The Savage Poet
Mark Stewart's illustrated feature reading Mailer's Of a Fire on the Moon as the work of a 'savage poet' who unlocked the space age through metaphor. Appeared in a spaceflight magazine (2020); a version was published in The Mailer Review vol. 13 (2019). An about-Mailer essay.
Mark Stewart. “The Savage Poet—Unlocking the Universe with Metaphor.” Spaceflight magazine, 2020.
An illustrated appreciation of Of a Fire on the Moon for a space-enthusiast readership. Stewart reads Mailer — “Aquarius” — as the writer who caught the Apollo 11 launch in metaphor (the Saturn V rising “slow as Melville’s Leviathan might swim”), and turns Mailer’s lament that no poet has gone into space into a meditation on whether his “superluminal fire” can be rekindled for Mars. A version of the essay appeared in The Mailer Review vol. 13 (2019).