Seven years after the improbable idea of cross-pollinating poetry and science came abloom on a Brooklyn stage in a former warehouse built in Whitman’s lifetime, after it traveled to the redwoods of Santa Cruz and the sunlit skies of Austin, The Universe in Versehas become a book — fifteen portals to wonder, each comprising an essay about some enchanting facet of science (entropy and dark matter, symmetry and the singularity, octopus intelligence and the evolution of flowers), paired with a poem that shines a sidewise gleam on these concepts (Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maya Angelou and Sylvia Plath, Tracy K. Smith and Marie Howe).
It was a joy to write, and a joy to collaborate with two of the most thoughtful and talented people I know: The print book features original art by Ofra Amit (who painted my favorite piece in A Velocity of Being), and the audiobook features my favorite voice in the universe — the magnificent Lili Taylor.
For a sense of the spirit of it, here is my introduction as it appears in the book:
We live our human lives in the lacuna between truth and meaning, between objective reality 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 at one or the other. In the aiming is what we call creativity, how we contact beauty — the beauty of a theorem, the beauty of a sonnet.
The Universe in Verse was born in 2017 as a festival of wonder: stories from the history of science — the history of our search for truth and our yearning to know nature — told live onstage alongside readings of illustrative poems — those emblems of our search for meaning and our yearning to know ourselves. Year after year, thousands of people gathered to listen, think, and feel together — a congregation of creatures concerned with the relationship between truth and beauty, between love and mortality, between the finite and the infinite.
Poetry may seem an improbable portal into the fundamental nature of reality — into dark matter and the singularity, evolution and entropy, Hubble’s law and pi — but it has a lovely way of sneaking ideas into our consciousness through the back door of feeling, bypassing our ordinary ways of seeing and relating to the world, our biases and preconceptions, and swinging open another gateway of receptivity. Through it, other scales of time, space, and significance — scales that are the raw material of science — can enter more fully and more faithfully into our worldview, depositing us back into our ordinary lives broadened and magnified so that we can return to our daily tasks and our existential longings with renewed resilience and a passion for possibility.
Poetry and science — individually, but especially together — are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it more deeply. We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it; a way of harmonizing the objective reality of a universe insentient to our hopes and fears with the subjective reality of what it feels like to be alive, to tremble with grief, to be glad. Both are occupied with helping us discover something we did not know before — something about who we are and what this is. Their shared benediction is a wakefulness to reality aglow with wonder.
The Universe in Verse: 15 Portals to Wonder through Science & Poetry comes out October 1 and is now available for pre-order. A portion of my author’s proceeds goes toward a new Universe in Verse fund at The Academy of American Poets, supporting poets who steward science and celebrate the realities of nature in their work.
“The true artist,” Beethoven wrote in his touching letter of advice to a young girl aspiring to be an artist, “is sad not to have reached that point to which his better genius only appears as a distant, guiding sun.” The choreographer Martha Graham called this particular shade of sadness “divine dissatisfaction.” It is something quite different from the small mean voice of the internal critic — it is rather a matter of “making your unknown known,” as Georgia O’Keeffe wrote in her magnificent letter of advice on the creative life to the young Sherwood Anderson, “and keeping the unknown always beyond you”; a matter of unselfing into something larger while remaining authentically oneself. Creativity, after all, is just our best sensemaking mechanism for what this is and what we are. We create — a poem or a theorem, a novel or a song — in order to explain the world to ourselves and explain ourselves to the world.
Because we are half-opaque to ourselves, because we are bathing in the mystery and confusion of consciousness amid a universe governed by forces beyond the reach of our control and comprehension, the work of art is cratered with exasperation and self-doubt, with failures and false starts. And yet the very existence of this cathedral of truth and beauty we call culture is evidence that somehow, again and again, through depressions and wars, pandemics and heartbreaks, artists have managed to keep faith in the creative process, to keep showing up for the mundane work that makes the magic, that makes the meaning, that makes life livable and more alive.
The strange self-salvation by which artists do that is what magazine editor turned painter Adam Moss explores in The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing (public library) — a revelatory window on the creative process at the crossing point of the mystical and the methodical through conversations with and reflections by some of the most beloved artists of our time — poets, painters, novelists, musicians, filmmakers, playwrights, architects, chefs — each centered on how a particular work came to be. What emerges is “a celebration of the art that happens when instinct meets rigor,” resinous with the passion and persistence necessary for making any idea come aflame with life.
Art requires access to the imagination, a notoriously difficult place to visit. The imagination fuels an idea. The artist acts urgently, often impulsively, on that idea but brings conscious rigor to the evaluation of what the imagination has spewed. Ultimately, experience, intellect, insight, and drive enable them to shape the work and then to edit it over and over, until that idea has been turned into a finished work. Each stage — the imagining, judging, and shaping — is important; one way or another, each entered these conversations… Influences are absorbed and thrown over… Constraints and circumstances (timing, luck, allies) create structures that allow accidents to happen. Along the way, there is making and destroying, self-sabotage, doubt and despair, but the unifying fact of this book is that successful creators do not give up, even when the thwarting seems insurmountable.
This unrelenting persistence is what prompted Albert Camus to write as passionately as he did about the importance of stubbornness of creative work, which Nobel laureate Louise Glück echoes in speaking with Moss about the making of her strange and splendid poem “The Wild Iris” shortly before her death:
The really hard thing about writing is how much patience you need to have. I mean, you can will things, but whenever I’ve tried to do that, the poem just goes to hell. Becomes a contrivance. An arrangement made with a mind instead of a discovery. If you want a discovery that will surprise you, too, you just have to wait… What’s needed is not diligence or intelligence. What’s needed is an intervention of something outside yourself, better than yourself, but with access to yourself… The gift I have is stubbornness. And patience.
I need to write first thing in the morning. I need to segue from sleep and dreams directly into this invented world of mine because part of the deal is maintaining, for several years, your belief in this world, and if I were to even run a few errands before I got to work, I’d get derailed. I’d get so lost in the realness of the real world that when I turned on the computer and looked at what I’d been writing, I’d think, ‘Well, this isn’t as deep as the dry cleaner’ — or the drugstore, or wherever else I’ve just been.
I write for about four, five hours, after which there’s nothing there anymore. But I also learned that for me it was going to be much more helpful to think in terms of time spent, as opposed to page limit — because if you just have to produce words and you write too much of what you know isn’t working — and there are those days — then you are in danger of losing faith in your book. But if I am in my chair, ready to write whatever arrives — ten pages or one sentence — I’ve fulfilled my commitment.
Although there are unifying themes, each conversation offers a particular tessera for the psychic mosaic of creative work — from poet Marie Howe (who discusses the making of her stunning poem “Singularity”), the urgency of self-forgetfulness as an antidote to the self-consciousness at the root of our suffering; from musician Moses Sumney, the transmutation of loneliness into fuel for the creative force on the other end of which is connection; from novelist Michael Cunningham, the capacity for self-surprise and the willingness to let the work take you where you couldn’t have willfully gone; from composer Stephen Sondheim, the fusion of “meticulous precision with a remarkable flexibility”; from artist Kara Walker, the importance of feeling new to yourself at the outset of each project, however predicated on your expertise it may be; from broadcaster Ira Glass, the wearying but necessary will to be always at war with mediocrity; from filmmaker Sofia Coppola, the inevitability of self-doubt and the willingness to endure it in order to better understand yourself through the creative process; from chef Samin Nosrat, the vital balance of beginner’s mind and pattern recognition honed on experience; from composer Nico Muhly, the importance of embracing your particularity and finding your own planet, even if it is “a planet most people will never live on.”
A handful of times a lifetime, if you are lucky, an experience opens a trapdoor in your psyche with its almost unbearable beauty and strangeness, its discomposing unlikeness to anything you have known before. Down, down you go into the depths of the unconscious, dark and fertile with the terror and longing that make for suffering, the surrender that makes for the end of suffering, not in resignation but in faith. It is then that the still, small voice of the soul begins to sing; it is then that the trapdoor becomes a portal into a life larger, truer, and more possible — a kind of rebirth.
Nobel laureate Louise Glück (April 22, 1943–October 13, 2023) captures the essence of such experiences, the way they sober us to being mortal and to being alive, with an image of piercing originality in the title poem of her 1992 collection The Wild Iris (public library).
THE WILD IRIS by Louise Glück
At the end of my suffering
there was a door.
Hear me out: that which you call death
I remember.
Overhead, noises, branches of the pine shifting.
Then nothing. The weak sun
flickered over the dry surface.
It is terrible to survive
as consciousness
buried in the dark earth.
Then it was over: that which you fear, being
a soul and unable
to speak, ending abruptly, the stiff earth
bending a little. And what I took to be
birds darting in low shrubs.
You who do not remember
passage from the other world
I tell you I could speak again: whatever
returns from oblivion returns
to find a voice:
from the center of my life came
a great fountain, deep blue
shadows on azure sea water.
How astonishing to remember that nothing has inherent color, that color is not a property of objects but of the light that falls upon them, reflected back. So too with the light of the mind — it is attention that gives the world its vibrancy, its kaleidoscopic beauty. The quality of attention we pay something or someone is the measure of our love. And because every littlest thing is, as John Muir observed, “hitched to everything else in the universe,” when we pay generous and unalloyed attention to anything, we are learning to love everything; we are learning that all around and within this world there is another, numinous and resinous with wonder, shimmering with a sense of the miraculous.
That recognition and its ample rewards animate The Paradise Notebooks: 90 Miles across the Sierra Nevada (public library) — the soulful chronicle of thirteen summer days the poetic geologist Richard J. Nevle and the Buddhist poet Steven Nightingale spent walking across one of the world’s most majestic mountains with their wives and teenage daughters, recording and reflecting on those devotional acts of pure attention in diary entires, essays, and poems that interleave science and spirit, observation and metaphor, grandeur and smallness. What emerges is a love letter to “a tender whole that is so much sweeter than the sum of its lonely parts.”
Nevle — who was first enchanted by the distant contour of the mountains when he was five but did not see them fully until he began his doctoral studies in geology eighteen years later — writes:
Many claim to have found God in the mountains. I don’t know what God is, but I admit to having sought her there too. Whatever my search, I have found that the pursuit of scientific inquiry — its own, necessarily limited kind of truth-seeking — can be as much an act of devotion as it is scholarly meditation. For to pay attention to the world, to seek its stories, to run your fingers along some crack of rock or furrow of tree bark, to admire a raptor in flight, to look, closely, at the construction of a previously unencountered wildflower — to wonder and to seek answers to how these things might have come to be in the world — are themselves acts of devotion, ways of knowing, ways of longing for communion.
Nightingale harmonizes:
Each world bears all the worlds we might find within it. If you understand one outcropping of stone, or one wildflower, or one hummingbird — if we see our way along the tracery of cause and effect, the mystery of change and recreation — then we are led to everything we see, and everything we are.
It is no accident that Virginia Woolf arrived at her epiphany about the unity of being while looking at a flower, that Oliver Sacks grasped deep time while walking in a forest, that Mary Oliver contacted the interconnectedness of life while observing an owl: It is beauty that beckons our attention, and it is attention that lets us see the world whole. Nightingale considers the common root of these experiences, these revelations of wholeness:
In most cultures, in every century, beauty is bound up with unity. Beauty illuminates the affinity, the inner relation, the resemblance, the kinship, the concord and identity of things. We are all trained to tell things apart. In the experience of beauty, we learn to tell things alike; to move from the darkness of oneself to a sympathy, an open rapport; a longed — for, conscious union with the world. Beauty is a lucid and graceful assembly of forms that calls the mind close to life, our bodies close to the earth, and all of us closer to one another.
[…]
There is nothing more powerful than the movement toward beauty. As we walked, this thought sustained us. What we needed was to keep moving: one more day, and in each day, all day, one more step. It struck me as the simplest rule of life and of reflection: keep moving. Stay in readiness. Cultivate openness, clarity, affection, an easygoing revelry of the senses, a trust in our luck that we are here on earth at all, that we have this moment at all. Movement along a trail is movement within the mind. In the long run, the revelation of beauty is not a matter of chance: it is the centermost surety in life.
Beauty matters because it swings open the doors of perception, and it is by seeing — by taking in what is there, incorporating it into our inner world — that we can begin to comprehend and connect, out of which the sense of belonging arises. Nightingale reflects:
This is true for everyone, wherever we are: what we see is the preface to what we can see. Beyond that preface, with work and love, is what we can come to understand. If we can understand, then we can live. In the Sierra, we understood that we might, after all, belong here with tree and rock and time and light. We might, for a brief spell of years, have the luck to find a home here by following the beauty that beckons us.
Observing the delicate fragility of a single ice crystal, and thinking about Wilson Bentley’s snowflakes, he adds:
The world around us is not what we see. It holds a life-giving, gift-giving, invisible order everywhere and always. It is an order of musical and exultant beauty. It has a mysterious and radiant splendor. Everywhere we look, if we would look, the natural world is making beauty, without fanfare, and the work is so plain, intelligent, playful, and devoted, that there is only one word for it: cosmic.
Throughout their journey, what kindles this sense of the cosmic are encounters with the earthly, in all its glorious smallness and specificity — a mountain chickadee hardly larger than a grape, singing in its “husky, harsh-sweet voice”; clouds “tangerine then crimson then lavender then gray”; a nutcracker harvesting ninety thousand whitebark seeds in a single year with its bill “black as obsidian”; a yellow-legged frog “as small as a baby’s hand, as still as a Buddha”; an aspen with its aria of color sung by chloroplasts that outnumber the stars in the Milky Way one hundredfold; a prairie falcon slicing through the clear blue with its speckled body, evoking a rush of astonishment that “such a wholly perfect thing could exist.” Nevle writes:
There is something numinous and joyful in these encounters, a way in which the boundary between the world we sense and the world that is beyond our senses becomes, for the briefest of moments, thin — almost transparent.
Punctuating the poems and essays are diary entries raw with aliveness. On the second day of the expedition, Nevle records:
Up too early again. Listening to the patter of rain dripping from the tree limbs onto the tent and the hush of the creek in the darkness. Breathing in the scent of earth and rain. I can’t believe we are here, surrounded by these old trees and mountains, with days ahead of us. I’m a little boy all over again, incredulous that this place actually exists, and I am here in it. I want to get up and wander down to the creek and feel its black, wet, cold aliveness on my skin.
That exhilaration emanates from a sudden and vivid sense of the interconnectedness of life in the mountain, the interbelonging of the wanderer and every wild creature, every rocky crevasse:
The great spine of rock holds diverse forests, dreamy meadows, skeins of streams, radiant lakes, and rare glaciers. Life ascends even to the highest reaches of the range, thousands of feet above tree line, where gardens of black, orange, and chartreuse lichen adorn the rock. Everywhere a tenacious living skin sheaths the ancient bones of the mountains.
[…]
The gray-crowned rosy-finch, the bighorn sheep, the pika, and the skypilot with its violet-cobalt blooms make their home among the enchanted stone that air and dust and time and life made possible.
Moving through the mountain, Nightingale embraces the poet’s task of wresting metaphor from observation. In a reflection that calls to mind poet Natalie Diaz’s magnificent meditation on brokenness as a portal to belonging, he writes:
The mountains are whole and beautiful for one principal reason: they have been broken so often… It is the very breaking and jointing, the cracking and carving and breakdown, the weathering and scouring, that all together give rise to the countless forms of beauty — iridescent, miraculous, gift-giving, exultant — throughout the whole of the range.
But it is often the geologist who best channels the poetic dimension of the living world. A century and a half after Emily Dickinson gasped in a poem that “to be a Flower is profound Responsibility,” Nevle writes:
What do we know of flowers? Of their wiliness and brilliance born of a ferocious will to live? Of their ability to extract what they need to survive over their fleeting lives, only so it can be given away? Consider the genus of flowering plants known as Castilleja, the paintbrushes. Species of Castilleja occur throughout the Sierra, from the oak savannas of the lowland foothills to the fragrant conifer forests of the mid-elevations to the sky gardens of the alpine fellfields — almost to the very crest of the range — blossoming in flames of vermillion and violet and cream and silvery mauve. Valley Tassels, Owl’s-Clover, Wooly Indian Paintbrush, Great Red Indian Paintbrush, Hairy Indian Paintbrush, Subalpine Paintbrush, Alpine Paint-brush, to name just a few of more than a dozen species of Castilleja whose blossoms return each year to the mountains. The sheer variety of Castilleja species you might encounter in a single summer day of wandering the Sierra might be enough to make you weep with gratitude for all the world offers us.
In the epilogue, Nightingale reflects on this countercultural endeavor to reunite dimensions of being that naturally belong together, that illuminate and magnify each other, despite how much our siloed and segregationist culture tries to keep them apart. (That, of course, is the animating spirit of The Universe in Verse.) He writes:
Science is thought by some to be dry, technical, and quantitative. It is not. Study is exaltation. Fact is miracle. Number is portal. Understanding is joy.
Poetry and spirituality are thought by some to be abstract, ethereal, private. They are not. Nature is language. Mind is sensual. Soul is earth.
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