Mars: a planet of dream and dread. In speculative poetry, Mars can be taken to its most interpretive depths. Whether it’s Tracy K. Smith’s poetry collection titled Life on Mars, inspired by her relationship with her Father who was an engineer who worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, to Genesis by Frederick Turner, an epic science fiction poem telling the story of terraforming the planet, Mars remains in the human consciousness at around 228 million miles away. The fourth planet from the sun continues to provide a space where poetry coerces into a series of meanderings on a dusty, lifeless expanse that continues to invoke the imagination. Mars, in other words, gives free reign. Mars can be depicted with savage storms, isolated castles, or lush jungles. There is a limitless frontier to our planetary neighbor.

Mars can also function in a representative or ideological space. Due to the delineated nature of speculative poetry, Mars is a space to muse on, mark upon, and reimagine. A garden glinting in the high noon sun can spread for thousands of miles upon the planet’s surface, covering the vivid rusty red in a prediction of its future or a possible interpretation of its past. To be more specific, Mars is a place that is close enough to home to feel like we could get away, yet hostile enough to the biological processes of organisms on Earth that depicting it in a poem is a process of reworking what it means to be human on our sole blue marble.

Mars as a Symbol for Introspection

While Mars is a place that we continue to write and talk about throughout creative, educational, informational, and technical fields, the poetry written in response to its close appeal on a galactic scale serves to give the planet a situational backdrop where life lives on with or without the realities of biology or physics. Mars becomes a space, both physical and metaphysical, where the development of fortitude is essential to survival, though not in the way that fortitude is typically viewed; instead, the idea of fortitude synergizes more so with introspection.

In “The Year Before I Left for Mars,” written by Margaret Rhee, whose poems typically center around feminist and familial ideations, Mars becomes the space through which a series of individual and social considerations are taken into account.

”I read a magazine article once that featured everyday individuals who signed up to move to Mars in a future time,” Rhee explains,” What was extraordinary was that in order to do so, these people signed up knowing they’d leave, and never come back to earth. I thought a lot about that: choice, loved ones, risk, travel, opportunity, and what’s lost in the space between decision and flight?”

While the setting of her poem stems from a meteor lesson she received in Venice Beach, California, the poem itself speaks greatly to the emotions that arise as the narrator ponders his/her decision to leave for Mars in the future. The meteor shower is the setting, but Mars serves as the backdrop of thought.

You have to take in the entire dark sky, (like viewing a landscape painting or a movie screen),

but let the frame blanket over our bodies until nothing is left.

There’s something eerie about the suggestion to leave for a planet enveloped in its own lifelessness. In this poem, the frame blanketing over the bodies of the narrator and her loved ones, seems to be that of Mars. The meteor shower is the focal point, and Mars is the darkness, the place where:

By the end, we are greedy.
We stop counting
As we clasp our hands,
Gulp in the disappearing us, then
Suffocated, strayed.

There is an emptiness to Mars, and in Rhee’s poem this emptiness is depicted like a dark landscape painting, a space where life begins and ends, on Mars, in suffocation.

“Debris” by Deborah L. Davitt is another poem in which introspection and emotional turmoil go hand-in-hand. In the poem one of the characters, Andy, has died. If “The Year Before I Left…” is a space for the thoughts predisposed to heading to Mars, then “Debris” places us in the heat-of-the-moment, when the consequences of the decision come full force. 

Andy, one of the few workers on Mars, falls into a deep depression as a result of his decision to come to the planet. Once off his medication, likely a symbol or image for falling in line to the unfavorable working conditions on Mars, Andy’s mental state leads him to suicide. There is a somber yet sobering quality to Andy’s life on the planet. His co-workers and colleagues become more annoyed by the little things his death impacts, rather than his living as a person, or his shared humanity:

resented having to step over his legs
like a sack of trash that hadn’t made it to the recycler.

Proceeding from this is the background of the irateness:
Some wondered why, if he didn’t want to live,
he didn’t just walk out the airlock without a suit—
till the day that he did just that,
and they found him on the other side of the door.

It’s a sad reality to come to, but ultimately my interpretation is this; Mars can can also be given the qualities of an idyllic paradise, but taken to its opposite end at the edge of realism, it’s a place where the struggle for survival is the only inevitability.

From a third person point-of-view, Ann K. Schwader’s poem “Chasma Glyphs” gives a portion of the landscape of Mars as a form of archaeological significance.

Mars is a waterless surface full of canyons, ravines. Even ice caps. In the poem, the juxtaposition of the opening line and the ending of the last two lines creates an unsettling atmosphere, as if to let out a foreboding indicating to stay away from an already-occupied red planet:

Using elements of archaeology and environmentalism, Schwader’s poem carries a heavy cultural weight. This cultural weight displays something more to Mars in relation to our humanity. These same elements could also be blanketed atop the surface of our own planet, placed in environments such as the Sahara or Death Valley, or places with recent drought conditions due to the effects of climate change. By using elements close to home, Schwader's poem presents Mars as a space for introspection in regards to our oft-rampant human endeavors, from the constant need to bulldoze and rebuild to the rampant push for the accrual of wealth at any cost. On Mars, there is no wealth, only aridness.

Mars from a Romanticist Lens

I want to revisit “Chasma Glyphs” later in this section, but for now we’ll step into the realm of romanticism and go from there.

Like the dueling contrasts between terror and the sublime or fear and hope, In a romanticist context, Mars inhabits a dualistic space. It lies just far enough to be mysterious and imagined in myths, stories, and legends. Simultaneously, with today's tools and technologies, we can examine and study the planet up close. It is familiar enough to use elements of its geography and landscape to either mirror Earth or operate as Earth’s antithesis.

In speculative poetry, a wide range of scenarios and ideas can be presented. It can function as a place to escape to or a place to avoid. In another sense, Mars also offers a space for a collision of both avoidance and escapism, and this keeps aligned with the ever-present idea of conflicting duality in Romanticism. Take, for instance, the poem “Echoes” by G.O. Clark, which I read from his poetry collection Easy Travel to the Stars, originally published in Asimov’s Science Fiction in 2016:

Echoes

As a kid, he used
to explore the canyons, alone
with the dust and echoes.

He was accustomed to
the solitude of empty spaces, and
the safe knowledge of home.

In this poem, Mars exists as an end destination that is not as is imagined. The excitement of “boots kicking up / red dust” immediately contrasts with “lander damaged”. “The new frontier of outer space” provides an exciting ambition contrasting with the reality of isolation actually being on the red planet in the last stanza, “There are no echoes on Mars, / no solace for the stranded; Earth / but a speck in a sandstorm.”

Fulfilling the revisit, I find that Schwader’s poem presents the same conflicting dilemmas. Prayer for water; a warning to leave. Whispers of bodies of water; deserts that never whispered. Etchings viewed contrasted with blinders, maybe a sense of blindness to the reality of Mar’s harsh living conditions.

The red planet is a place where dueling ideas of its perceived existence and its reality in part allow both the comfort of imagination and the harsh reality of the planet’s conditions to align.

Where We’re Going

No exploration about Mars in speculative poetry would be complete without going through the nuances of speculation on a future timeline. Now, as an uncertified, amateur time traveler, I can only provide speculation and prediction as to how this process will go in the future. Because Mars is a space where the future is just within reach, yet far enough to be reimagined, it adopts many of the traits that people cling to when considering places to go to. On Earth, it’s like inputting directions in Google Maps to find a place where we might want to move to or visit. There are a lot of specifics, but the process is otherwise subconscious and inherent to our wants and needs.

Travel on Mars, however, requires our entire worldview to be upended. Earth’s lush mixture of color is replaced by Mar’s singular, harsh rustic quality. Family, friends, culture and lifestyle as it is viewed on our blue marble transfigures completely. Suddenly, in addition to thinking about basic necessities and comforts, we’d cling to not only how to have our wants in abundance, but how to shelter ourselves from the planet of war’s grueling and ravaging dust storms and bone-shattering cold.

Like in any genre veering towards an inherent form of infinite creative liberty, in speculative poetry, Mars doesn’t need to be a space where people go to simply die. It can also be established as a pre-existing foundation for another culture in the solar system. Most of the time, however, the planet is viewed as a place to start anew. Think exploration turned to 11,000: extreme weather, no availability of resources beyond a 6 month trip back and forth between Earth and Mars at the optimal trajectory.

As removed as our creations might be from the tried-and-true reality, poetry that lifts Mars from its lifelessness and gives it even the faintest of human centered evocation takes into consideration the fact that Mars, even at its most visceral state, might still become a space where the stresses and worries of environment and culture will one day exist beyond Earth. In facing the lens of space colonization on Mars, many of our Earthly considerations will still need to be taken into consideration. In Mars-inspired poetry, we’re not looking at Mars with a blank stare; we’re looking at Mars with human eyes.

Source Notes:
"Chasma Glyphs" by Ann K. Schwader appeared in Abyss & Apex #84, October 2022.
"Echoes" by G.O. Clark appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction in 2016.
Excerpts of "The Year Before I Left for Mars" by Margaret Rhee were pulled from Poets.org.
"Debris" by Deborah L. Davitt appeared in The Avenue Journal.