An exhibition about the work of Stanley Kubrick has just opened at the Design Museum in London and is getting rave reviews. I'm relatively unlikely to see this exhibition, given that I'm a Kubrick ignoramus (I do have an ambition to finally see 2001: A Space Odyssey from start to finish...). However, the opening of the exhibition reminded me that I've wanted to write about the poem 'My God, It's Full of Stars' by Tracy K Smith, for a while. (The phrase 'My God, it's full of stars!' appears in the book 2001 rather than in the film - and I actually have read the book!)
'My God, It's Full of Stars' appears in the 2011 collection Life on Mars, for which Tracy K Smith won the Pulitzer Prize. Smith has recently and deservedly become even more famous as the current US Poet Laureate, and her latest collection Wade in the Water was nominated in the UK for both the Forward Prize and the TS Eliot Prize. Having read both excellent collections, I have to say that I preferred Life on Mars, which is extraordinarily personal and expansive at one and the same time. I know that's a bit of a cliché, but it really applies here as the collection is partly an elegy for her father, who was a scientist and worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. So the collection looks from earth and to earth, at God and at humans, and features beautiful poems about David Bowie ("thin-hipped glittering Bowie-being"), about relationships, about cathedrals and space.
There's a funny and strange section in 'My God, It's Full of Stars' where Charlton Heston makes a cameo appearance ("Charlton Heston is waiting to be let in"). Heston wasn't in 2001, of course, so maybe he's stepped over from Planet of the Apes. But perhaps this is just another cameo; there's a sense in the poem of walking on and off stage, Smith's father lighting his pipe at the end of a section describing the enormity and complexity of space. Elsewhere, the final scenes of 2001 are shot and then "the costumes go back on their racks".
I find Tracy K Smith's work exceptionally well-written and moving, and a reader new to her work could do much worse than to start with Life on Mars, and perhaps with this poem in particular.
Photo: Nasa Unveils Celestial Fireworks as Official Hubble 25th Anniversary Image - Westerlund 2. Public domain - created by NASA and ESA (2015)
Sounds fascinating. The film 2010:The Year We Make Contact (sequel to 2001) actually starts with the line My God, it's full of stars" in voiceover. As you say, it's in the 2001 book but not the film.
ReplyDeleteThanks for that! I sense that there may have been too many sequels to the original film and book. I think there were about three sequels to the original book and I read at least one or two of them. And I'm not sure any were necessary. (Sequels to books which end very mysteriously have a way of killing the mystery. I really must watch the whole film properly though...)
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