Seven years after the unbelievable thought of cross-pollinating poetry and science got here abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse inbuilt Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Verse has become a book — fifteen portals to marvel, every comprising an essay about some enchanting aspect of science (entropy and darkish matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these ideas (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and W.H. Auden, Tracy Okay. Smith and Marie Howe).
It was a pleasure to jot down, and a pleasure to collaborate with two of essentially the most considerate and gifted folks I do know: The print e book options authentic artwork by Ofra Amit (who painted my favourite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook options my favourite voice within the universe — the magnificent Lili Taylor.
For a way of the spirit of it, right here is my introduction because it seems within the e book:
We stay our human lives within the lacuna between reality and that means, between goal actuality and subjective sensemaking laced with feeling. All of our longings, all of our despairs, all of our reckonings with the perplexity of existence are aimed toward one or the opposite. Within the aiming is what we name creativity, how we contact magnificence — the great thing about a theorem, the great thing about a sonnet.
The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a pageant of marvel: tales from the historical past of science — the historical past of our seek for reality and our craving to know nature — informed stay onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — these emblems of our seek for that means and our craving to know ourselves. 12 months after yr, hundreds of individuals gathered to pay attention, assume, and really feel collectively — a congregation of creatures involved with the connection between reality and wonder, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.
Poetry could appear an unbelievable portal into the basic nature of actuality — into darkish matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s regulation and pi — nevertheless it has a beautiful approach of sneaking concepts into our consciousness by way of the again door of feeling, bypassing our unusual methods of seeing and referring to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open one other gateway of receptivity. By way of it, different scales of time, house, and significance — scales which can be the uncooked materials of science — can enter extra absolutely and extra faithfully into our worldview, depositing us again into our unusual lives broadened and magnified in order that we are able to return to our each day duties and our existential longings with renewed resilience and a ardour for risk.
Poetry and science — individually, however particularly collectively — are devices for figuring out the world extra intimately and loving it extra deeply. We want science to assist us meet actuality by itself phrases, and we’d like poetry to assist us broaden and deepen the phrases on which we meet ourselves and one another. On the crossing level of the 2 we could discover a approach of clarifying our expertise and of sanctifying it; a approach of harmonizing the target actuality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective actuality of what it feels wish to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Each are occupied with serving to us uncover one thing we didn’t know earlier than — one thing about who we’re and what that is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to actuality aglow with marvel.
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry comes out October 1 and is now accessible for pre-order. A portion of my creator’s proceeds goes towards a brand new Universe in Verse fund at The Academy of American Poets, supporting poets who steward science and rejoice the realities of nature of their work.
