Ian Warden | With Ada Limon's work going on on the Europa Clipper, poetry is going to infinity and beyond

"You can keep your presidential inaugurations and your state funerals," Dan Sheehan rejoices for my daily Literary Hub post. "Here's the commission every self-respecting poet really dreams of.

"NASA has asked US Poet Laureate Ada Limon to craft an original poem that will go on the spacecraft Europa Clipper on its voyage to Jupiter's second moon, Europa.

"The poem, written by Limon and dedicated to the Europa Clipper mission (to find out if the conditions are right for life on Jupiter's icy moon ... ) will be engraved on the spacecraft, where it will travel 1.8 billion miles on its path to the Jupiter system."

Australia imitates so much that's awful about the United States and about Americans but here we are at last, after a dignified wait (perhaps lest we be thought lickspittle copycats of our great and powerful friend) of only 86 years, imitating the USA in matters of national poets laureate.

The US has had a national poet laureate, sometimes called The Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, since 1937.

The USA's national poet laureate serves for two years and during that time, as well as composing poetry of his or her own as official poet of the United States, gets a wriggle-on in making the nation more appreciative of the reading and writing of poetry.

READ MORE:

One hopes and imagines that our poets laureate too, beginning with our yet-to-be-appointed one, are given a similarly evangelical guernsey. We all need, to tenderise and sensitise us to life's richness and poignancy, far more poetry in our lives.

He or she will face challenges galore, for philistinism stalks our land, and of course is unlikely to ever be given a commission anything like as fabulously glamorous as the Europa Clipper spacecraft job given to Ada Limon.

Her poem, on which she is already at work, for the spacecraft is set to be velcroed atop a big rocket and whooshed up, up and away from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in October 2024, will be literally "on" the spacecraft in that it is to be engraved-embossed somewhere on the spacecraft's ample body.

Ada Limon's laureate tenure will have expired by the time the Europa Clipper goes to work. Dan Sheehan rejoices "by 2030, it will be in orbit around [Jupiter] the gas giant".

"It will conduct multiple flybys of Jupiter's icy moon Europa, to gather detailed measurements and determine if the moon has conditions suitable for life. Europa is thought to contain a massive internal ocean and is considered one of the most promising habitable environments in our solar system, beyond Earth.

"We wish both Limon and the NASA engineers the very best of luck as the set to their respective tasks. This romantic melding of the scientific and the artistic brings to mind Carl Sagan's Golden Records - two phonograph records that were included aboard both Voyager spacecraft launched into outer space in 1977. The records contained sounds (including Sagan's heartbeat as he was falling in love), and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth, and were intended to communicate to extraterrestrials a story of the world of humans on Earth."

Ada Limon, Latina and 46, is a ripper poet, by turns crusading, humane, Green, meditative, engaging and feminist. Her How To Triumph Like A Girl gives a good sense of her but is just a little long to fit in a teensy column. So here is her smaller A Name, with two little added emphases of mine to give a better sense of how it might sound with the poet reading it to us:

"When Eve walked among

the animals and named them-

nightingale, redshouldered hawk,

fiddler crab, fallow deer-

I wonder if she ever wanted

them to speak back, looked into

their wide wonderful eyes and

whispered, Name me, name me."

All of us (not just poets and columnist but tradies, baristas, GPs, cleaners, sex workers, stand-up comedians, kennelhands ...) who ever do any kind of conscientious working to deadlines will find it poignant to try and put ourselves in Ms Limon's shoes, in her seat at her desktop as she composes her poem to be etched into the Euro Clipper.

Yes, it is a dream commission, and yes she has many months yet before she must give it it's last full stop (only a figurative full stop for Ms Limon scarcely uses punctuation). But given the enormously public nature of if all, given that what she's written will be there for eternity to be read and judged by extraterrestrial passers-by, she must feel under unimaginable pressure to perform and to perform gloriously.

When she has got her breath back, I urge the ACT government to bring her here to Canberra to advise on the establishment of a Canberra City Poet an ACT laureate.

For in her enlightened, poetry-sensitised USA not only every state but every self-respecting city has such a laureate.

Now that our nation is to have a laureate an example is set and one expects, nay, demands, that the creation of a Canberra City Poet for the federal capital city be a core promise of the ACT government at the next election.

We've made it a whole lot easier for you to have your say. Our new comment platform requires only one log-in to access articles and to join the discussion on The Canberra Times website. Find out how to register so you can enjoy civil, friendly and engaging discussions. See our moderation policy here.