The first things that struck me about this poem:

1. This poem was s full of casual name-dropping allusions.

2. This poem is very aware of itself as a poem, and as literature, commenting constantly on poetry and literature.

3. The amount of science dropped just as casually into a poem is much more unusual to find than allusions. Allusions are commonplace, but for some reason (I think because of the distinictons we make between right-brained and left-brained and asking people to identify themselves as one or the other…) we assume that people interested in science and people interested in literature are exclusive audience, and that one reads Nation Geographic and the other reads The New England Review.

4. State of the Planet has such a fundamental curiosity about life and the world around it, while (and this ties into numero tres) also being deeply connected to literature and beauty and unanswerable, doubt churning questions. (“Cells that divided and reproduced. From where? Why?”)

5. The subject of this poem, for the first few sections, comes back to a girl. She’s running and it’s raining and she’s observing the beauty of the world and nature. In her bag, is a book, dog eared (well read / well loved) with a title “like” Getting to Know Your Planet, but then the subject of the poem seems to be the world itself; its beauty; its majesty; its history. But it keeps coming back to this girl. She understands the accidents of the universe, because she had an accident spilling milk that morning; and it comes back to her, her hair wet, and windshield wipers clearing her view out of the car.

6. So much geology, along with science and evolution and literary allusions.

7. Some of the imagery and lines were so unexpected. The rest of this will be about my favorites and what I got from them.

A. Section 1: “One of the six billion of her hungry and curious kind.” I love the image of this girl, running in the rain, (I privately imagine her laughing) to get to her car, her bag thump-thumping against her bag, filled with a dog eared book. This image seems to be a set up for the entire poem: with the human hungry and curious about the world around her, and experiencing the beauty of it both cognitively read-this-book-a-thousand-times and in a practical, feet-squishing against wet grass sort of way.

B. Section 1: “… that this was something we’ve done quite accidentally, which she can understand, not having meant this morning to have spilled the milk.” The two things I love about this line are that, one, the author uses the typical spilled-milk regret, (something that, as the saying goes, there is literally no use for) to draw a parallel with global warming / temperature change, and two, that a girl can sympathize with an entire planet’s mistake because she spilled a liquid. (Or an everyman object for her failures.)

C. Section 2: “Pacific Salmon nosing against dams … in a rage to breed.” Salmon literally jump up waterfalls to get upriver to breed each year, so the image of them confused and unable to pass a man made structure was really evocative, to me, and pretty much defines the entire theme of this poem.

D. Section 3: “… their bodies must be so strange to them. An artist in Chicago – thinking of a great trading city in Dacia or Thracia – has asked to learn the method so he can sell people dogs that glow in the dark.” Man is always using nature to direct him, getting ideas from it, imitating it. This is unnerving in the most satisfying way.