What to read after Space Craft?

Poetry and philosophy are siblings and sometimes synonymous discourses. In this postmodern age where everything seems to be constantly shifting, truth is regularly questioned. One might refer to Plato’s Allegory of the Cave to explain shifting baseline syndrome. Space Craft attempts to describe the moment and to reassure Homo sapiens by responding to Peter Sloterdijk’s essay “Deep Observation” in his book What Happened in the Twentieth Century?



In that essay, Sloterdijk states, “The creation of space stations represents a dramatic break in the history of human self-relations. . . . To have a conscience means to know that one is observed from a deep off-center position and pervaded by it.” Rich Murphy’s poems take the idea of seeing Earth as a space station or spaceship and stretch the metaphor to imagine a possible future with a lens for time and space. The idea is one in which space and time, the environment on the spaceship Earth, need crafting. His poems name, and in that embrace they find a way for poetry. They also attempt to embrace a way for a person, for Homo sapiens, without corporate capitalism and without Harari’s Homo Deus threats. The poems imagine the problems with things as they are and imagine possible solutions. The poetics and resulting poetry are what Blake called “firm persuasion.”