Fwd: Introducing "The Universe in Verse," animated edition

[David Morris]

On the slim chance you haven’t heard of this…

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From: The Marginalian by Maria Popova: Sunday digest <
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Date: Sat, Feb 5, 2022 at 5:12 AM
Subject: Introducing "The Universe in Verse," animated edition
To: David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>


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*Hello, David Morris, with a very irregular dispatch to share something
infinitely dear to my heart, which has taken a near-infinite amount of time
and toil to bring to life. The regular weekly edition will be with you at
its regular time.* *The Universe in Verse* Animated Season | Episode 1:
Emily Dickinson and the Birth of Ecology
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=0918d06ac9&e=085ac54fc2>

*The Universe in Verse*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9055c25e5&e=085ac54fc2>
was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality
through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the
assault on science and the natural world in an atmosphere of “alternative
facts” and vanishing ecological protections) and part persistence (in
sustaining the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our
capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.)

For four seasons, it remained a live gathering
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=339eca20d9&e=085ac54fc2>
— thousands of embodied universes of thought and feeling, huddled together
in a finite space
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=7168f87378&e=085ac54fc2>
built in a faraway time when Whitman’s living atoms walked the streets
outside.

In this interlude between gatherings, as we face the biological and
ecological realities of life with widened eyes, I have entwined visions
with my friends at *On Being*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f4769869da&e=085ac54fc2>
to reimagine the spirit of *The Universe in Verse* in a different
incarnation, a year in the making: a season of stories about epoch-making
events, discoveries, and unsung heroes from the history of science — this
common record of our search for truth and the native beauty of reality —
each illustrated in poetry’s lovely abstract language, with an animated
poem.

There are stories about relativity and the evolution of flowers, about
entropy and space telescopes, about dark matter and the octopus
consciousness, illustrated with poems new and old, by Emily Dickinson and
Richard Feynman, by W.H. Auden and Tracy K. Smith, by Marilyn Nelson and
Edna St. Vincent Millay, brought to life by a human constellation strewn
across spacetime and difference: twenty-nine largehearted artists,
musicians, writers, scientists, and other weavers of wonder, who have
poured their time and talent into this improbable labor of love. The total
distance between them exceeds the circumference of the globe. Half a
century stretches between the youngest and the eldest.

Among them are Yo-Yo Ma, Joan As Police Woman, David Byrne, Sophie
Blackall, Amanda Palmer, Janna Levin, Ohara Hale, Maira Kalman, Debbie
Millman, Toshi Reagon, Daniel Bruson, Zöe Keating, Garth Stevenson, Sy
Montgomery, Jherek Bischoff, Edwina White, Marissa Davis, Tom McRae, Topu
Lyo, Gautam Srikishan, Lottie Kingslake, Kelli Anderson, Liang-Hsin Huang,
and Patti Smith.

Released over the course of nine weeks, each of the nine episodes begins
with a science story and ends with an animated poem chosen to illuminate
the scientific fact with the sidewise gleam of feeling. Two of the poems
(including the premiere episode
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c3988850eb&e=085ac54fc2>)
are set to song and seven are soulful readings scored with original music
by a different composer. Each miniature totality is brought to life by a
different performer and shimmers with visual magic by a different artist.
Each is a portable cosmos of gladness at the chance-miracle of aliveness:
all of us, suspended here in this sliver of spacetime, with our stories and
our poems and each other.

And so we begin:

The first episode tells the story of evolution and the birth of ecology,
illustrated with an Emily Dickinson poem — untitled, per her unconventional
choice across her entire body of work, but known, per literary convention,
by its first line: “Bloom.”

<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8c102fe7ff&e=085ac54fc2>

Watch it, and find the transcript and poem text, on the episode page
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=c496f8b66c&e=085ac54fc2>
.
HOW WE MADE IT

Every true artist is a miniaturist of grandeur, determined to make every
littlest thing the very best it can be — not out of egoic grandiosity but
out of devotion to beauty, devotion paid for with their time and thought,
those raw materials of life. When I invited the uncommonly gifted and
uncommonly minded Joan As Police Woman
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=f9c94d1e5c&e=085ac54fc2>
to bring the poem to life in a typical *Universe in Verse* reading, this
true artist instead transformed it into a soulful song — an homage that
would have gladdened the poet, who in her teenage years took regular music
lessons and practiced piano for two hours a day, and who grew up to believe
that, in its most transcendent stillness, the world is “thronged only with
Music.”

>From the start, I envisioned using the teenage poet’s herbarium
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=e2090bff40&e=085ac54fc2>
— a forgotten treasure at the intersection of art and science, one of my
favorite discoveries during the research for the Dickinson chapters of
*Figuring*
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=37dadfdf55&e=085ac54fc2>
— as the raw material for the animation art. Having collaborated on a
handful of previous
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=41be775155&e=085ac54fc2>
animated
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=cd49b9443a&e=085ac54fc2>
poems
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=96631a701f&e=085ac54fc2>,
I invited Ohara Hale
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=8e59e07843&e=085ac54fc2>
— artist, musician, poet, illustrator, animator, maker of nature-reverent
children’s books
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=ef53ae9796&e=085ac54fc2>,
choreographer of beauty and feeling across a multitude of art-forms — to
work her visual magic on the poem-song.

In a small wood cabin at the foot of a Spanish volcano, she set about
reanimating — in both senses of the word — Emily Dickinson’s spirit through
her herbarium.

Ohara composed all the creatures — the bee, the butterfly, the caterpillar,
the human hand — from fragments of the poet’s centuries-old pressed
flowers: digitized, restored, retraced by hand, and atomized into new
life-forms. Individual petals, leaves, and stamens make the wings, body,
and antennae of each butterfly. Layers of petals, sepals, and anthers
stripe and behair the body of the bee. A large leaf folds unto itself to
shape the hand that wrote this poem and nearly two thousand others — poems
that have long outlived the living matter that felt and composed them,
poems that have helped generations live.

Strewing the animation are words from the poem, hand-lettered by the
polymathic Debbie Millman
<https://themarginalian.us2.list-manage.com/track/click?u=13eb080d8a315477042e0d5b1&id=67fb49a628&e=085ac54fc2>
(whose script graces the *Universe in Verse* titles throughout the entire
season) in a style based on surviving museum samples of Emily Dickinson’s
handwriting from the period in which she composed the herbarium.

In a lovely way, the art mirrors the music it serves. Joan’s composition is
itself a time-traveling masterwork of layering: voice upon keys upon
strings, feeling-tone upon feeling-tone, classical heritage beneath
thoroughly original sensibility — all of it so consonant with the central
poetic image, all of it “so intricately done,” all of it a triumph of that
“profound responsibility” we have to the ecosystem of art and ideas abloom
in the spacetime between Emily Dickinson and us.

It has been an honor to collaborate with these uncommonly gifted women on
honoring an uncommonly gifted artistic ancestor and celebrating our common
evolutionary ancestry with all life-forms in nature.
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