable emotions—so-called “wet stuff”—which surround and define human existence. “In Space” thus offers a prime example of a metaphor-to meaning poetic turn, as the simple act of resetting this poem “On earth” reveals another layer of meaning, and redefines those prior lines as symbolic language.