Stardust Media by Christina Pugh

Abstract

Reviewed by: Stardust Media by Christina Pugh Jane Rosenberg LaForge (bio) stardust media Christina Pugh University of Massachusetts Press https://www.umasspress.com/9781625345110/stardust-media/ 96 pages; Print, $16.95 The late Carl Sagan liked to say that we humans are made of "star stuff," a corollary that his protégé and successor in the popular imagination, Neal de-Grasse Tyson, has reframed as, "We are not figuratively, but literally stardust." It follows, then, that everything is composed of similar material—plants, animals, humans and their artistic outputs. The poems in Christina Pugh's newest collection, Stardust Media, should also be included, though not because of their subject matter or cosmological ancestry. Pugh's daring, deeply layered, and erudite poetry asks readers to take a trip around the universe to understand its lessons in interconnectedness. Sagan, deGrasse Tyson, and other scientists of their ilk have repeated this axiom in an effort to garner respect for [End Page 147] all life, no matter how small, invisible, or insignificant it might seem. Pugh, however, aims to deliver another maxim, about the worth of human interpretation, no matter the prestige or lack of stature, of the interpreter. Pugh's primary methods include allusion and synesthesia, enabling her to plumb the depths of the cultural record and come back with surprising and egalitarian associations. A disquisition into a particular color, a piece of lace, or a peculiar cloud will bring up the name of an actress or a character from a television series, perhaps a long-forgotten performance artist or a composer of symphonies based on traditional folk ballads. "Machines can be diaphanous," Pugh informs us in "But the Avant-Garde," an elegy to possibly a more innocent time, depending on what that naïveté was focused on, or missed. The poem settles around the figure of Charlotte Moorman, who posed for her husband's "TV Bra for Living Sculpture" while playing the cello and wearing two television screens over her breasts, as if cups of a bra. Moorman "closely crabbed a pain journal throbbing out / the instants of her terminal, young time. This was / a woman who swam through everything," Pugh says; the "swimming" refers to how the television screens appeared on her breasts—"Mellifluous / jellyfish agitated"—but it is the word "terminal" that is even more important, considering Moorman's fate in life and art. Readers don't necessarily need to know what those fates were to comprehend the many losses documented in these lines. "But the Avant-Garde" encapsulates other hallmarks of Pugh's approach, elegant and efficient while supporting multiple perspectives. In "Eighty Percent of Light Is Missing, Scientists Say," Pugh reports on the latest research, the mathematical propositions and their disappointing outcomes, to explore phenomena that defies human attempts to describe it. Our galaxy'seffulgence is malnourished, and nobodyquite knows why. The scientists' numberswere four hundred percent wrong. Whitmanwould have said, Seriously? You're surprised?Frost would have junked the telescope.Me, I'll settle in to watch this goldfinchsock away a decent chunk of change. [End Page 148] Of course, light gets lost, she seems to be saying; anyone who's read poetry (Whitman's "Prayer of Columbus" or Frost's "Nothing Gold Can Stay") knows that. But where the light goes, and how it is recycled, is as "steady, ineffable … untellable" as Whitman first proclaimed. Pugh announces her democratic approach in two poems that give the book its title: "Stardust Media" and "Stardust Media II." In the first, the irresistible call of the Sirens is said to be just as bewitching as vocals of the 1980s alternative rock band the Cocteau Twins. Together, they share the same musicality as a verse of Homer; they "unspooled the way that bodies pool and crash / together, raptured after sex." Yet as Pugh actively tries to re-create the actual sound of the Cocteau Twins, she illustrates one of the central questions of the collection, one that alternately enchants or bewilders scholars of the pop culture and its biggest by-product, nostalgia. Are our memories—the ultimate media—as solid and reliable as the material that inspired them, or is it the burnishing of our...