Space Poems

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I cannot resist the segue that you have opened up with those comments. So I'm going to hold off yet again on talking about the other contributor to the book and play one more of these. It's from our other reader who has been up there.

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. I think that's what we're trying to get at in that section of the preface that, what Whitman saying about going out and being in the mystical moist night air we agree with that sense of looking up to the sky kind of seeing and experiencing what we can see and what we can imagine our way into. But that also, like you said Matt, the work of scientists, the charts and the numbers are also really important, that's the fact-based part, giving us the information to then really imagine, even beyond that. Ideal for dipping into, and as easy to enjoy as a glimpse of the stars at night, this anthology is filled with those tiny doors into the infinite that poetry is so good at throwing open.' 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.Dawn, darkness, evening, space and the stars; that which the night conceals or shows between its veils is mingled with the fervour of our exalted being. Those who live with love live with eternity. 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. As I said earlier, Julie and I were working on the project and ran up hard against the need to actually pay publishers and pay the poets to reprint this work because that's their labor and poets get really rich from their poems. So we need to pay. Don't quit your day job if you're a poet, but the permission fees mounted and so we approached the Sloan foundation and said, we've got this wonderful project and would you be able to support it? And they were so responsive and have been just incredible. As part of that we were having conversations with them and they offered the services of John Lodsdon, the Dean of space flight, history and policy. And so he wrote this terrific historical overview, which we hope will be of a special note to folks who might be coming to this book more from the poetry side of things and may not have the sort of depth of knowledge about the history and the historical context of the space age. An eclectic collection of poetry from BCE to the present, which reveals our unchanging response to a starry night, along with our changing understanding of the science.' Blast off into the unknown and discover a galaxy of KS2 poems with this space KS2 resource from Pie Corbett.

And there is a little note to this effect at the bottom of the poem. What does wonderful things putting this in context the way you have for some of these poems?

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Let's get to another one of these poems, we've got nine in all that you were able to get permission for us to have readings of. There are two poems in the book that are by astronauts. We also have two astronauts who are ready to read them. So let's hear from the first of them right now. Each of these Pie Corbett Talk for Writing resources contains a Powerpoint and a PDF full of KS2 poetry ideas. An interesting way into the topic might be to leave a message from an alien in the classroom – scrawled on a screen, hidden in a container or even a large poster pinned on the classroom door. Soon your class will be buzzing with conspiracy theories. Space KS2 resource 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. The daughter of Ann Druyan and Carl Sagan, co-founder of The Planetary Society of course. Ann Druyan, friend of the show, friend of The Society. Sasha Sagan who was featured on our show about a year ago when her own book came out. I just find that a very fitting close. I will tell you another secret about this, Sasha closed herself up in a closet at her house, record that, so that she'd have reasonably good acoustics and I'm very grateful.