#Goddard2Goddard #SpacePoetry

by | Feb 24, 2016 | News Flash | 17 comments

Calling all students and alumni! Have you ever imagined your poetry sailing among the stars? NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center wants your artwork, poetry, short prose, videos, and songs on board their OSIRIS-REx spacecraft bound for the asteroid Bennu. And so we thought…Goddard and Goddard! We’d love to see what sparks in your imagination when you consider exploration, the universe, and the essence of the human spirit.

nasa imageWant to dream, write, play with us? There are two ways to do it.

First, if you have a poem, lyric, piece of flash fiction to share, you can tweet a link or image of it yourself to @OSIRISREx, hashtag #WeTheExplorers. (Here are the instructions). If you add the hastag #Goddard2Goddard or tag @goddardmfaw we will nab it too and retweet. We may even grab it for a special page on the blog if the idea starts to take off.

Second, you can help us write our own Goddard2Goddard poem. How does it work? Simple.  One person writes the first half of a sentence beginning “If.”  Another person writes the second half of the sentence beginning “then the.”  Then they get slotted together to create mysterious, surrealist, space age ideas.

For example:

Elena writes:  “If I was launched into space,”

Then without knowing what she’s written, Reiko writes,

“then the mouth of the ocean would be the mouth of the stars.”

So the co-written line becomes

“If I was launched into space, then the mouth of the ocean would be the mouth of the stars.”

And then another pair adds their line.

Want to do it?

Let’s make it simple. In the comments on the blog post #Goddard@Goddard #SpacePoetry, add your half a line, whichever fragment appeals to you. (Start with either “If” or “then the.”)  We will mix and match them in a magic “vortext” and voila!

Space Poetry, tweeted into the stars.

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Elena Georgiou

Elena Georgiou is the author of the short-story collection, The Immigrant’s Refrigerator (GenPop Books, 2018), and the poetry collections Rhapsody of the Naked Immigrants (Harbor Mountain Press) and mercy mercy me (University of Wisconsin), which won a Lambda Literary Award and was a finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award. She is also co-editor (with Michael Lassell) of the poetry anthology, The World In Us (St. Martin’s Press). Georgiou has won an Astraea Emerging Writers Award, a New York Foundation of the Arts Fellowship, and was a fellow at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work appears in journals such as BOMB, Cream City Review, Denver Quarterly, Gargoyle, Lumina, MiPoesia, and Spoon River Review. She is an editor at Tarpaulin Sky Press and the Director of the MFA in Creative Writing program at Goddard College. Georgiou is an English-Cypriot originally from London, where she spent the first twenty-seven years of her life. Since then, she has lived in the US — first in New York, now in Vermont. She maintains a website at http://elenageorgiou.com.

Latest posts by Elena Georgiou (see all)

17 Comments

  1. Lizz Schumer
    Lizz Schumer on March 1, 2016 at 11:55 am

    If we’re all just light with bodies.

    • Scout
      Scout on March 1, 2016 at 7:01 pm

      Then I will call your body home until, age having set in making us both soft-worn, we are cracked open and return once again to the night sky . . .

  2. The Writer
    The Writer on February 29, 2016 at 12:51 pm

    If only I could squeeze between the Pleiades,

    then perhaps I would understand
    my mother.

  3. Penny Hinke
    Penny Hinke on February 26, 2016 at 2:27 pm

    If the moon were my compass and the stars my GPS,

  4. Loba
    Loba on February 26, 2016 at 9:22 am

    If I flew through the nose of a star

    If I got lost inside of a nebula

    If we discovered a whole new galaxy

    If night is really day and day is really night

    Then the gravity of the black hole would consume the edge of infinity

    Then the craters will be mountains and the mountains craters

    Then the stars will be my bed and the space between them my trampoline

    Then the entire universe will be mine to swim through

  5. Anne Boaden
    Anne Boaden on February 26, 2016 at 5:31 am

    If all your base belong to us…

    • Anne Boaden
      Anne Boaden on February 26, 2016 at 5:33 am

      #Goddard@Goddard #SpacePoetry

  6. Robert Goodman
    Robert Goodman on February 25, 2016 at 9:08 am

    Then the light of us is surfing the breaks of gravity’s wave.

  7. elena
    elena on February 25, 2016 at 8:47 am

    some offerings:

    then the galaxy would be alive with indigo.
    then our world would be wrapped in a silver light.
    then a million stars would catch us in their net.

    If the night sky opened to magic
    If the velvet blackness launched us into space
    If outer space was the size of our heart muscle

  8. Reiko Rizzuto
    Reiko Rizzuto on February 24, 2016 at 3:05 pm

    then would the rings of Saturn be our children or our gods?

  9. Sherri L. Smith
    Sherri L. Smith on February 24, 2016 at 2:47 pm

    if we are made of stars and collide

  10. Patrice
    Patrice on February 24, 2016 at 12:51 pm

    Does this mean I have to be on Instagram? 🙂

    • The Writer
      The Writer on February 24, 2016 at 1:04 pm

      You can do it from twitter. Or, if you have something to share and no twitter account, send us the link and we can tweet it for you.

      • Patrice
        Patrice on February 24, 2016 at 1:13 pm

        I guess that’s what I meant.
        Twitter.
        Not on either.
        Maybe it’s time. Maybe not.
        I used to do this exercise on long car rides with my kids.
        Works like a charm.
        Thanks!

  11. Lisa Hartsgrove
    Lisa Hartsgrove on February 24, 2016 at 12:25 pm

    then the box would remain open, forever.

  12. Bhanu
    Bhanu on February 24, 2016 at 9:25 am

    Tell me something I don’t know.

    • Reiko Rizzuto
      Reiko Rizzuto on February 24, 2016 at 10:54 am

      “If” or “then the”? 🙂