“The Universe as a Primal Scream” is a poem by Tracy K. Smith which appears in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Life on Mars. Conceived as a tribute to the author’s father who had worked on the Hubble Space Telescope, the collection is unified by a thematic and narrative focus on astronomy and science fiction s a portal to exploring more abstract and philosophical issues. The opening poem in the book is titled “Sci-Fi” and the title of the second poem, “My God, it’s Full of Stars” is an allusion to Stanley Kubrick’s groundbreaking film 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The influence of that particular movie is also strongly felt in the concluding imagery of “The Universe as a Primal Scream.” In several interviews, Smith has admitted to binge-watching science fiction films during the writing of her book and noted that Kubrick’s epic is situated at the very top of the entire film genre. That she would be particularly drawn to 2001: A Space Odyssey makes perfect sense relative to “The Universe as a Primal Scream.” Like the film, the poem also has a narrative constructed on a traditional science fiction basis but expands ever outward from that foundation to tackle philosophical and metaphysical issues related to existence and the place of humans within the universe.
