Science and Poetry

This morning's Brainpickings, my Sunday morning first-read every week, is particularly heartening--in that it shares excerpts from a meeting of science and poetry.  In a time when the arts are at serious risk of being defunding and science is being "silenced" in favor of half-baked opinions about climate change and protection of our one and only planet, this meeting of minds must have been spectacular.  

Fortunately, for those of us unable to attend or watch the livestream, Maria Popova does what her blog does better than any other--it leads us from one conversation to another and connects them brilliantly at one big table of ideas.

 https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/04/26/the-mushroom-hunters-neil-gaiman/?utm_source=Brain+Pickings&utm_campaign=85b5344a4e-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_28&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_179ffa2629-85b5344a4e-235042797&mc_cid=85b5344a4e&mc_eid=7940cd5ca2

Listen to Amanda Palmer reading her husband Neil Gaiman's poem, "The Mushroom Hunters."  This reading concluded the gathering described by Maria Popova this way:

To our astonishment, eight hundred people poured into Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works and thousands watched the livestream of the sold-out show — a heartening testament to this seemingly unsuspected yet immensely fertile meeting point of science, poetry, and protest, featuring poems about Marie Curie, Jane Goodall, Oliver Sacks, Caroline Herschel, Euclid, neutrinos, and the number pi, by poets like Adrienne Rich, John Updike, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Wisława Szymborska, read by beloved artists and writers, including Rosanne Cash, Diane Ackerman, Ann Hamilton, Brandon Stanton, Jad Abumrad, and Elizabeth Alexander.