ABSTRACT
Where Prynne's poem analyzes the false sentimentality of the first photographs of "the earth as a whole" taken during the Vietnam War, Lerner's poem explores a related mesh of political and aesthetic themes constellated around the BP disaster. In both cases, the poets focus their attention on the difference between the events themselves and the strategies by which governments and multinational corporations contain and manipulate their reproduction in the media. The Deepwater Horizon disaster reveals the bad transpersonal network of government, finance, media, oil industry, and investors within which individual citizens find themselves hopelessly enmeshed. Lerner makes an appeal to this transpersonal subject in the poem's final lines, in which our fear of our anger, and the oil field itself, collapse into each other. Where "The Ideal Star-Fighter" documents the high-water mark of American space-age triumphalism, the Challenger disaster, arguably the first of a continuing cycle of televised public American tragedies, marks the beginning of the end.
