Space Poems

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To look at the night sky is to look into the past: we are looking at stars, not as they are now, but as they were thousands, perhaps even millions of years ago. MacNeice’s ‘Star-Gazer’ thinks bigger than man’s three-score-and-ten, reflecting on the fact that some of the stars now bursting into life will never be seen by the poet, because they are so far away their light will only reach earth a long, long time in the future. Haiku – Haiku is a form of Japanese poetry consisting of 17 syllables in three verses. The first and third lines have five syllables, and the second has seven syllables. Traditionally, haiku focus on images from nature, are written in the present tense and use direct language emphasizing simplicity. The internet is alive with images of space – planets, moons, suns and stars – but also images of ‘flying saucers’ and aliens. This is always a topic that grabs children’s interest.

No, we actually weren't. The connection I saw was her being at Planetary Science and it being a poem very much digging into Voyager. There's a lot of research behind that poem it's part of a longer book that really connects with Voyager and thinks about it deeply. So it's wonderful to know that she was there. That silence is the thing, this noise a found word for it; interjection, a jump of the breath at that silence; Sometimes, the best way to explore the mysteries of space is through laughter. Here are some interesting poems about space about the cosmos that are sure to make you smile. 1. A Ride into Space NASA's OSIRIS-REx mission is about to sample an asteroid, asteroid Bennu, very exciting. Here's your question, who was the original principal investigator of the OSIRIS-REx mission? Go to planetary.org/radio contest.PlanetVac. Planetary vacuum, it uses a pneumatic gas driven system to force surface samples of planets or moons or comets or asteroids into a sample container for return to Earth or for analysis on the body. We, our members allowed us to provide key funding twice in its development. Now it's been selected to fly on not only one but two missions. It will be flying to the moon launching in 2023 on a NASA commercial lander as part of a tech demonstration. And then it will be flying as a NASA contribution to the Japanese MMX mission that will launch in 2024. And it will be sampling Mars' moon, Phobos for material to repeat return to Earth. So we're very excited. Congratulations to Honeybee Robotics, who is the company behind PlanetVac and we're looking forward to cool stuff in the years to come. But the more I started looking for these poems early on in this project, the more I found writers who were really digging in and really doing research or really coming to this topic with their own love and enthusiasm or with really serious questions about what's involved in the process of going to space or thinking about space. And through what poets bring to the table, I think we get kind of different perspectives on space flight. In popular music maybe it doesn't go quite as deep but poems, one thing that I think poems do well is that they can allow us to kind of sit with something and sit with a small detail and really think about it from a lot of different directions at once. Yeah, we hope. I don't know. I feel like I need to take about a year at least, just nap to recover from all of this. But I think we really, in working on this book, it really kind of gestures to how much interest there is in this globally and that kind of imagining more of this would be something that we hope someone would do in the future or maybe in 10 years we'll be ready to do it again. Since the time we finished this, I keep coming across new books that are engaging with space, new books of poetry even just from American writers again. So I think the interest in this topic just continues to grow.

Chris, are there some that got away that you really would have loved to include it but it just didn't come together? If you’re supporting your child’s learning at home, you can also do the reading comprehension activity together! We’ve also included a handy answer sheet so you can mark your child’s responses. Stars burn, grass grows, men breathe: as a man finding treasure says ‘Ah!’ but the treasure’s the essence; I'm not sure I've thought about it much in popular music but I think a lot of this project came from, I've had a lifelong love of space myself and I work in a poetry library, I'm surrounded by books of poetry all day and I kept running across poems about space and I was surprised by this. I hadn't set out to look for that but finding that another writers made me really curious about what poets could bring to the table. And I think like you're gesturing to thinking about popular music, sometimes people just will have a mention of space in a poem or just kind of talk about it a little bit.

Howe wrote this poem about scientific ideas – specifically relating to Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity and its impact on subsequent physics – and read it to Stephen Hawking, to whom the poem is dedicated. It’s beautiful, moving, and shows that science continues to inspire some of the finest poetry. We've also got a similar set of lovely space poems that's more suited to older learners in upper key stage 2!

Because we have two poems here in these nine that are both basically about the Hubble Space Telescope. If you don't mind, I'm going to go on to the next of these it's from someone else who's been heard many times on the show, so we'll go to that now. Like a ride in a spaceship, this wonderful collection of poems takes you on a unique journey. Through a myriad of perspectives, you’ll fly in space, visit the stars and planets, and explore our place in the universe.’Epigram – Epigrams are short and witty poems that are sometimes a couplet or quatrain (four-line stanza), but can be just a single line. They can be satirical and are often powerful statements with funny endings. The cosmos has captured the imaginations of poets for centuries, inspiring some of the most famous works of literature. Here are some of the most famous space poems. 1. The Galaxy For me as well. I only perceive that glass as half full. So, I took the same approach to it that you did. We still have three more of these to hear from before we do though, Chris, that other contributor that I've been teasing people with, another regular, semi-regular at least, on Planetary Radio and another Planetary Society board member. How did you get to the great John Logsdon to write a wonderful, concise history of space exploration for the book?

The quest to explore the universe has been a driving force for humanity. These poems about space capture the wonder and curiosity that inspire us to reach for the stars. 1. Hymn to Time Amen to that. Maybe you'll be up on stage with whoever else is up there reading some of your own work. I mean, you did include, each of you, one of your works in this collection they are very appropriate inclusions I will say. Modestly, they're not among the nine that are going to be read today but they are really lovely contributions to this. His book, The Underneath was awarded the 2016 New American Poetry Prize. We gathered a few days ago to talk about this new collection and to hear nine of the poems read by my other guests, our readers recorded their selections at home which is why you'll hear the audio quality vary but I bet you'll love their reads just as much as Julie, Chris and I do. Julie and Chris, thank you so much. As you know, I have been looking forward to this episode of Planetary Radio, this very special feature with great excitement. Welcome. I don't know if the two of you knew this because I told each of our readers that I thought you had just done an outstanding job of assigning each of them to the nine poems that we're able to include in this show. But did you know that Bill is very interested in nautical history and actually wrote a screenplay along these lines that I got to read once. He loved this, it was perfect for him and I hope you like the reading.Yes indeed, I know. That's one of the things that we can do in poetry is assume those perspectives that perhaps would be impossible otherwise. But listening to her read the poem made me think we should be embedding a poets and artists again, the NASA artists program has gone on for so long with visual artists at launches and facilities and that's produced an incredible array of paintings and drawings and photographs. And we should be embedding poets when things are being launched and landings are occurring at JPL and have sort of, the creative momentary history recorded by those artists as well.