Postscript: Into the Future
In 1958, one year after the launch of the Sputnik satellite and the dawn of the Space Age, the American architect and amateur poet Frederick Winsor published The Space Child’s Mother Goose. Illustrated by Marian Parry, the poems put a new spin on rhymes that children and adults had been reciting for generations.
Little Bo-Peep
Has lost her sheep,
The radar has failed to find them.
They’ll all, face to face,
Meet in parallel space,
Preceding their leaders behind them.
Though humans have not yet made a permanent home anywhere other than Earth, when we eventually do, children’s poetry, including the more timeless verses in the Prelutsky Collection, will surely go along with us. Despite centuries of technological advancement, has any new gadget—even ones that are literally out of this world—ever fully succeeded in doing everything that poetry does?
Nonsensical as it may sound, it could be argued that poetry, seen as a form of transportation, is humankind’s oldest form of technology. It is not hard to imagine that before we were using stone tools, and certainly before we had the wheel, we were hitching a ride on words and sounds, selected and arranged in some meaningful way, to travel the distance between one person and another and even one generation and another. Just as sleighs, stagecoaches, and sailing ships evolved into scooters, skateboards, and space shuttles, poetry, too, has changed a lot over the years. At its core, however, is the same old desire that has been there since the beginning: the desire to cross a space. This is the impulse that is at the heart of every book, including the books in the Prelutsky Collection.
Though few people know about it, poetry for young and old alike is already on the verge of venturing into outer space—and will do so while this exhibition is on display. In 2022, Ada Limón, a graduate of the University of Washington, was named the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States. As part of her role, she wrote “In Praise of Mystery: A Poem for Europa.” It has been engraved onto a small metal plate that will form part of the Europa Clipper space probe. The mission is scheduled to launch in October 2024 and arrive at Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter, in 2030, where it will look for evidence of liquid water beneath Europa’s icy surface. Coinciding with the launch, a picture book containing Limón’s poem and illustrations by Peter Sís (one of the contributors to this catalog) will be published.
“O second moon,” Limón writes, “we, too, are made of water, / of vast and beckoning seas.” To her, Europa represents every human being; for all the ways we are not alike, for all the ways we might seem a billion miles away from each other, deep down, we are the same, and we all long to be discovered and known. The poet goes on: “We, too, are made of wonders, of great / and ordinary loves, of small invisible worlds, / of a need to call out through the dark.” Whether serious, silly, or something in between, every poem is that: a calling out through the dark, an attempt to bring two people, two worlds, together. Thanks to Jack Prelutsky, people well into the future will be exploring the immense galaxy of poems he collected—and the small invisible worlds they take us to.