01-05-2025
Metro Detroit poet's work lands on the moon, in mission to send art to lunar surface
When Diane DeCillis looks at the night sky, it feels different now than it did before. Says the metro Detroit poet, 'I think to myself, wow, something I've written is on the moon.'
A poem by DeCillis landed on the moon recently as part of a digitized archive carried by Blue Ghost Mission 1, which launched in January and reached the lunar surface in early March. The mission was operated by Firefly Aerospace in partnership with NASA.
DeCillis is among the writers and artists whose work is included in the Lunar Codex, an effort by Canadian physicist and author Samuel Peralta to gather a huge, multimedia collection of art by thousands of creators from across the globe and send it to the moon.
Her poem 'The Artist and His Volcano' was chosen to be part of 'The Polaris Trilogy,' an anthology that now has a permanent home on the moon and is devoted to works about the sun, moon and stars.
DeCillis says the poem was inspired by visionary sculptor James Turrell's epic Roden Crater project. Turrell has spent more than four decades on the ongoing giant artwork located in an extinct volcano cinder cone in Arizona's Painted Desert area.
The internationally famous artist has designed what Smithsonian magazine describes as 'a series of tunnels and chambers inside to capture celestial light,' including one completed tunnel that is more than 850 feet long.
Turrell's observatory for the naked eye is made to be 'most precise in about 2,000 years,' according to the Smithsonian, which notes that his friends "sometimes joke that's also when he'll finish the project.'
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DeCillis hasn't been to the Roden Crater site, but she says she was extremely inspired by it. 'The poem I wrote was out of sheer passion. I had been looking at Turrell's work an d I was just blown away by it.'
The former longtime owner of Southfield's The Print Gallery, DeCillis, who is 74, has had two collections of poetry published by the Wayne State University Press. In 2015, her first collection, 'Strings Attached,' was named to the annual Michigan Notable Book list and won the 2015 Next Generation Indie Book Award for poetry.
DeCillis gives her husband, Lou, credit for opening her mind and art to the grandeur of the moon and stars. 'When I married my husband, I didn't pay attention to the sky too much. I don't know if people do. But he's very interested in astromony and he had a telescope, so he'd always be showing me things in the sky,' she recounts.
' I just thought it was so cool, because it just made the world seem so much bigger…I'm thinking how could I not have noticed this.'
Fast forward to a trip the couple took to Florida. She wanted to visit an art museum, but he wanted to go to the Kennedy Space Center visitor complex. 'I'm thinking, oh boy, it's going to be boring,' says DeCillis, describing a tour that included getting to see control rooms and more.
Then DeCillis saw something that hit home emotionally. 'Ultimately you end up in this room with this gigantic curtain or metal door…and the door slowly opens and what do you see? The Saturn 5 rocket ship,' she says, referring to the mammoth vehicles. was used to send astronauts to the Moon, including the first landing in 1969.
'I literally fell to my knees and starting weeping. And I looked at my husband and said, 'This is the opposite of the word no.'
DeCillis saw what she describes as 'a cosmic' yes in the fact that this mammoth was something human beings thought they could – and did – navigate to the moon. She has felt similarly impressed by Turrell's Roden Crater project and is looking for a way to contact the artist about her poem's recent journey.
DeCillis is working now on her third book of poetry. She also expects to have her work included in a second lunar mission later this year.
In 'The Artist and His Volcano,' she writes eloquently about 'that first night you were humbled into innocence/drawn into the rapturous sky realizing you could not hold/the immensity of space.'
For poetry and the celestial world, the sky really is the limit.
Contact Detroit Free Press pop culture critic Julie Hinds at jhinds@
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Metro Detroiter's poem placed in digitized archive located on the moon
