Re-Analysis of "Panoramic View" by Shanna Compton

Original Analysis Here: https://ddcpoetry.blogspot.com/2013/02/analysis-of-view-by-shanna-compton.html

It's been ten years since I first started posting analysis of individual poems.  In that time span I analyzed poems everyday to not doing analysis for the entirety of a year to being spotty, and now I'm just going to try something once a week with two projects: analysis of poetry, and looking back at old analysis and just writing about it.

I wanted to look up the poets and really see their background.  Since the original analysis, Shanna Compton has published so much: four books of poems and multiple publications.  Looking at her later poems like "I wore my dress" and "Seven Steps to Better Listening": there's a bit more space and play with white space.  

For this poem though, the first thing I noticed is that I didn't do a real good job of analyzing this poem.  I was so self-conscious on how I'd appear as a critic as I was graded harshly and correctly on my prose.  I was so focused on finishing quickly just to post something out there.

This poem is a timepiece of being able to see a panoramic view of Mars.  Technology has advanced immensely to the point we can see Mars through the 2020 Perseverance Rover.  Yet this poem isn't based on this fact.  The poem plays with the idea of how images evoke ideas and images.  

Note how the first line there's a specific closeness of the event to the speaker to situate the poem, "Last week Mars suddenly got a lot closer."  I focus on last week as though the speaker and the audience are together in this moment at the same time.  This idea carries over with the usage of the second person, "It used to be the place we'd throw out / as impossible, utterly unreachable, so read / and foreign and sere.  Not anymore."  The colloquial tone in these lines especially with, "Not anymore" adds a sense of common experience and thought.  A sense of closeness.

I google searched "2012 Mars Close" and I saw this article by Wired.  

With the planets separated by 62 million miles, this will actually be one of the least close of the regular close-ups that Mars and Earth have experienced in recent times. The closest approach in almost 60,000 years occurred in 2003, when the planets were just 35 million miles apart. Earth and Mars won't break that record for 275 more years, in 2287.

With this context of close, yes, Mars was close, but also so distant space wise.  I wonder if this distance and thought triggers the speaker to go down this simile cascade:

And I'm trying to figure out why watching
the panorama makes something in the hot core
of me crumple like a swig-emptied can
intoxicating it may be, vibrant
with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's
a sand painting, a dimensional mandala
some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring
freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea,
ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests.

Looking back, I probably wanted to dissect each simile and see how it works.  But this would be like noting individual parts of a panorama.  The speaker seems like they are experiencing a sublime personal experience with "something in the hot core / of me crumple."  The allusion to a planetary core and a personal core is in there, yet both are compared to a "swig-emptied can."  There's an image for me of a beer can crumpled on the street, but I don't stick to that image long.

The image shifts to "vibrant / with out-of-this-world color like the whole thing's a sand painting."  This simile continues the hot core allusion for me as it's described as "a sand painting, a dimensional mandala" which is a mystical image which gets subverted with the next lines that focuses on the "creator," "some galactic monk took her sweet time pouring / freehand, blowing on it between sips of her tea, / ruffling up the most dramatic of its rumpled crests."  At this point, I feel the speaker can possible relate to this creator figure -- breaking internally, but still creating for some otherworldly reason and insight.   This poem feels meta-poetic to me.  Like the poet is talking about the way to create an ekphrastic piece.  

"It's bluer than I thought, attained.  Like most things / I wish we could take back."  The final "like" in this poem tricks me into thinking it's a simile, but it's not.  There's no comparison.  The like in the final line sets up a general idea "like most things."  What are most things?  Does it matter?  Does it matter that it's bluer than the speaker thought?  Yes, but it's personal -- like what we could take back.