The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Optimism: A Poetic Stop-Motion Celebration of Nature’s Resilience and the Persistence of Life Against All Odds

Optimism: A Poetic Stop-Motion Celebration of Nature’s Resilience and the Persistence of Life Against All Odds

One spring morning in 2017, walking along a San Francisco sidewalk, I was arrested by the sight of a tiny weed poking through the crevice between a concrete wall and a chain link fence, boldly blooming in its yellow gramophone blossoms. I stood there marveling at its persistence, remembering Gwendolyn Brooks’s beautiful lines: “Wherever life can grow, it will. / It will sprout out, / and do the best it can.”

Poetry was on my mind that day — I was in the final stages of composing the inaugural Universe in Verse and was on my way to meet the poet and ordained Buddhist Jane Hirshfield, whose work I had cherished for years and who had kindly contributed to the program her mighty protest poem about the silencing of science and nature.

A year passed. When I invited Jane to participate in the second annual Universe in Verse, we chose her spare and lovely poem “Optimism” for the show. Perhaps because it is thematically kindred, or perhaps because adjacent memories so often get enmeshed when encoded, it instantly reminded me of the irrepressible yellow blossoms I had seen the day Jane and I first met. I had a sudden vision of brining the poem to life in an animated stop-motion short film playing with this idea of the improbable and inhospitable environments in which life, against all odds, persists — the raw optimism of nature.

I enlisted the imaginative help of artist, designer, papercraft engineer, and my longtime collaborator Kelli Anderson — a wrester of wonder from ordinary objects and creator of the wondrous This Books Is a Planetarium — and sent her a photograph of the little yellow weed that had germinated the idea, inviting her to explore this concept with her masterly paper engineering.

Kelli Anderson: “Optimism” process.
Kelli Anderson: “Optimism” process.
Kelli Anderson: “Optimism” process.

Kelli poured tremendous time, thought, and craftsmanship into creating a set of delicate, exquisitely engineered paper weeds, then setting them to “grow” in various real-world urban environments around Brooklyn — crawling along a brick wall, sprouting through concrete, blooming in a pavement crack — to the sound of Jane reading her splendid poem and a cello score by Zoë Keating, who was also part of The Universe in Verse. The resulting short film is a collaborative labor of love, celebrating a simple truth we so easily forget, yet a truth that animates the center of existence:

OPTIMISM
by Jane Hirshfield

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs — all this resinous, unretractable earth.

“Optimism” appears in Jane Hirshfield’s altogether spirit-quenching Each Happiness Ringed by Lions: Selected Poems (public library).

Find more highlights from The Universe in Verse here, including actor and activist America Ferrera reading Denise Levertov’s poem about our conflicted relationship with nature and astrophysicist Janna Levin reading of Maya Angelou’s cosmic clarion call to humanity, inspired by Carl Sagan, then revisit Zadie Smith on optimism and despair.


Published May 14, 2018

https://www.themarginalian.org/2018/05/14/jane-hirshfield-optimism-kelli-anderson-animation/

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