Prime Directive
Bryan D. Dietrich
Published by Needfire Poetry
~An imprint of Belfire Press~
Box 295
Miami, MB
R0G 1H0
Copyright © 2011 Bryan D. Dietrich
Edited by Rich Ristow
Cover Art & Design by Heather Boyce-Broddle
Interior Design by Jodi Lee
ISBN: 978-1-926912-32-5
Multi-Format Ebook/Digital Download
Smashwords Edition
A catalogue record for this title is available from the
National Library of Canada.
This is a work of fictitious poetry. Any resemblance to place, person or event is strictly coincidental or used by permission granted to the poet. All rights reserved.
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* * * *
Also By Bryan D. Dietrich
The Assumption
Love Craft
Universal Monsters
Krypton Nights
Coming Soon
The Monstrance
* * * *
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Rich Ristow and Needfire Press for plucking my poem from the ether.
Thanks to Heather Boyce-Broddle for her out-of-this-world cover design, to P. Michael Evans for the author photo, to William Shatner for his kindness and generosity, and to Shooting Stars and the Trek Expo in Tulsa for providing the opportunity.
Thanks to Gene Roddenberry for imagining a modern myth, to the creators of the JVC Videosphere for designing the space helmet TV on which I watched it as a kid, and to Jerry Holt, my Teacher, for offering new and astonishing ways of reading stars.
Thanks to Jimmy Don Burnett for teaching me how to build a tricorder, to Harlan Ellison for providing the requisite stone knives and bear skins, and to Roger Waters and Jean Michel Jarre for supplying the soundtrack.
Thanks to my family for letting me grow up geek—my father for all those other worlds, my mother for this one, and my sisters for encouraging me to go boldly. A special thanks to Beverly who has become my father’s Guardian of Forever.
Finally, thanks to Gina and to Nick for initiating me into their alien culture, to E.B. and Doris Greenway for welcoming this particular alien among them, and to Newman University and the IAFA, grand federations that make my mission possible.
* * * *
Dedication
For My Son, Nick.
* * * *
Alluding to a Contemporary Myth
Where No Man Has Gone Before
Star Trek as Myth
* * * *
Alluding to a Contemporary Myth
If Prime Directive were a work of prose, its very Star Trek nature would rub up against a strong stigma. To some, it would be easily dismissible as ‘fan fiction.’ Even as a book-length poem, an intellectually lazy reader might try to dismiss it, passing it off as fan-inspired writing not worthy of ‘serious’ attention. It has happened before, with Jeff Burk’s Eraserhead Press novel, Shatnerquake. Nevermind Burk’s obvious satire, not to mention the absurdist qualities marking both Burk’s writing and the bizarro fiction genre in general. Burk was doing something more than ‘playing with the toys’ both Star Trek and William Shatner’s public persona offer. In his own way, Burk was critically engaging cultural phenomena. Bryan Dietrich is doing the same with Prime Directive. There is a fundamental difference between that pursuit and the heroic (and sometimes pornographic) fantasies found in fan-written fiction littered across the Internet.
Both Dietrich and Burk are not innovative in this regard. Poets and fiction writers have long engaged popular culture across the centuries. How many works have first taken their cue from Homer and the Greeks? Keats once famously ruminated on Chapman’s translation of The Iliad. Where would Shakespeare be without Greek myth, Roman literature, and Holinshed’s Chronicle? How many poets, had Shakespeare not existed, would have starved from a lack of material? Could Rainer Maria Rilke have become an icon of German literature, without having Orpheus to kick around? What about Virgil, in The Divine Comedy, leading Dante through the Inferno? And, let us not forget that Dante spurned the ‘erudite’ Latin to write in vernacular Italian.
There is one immediate answer. Those works are engaging in a long active neo-classical tradition – people who furiously type out, and then post online, their lurid James T. Kirk or Harry Potter fetishes are not. Yet, to smear Dietrich with the word ‘fetish’ does him a disservice. Fan fiction, at its worse, serves no purpose but to titillate the fan-writer’s imagination. Dietrich, on the other hand, constantly seeks to apply pop cultural cues. James T. Kirk, under Dietrich’s usage, becomes a tool to examine greater questions of life, society, and imagination. Neo-classical works, whether it’s resurrecting Orpheus for the umpteenth time or dusting off the old Faust/Faustus legend, do exactly the same.
There are times when certain myths and legends lose their potency with a mass audience. Worse than that, they also can lose the cultural relevancy. If you were to randomly stop people on the streets of New York City, Chicago, Houston, Atlanta, and Los Angeles, a good number of them may not likely know Orpheus, Agamemnon, King Lear, or even Hamlet. But Homer J. Simpson? Not only would most know him, they could compare themselves, or somebody they know, to his dysfunctional antics, lack of prowess with power tools, and ability to say the most insensitive things at the wrong time. This isn’t a failure of education, either. Rather, it is more of Homer Simpson becoming a metaphor more relevant to contemporary life. Dietrich is doing the same – he both appropriates James T. Kirk as a metaphor and a tool, but he’s also able to step back and comment on that appropriation. He can contextualize, and in the process, he probes for an inner meaning.
Poetry would be nothing without metaphor. Writing poetry successfully is also a constant search for newer and fresher metaphors. For this reason, you can open practically any contemporary poetry journal and find enterprising new ways of appropriating language from both scientific and vernacular sources. It touches on something the Pulitzer Prize winning essayist John McPhee once noted, when asked about how and why he writes non-fiction. Geography, to paraphrase, is such ripe territory for metaphor. For Dietrich, 20th Century popular culture is that ripe territory.
Dietrich’s poetic career has constantly sought to appropriate popular culture, examine it, and repurpose it as metaphor. His first book was Krypton Nights, a collection of poems about Superman and his supporting cast of characters. This work not only got Dietrich Neil Gaiman’s blurbing attention, but uncommonly positive reviews across the poetic spectrum. The book itself won a Paris Review Prize. Unfortunately, Krypton Nights went—prematurely—into out-of-print-oblivion. Dietrich’s second book, Universal Monsters, gave the same treatment to classic Universal Studios creatures. 2010 saw the publication of Dietrich’s chapbook, Love Craft – and when it comes to the Necronomicon, Cthulhu, The King in Yellow, and others, I can’t think of another contemporary myth-set that has passed through as many writers’ pens, typewriters, and word processors. Now, Prime Directive continues the investigation.
There is more to come. Bryan Dietrich continues to write books, but there is more to it. In a way, he is the advance harbinger of what is to come. The 20th Century is now safely in the history books. It was a complex century, filled with both genocidal horror and wondrous imagination. That hundred years witnessed death and innovation on a scale humanity has never seen before. It will be scrutinized and studied for centuries to come. Sure, historians, scholars, and linguists will be at the forefront, but so will writers, artists, musicians, and poets.
Rich Ristow
Editor, Needfire Poetry
Where No Man Has Gone Before
In late 2000, my grandmother was diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. Gran took the news rather badly at first, leading to temper tantrums, long phone calls to me with tears on both sides, and finally acceptance.
Over the next year, she tried hard to keep doing what she’d always done, but the tasks got harder and her memories slipped farther and farther behind. The woman who had once shown me how to relax my hand so I could separate my fingers into the Vulcan greeting, that same one who let me use pant-hangers as phasers, clothes hampers as shuttles and couch cushions as transporters, was gone. It wasn't long before she had to be moved to a nursing home an hour away from all of us, breaking her heart briefly—while she could still remember—and leaving my grandfather alone for the first time in over fifty years.
I knew better, but that didn’t stop me from feeling like I had actually disintegrated her with one of those phaser blasts.
Gran died of complications due to Alzheimer’s Disease in 2004, having outlived my grandfather by just eleven months. He himself had been diagnosed with a form of dementia not long after Gran was taken away, and I'll always think it was more a broken heart than anything else….
Bryan’s poetry has put my grandparents, specifically Gran, back on that couch cushion, transporting her from 1980 to the present. Reading Prime Directive, I remembered all of my childhood with her, and how she shared my obsession with Star Trek, despite not understanding a moment of it.
Being able to publish such an epic homage has been humbling, and my eternal gratitude is forever in Bryan’s hands.
Jodi Lee
Publisher, Belfire Press
* * * *
It’s five-year mission: to explore strange, new
worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations,
to boldly go where no man has gone before.
—James T. Kirk, Star Trek
The road there, if you’ll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry….
—Robert Frost, ‘Directive’
Who misses ten? Two
tandem five-year missions in
and still no command?
Who recalls their prime
directive, that age, all that
awe? It’s like the box
Spock opened in Star
Trek, the Medusa within
that made him mad, too
alien to touch.
And since ten? Even the stars
have moved, if only
just. Walk out tonight,
look up and find Orion.
Isn’t his blue belt
a bit off? Aren’t we
disturbed how much the sky has
shifted since we saw
through more earnest eyes?
We move as Earth moves, swinging
our slow circles through
even slower space,
our flesh flush with tectonics,
our minds alight, red
shifted, turning arcs
across all we call current.
Yet we do not move,
not really, not when
we consider, as we must,
the galaxial
hub, that vast ballast
between ourselves and the eye
of our gathering
star storm. Riding glass,
hurricanes of noble gas,
hydrogen, old gold,
we are taken up
into the storied middle
of things, move outward
from a center no
one—not Einstein, not Hopkins,
not Hawking—believes
we need to explain
how far we’ve come, how little
we are truly moved.
Eppur si muove.
They say Galileo said
this under his breath
when God’s shock troops came
to take him away. And yet,
yes, we move. Chronos
eats his young, the stars
eat their own stones, the standing
dolmens dot the field
then wear away. Age
comes. Two old folk, a couple,
Greek, watch body parts
ebb out with the tide,
then, hearing some voice inside,
begin to toss rocks
behind them, begin
to build another race. Stone
on stone we stand here
like golems without
our maker. The sign we came
with, what has long since
washed clean from our brows
would only weight us down. Words…
we say them, we pile
them between ourselves
and the sky, we make up tales
to explain the way
we lost them, the way
we found so few in the first
place. We imagine
towers, whole peoples
surging over savannah,
becoming the stones
they couldn’t speak to,
the cities they would not say.
We mark each passing
the way poor Hansel
did, after the bread, after
the blue herons came.
We leave words behind,
stones, pretending they’ll be still.
But even our graves,
our tottering tombs,
too like the tumbling rocks
they can’t recover,
move with the wayward
waves that call us down. We speak,
we give names, whisper
against the dark, yet
sound, even sound, even what
we saw and then gave
voice to, even light,
what lets us see, moves toward
that moment when it
wasn’t. We are not
growing old. We are growing
into. Gravity.
As we fall apart—
we planets, we plots, we star-
stuff stuffed skin—we fall
together, slow, glow
brighter. Form from formlessness,
mutter made matter
* * * *
II.
So, ten. What would you
give to be back where the rocks
started to pile up,
where the urge to pitch,
catch, suffer, recover them
began? No matter
the rough sand that seemed
to build, always, in pocket
bottoms; you carried
them the way real sky
scavengers might. A fragment
of moonlight, pyrite,
the fire-fused u-joint
of some Vulcan craft. They were
everything. Dander
of dreams, detritus
of deliverance. Rocky
reminders of all
you couldn’t collect.
Pluto, Planet X, Quasar
3C212.
If you had blown up
then—your skin and skull so new,
unaccustomed to
all with which it pulsed,
convulsed—if someone had come,
sack in hand to claim
what remained, you, your
rock box would have been the same,
each vein rich with or.
Spiral notebooks scored
to the spine with black and blue
starships. Walls crawling
with X and Y-Wings.
2001’s techno-sperm,
the Discovery.
The poor, doomed Valley
Forge suppurating with spoiled
arboretums. Moon-
scapes alive with Hawks
and Eagles, futuristic
cargo cults hauling
radioactive
landfill. The Galileo
7. Khan’s coffin,
the Botany Bay.
NCC-170….
What? 1? Yes, but A
or B? It depends
on who counts. The Nostromo.
Not Conrad’s of course,
but Alien’s. More
gore, more ore, all the artist
H. R. Giger cribbed
from Böcklin’s ‘Island
of the Dead.’ So many ships.
Some stellar, others
earthly. Each dry-docked
in your room, ramped for release
from this island earth.
A whole habitat
of boy bait. Buoy-breasted
alien women,
Barsoomian broad
sides cuddling clouds, pillows,
Andromeda’s ribbed
rock. Sword swaggering
human heroes. Helm-headed
Neros fiddling
among that dire, if
requisite, Rigelian
technology, green
buttons blinking out
of sequence, maniacal
laughter while worlds burn.
Miniature moon
bases, more rocks to make them
real. Dioramas
dreamed up from plastic
people, tiny tin hammers
ringing down on each
dead dilithium
drive, Death Star kill core, die-cast,
deep-space catafalque.
Always explosive
expectations, the end run
rationale, doomsday
detente. And every
night: dreaded dreams. Phaethon’s
forbidden flight, Han
Solo’s carbonite
casket, the fate of Kirk’s crew,
episode 50,
‘By Any Other
Name’…. Poof. Dodecahedrons.
All of this? War wounds
of wanting so much
more than, say, Oklahoma.
Give me a lever,
a rock to stand on,
oh, give me another world,
and I…you…could move.
'Give me a tall ship.”
“Straight on to morning.” “My God,
it’s full of stars.” Each
ship, story, stone…. Arks,
reeds, prayer beads. Ways to leave this
red, red rock behind.
* * * *
III.
So what would I give
to love Star Trek again? Not
the new rehash, that
postmodern mish-mash,
but the stone cold kitsch of Bones
and Spock, that angry
erection called Kirk.
What it means to me now, well….
Nostalgia isn’t
enough. Once I was
spellbound, struck by the simple
hubris of it all.
Every afternoon,
psyched, approaching our Zenith,
I’d flick the ON switch
and bathe in bathos,
wash myself clean in the light
that had to travel
through sky I wanted
so desperately to be
free from. Each dousing
was full submersion,
the old world rolling away
like a stone. Buried
in the likeness of
his death, raised in the likeness
of resurrection.
James Kirk. J. K., not
J. C., I know, but it’s not
like he could discern
the difference. No,
where Kirk led, his crew followed,
and he expected
nothing less. Except
for a few expendable
red-shirts here and there—
the one or two who
beamed down into lava floes,
got shot by zeroes—
save these, Kirk saved them
all, often whole cities, worlds
caught in the balance.
How many cultures
could say, there but for the grace
of Kirk go I? How
many green women
walked away dressed, unimpressed?
How many saviors
seeded among stars?
No one was immune, not me,
not Federation.
Kirk had only one
rule, really. Other than that
odd prohibition
regarding Talos
IV (something like forbidden
fruit), Kirk’s singular
directive, his prime
precept was the same as some
doctors’: Do no harm.
And yet, well, I don’t
remember one installment
where the apple was
withheld, where ‘The Kirk’
allowed a graven image
before him. If ‘Prime
Directive’ means not
contaminating culture,
polluting the pure,
this singular five
year mission went belly up
long before lift-off.
Take ‘The Apple,’ or
‘The Return of the Archons,’
perhaps ‘Paradise
Syndrome, The’ …. Any
one of them would suggest we
humans always know
best, computers, while
helpful, should not be our god,
and no matter what,
mystery is not
meant for forever. Who mourns
for Adonis? Kirk?
Never. Me? No. I,
like a good godless heathen,
would have pulled the same
wires were the machine
not right there in front of me.
Phosphordot pulpit,
front row pew…. Not I,
Lord, not I. I worshipped thus
at the foot of that
primal paradox:
Machines will take us away,
technology can
save us, propel us
past our years, but the human,
what we do with thumbs,
with stone knives and bear
skins…that’s what truly moves us.
No external force,
no clockmaker, no
ultimate analog, no
adroit android should
own us, our future.
But what, then, was I watching?
Why did I adore?
* * * *
IV.
Kirk’s cock seemed to mean
more than even his phaser
might suggest. His gift
for overacting,
Bones’ emotional outbursts,
Uhura’s exposed
thigh, Sulu’s sweaty
chest, Chekhov’s illness, illness,
illness…. We should give
these, not some corny
cloaked craft, our rapt attention.
It’s the human side