Figures of Thought: Krista Tippett Reads Howard Nemerov’s Mathematical-Existential Poem About the Interconnectedness of the Universe
By Maria Popova
“A leaf of grass is no less than the journey work of the stars,” Walt Whitman wrote in one of his most beautiful poems in the middle of the nineteenth century, just as humanity was coming awake to the glorious interconnectedness of nature — to the awareness, in the immortal words of the great naturalist John Muir, that “when we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
A century later, Albert Einstein recounted his takeaway from the childhood epiphany that made him want to be a scientist: “Something deeply hidden had to be behind things.” Virginia Woolf, in her account of the epiphany in which she understood she was an artist — one of the most beautiful and penetrating passages in all of literature — articulated a kindred sentiment: “Behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern… the whole world is a work of art… there is no Shakespeare… no Beethoven… no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.”
This interleaved thing-itselfness of existence, hidden in plain sight, is what two-time U.S. Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (February 29, 1920–July 5, 1991) takes up, two centuries after William Blake saw the universe in a grain of sand, in a spare masterpiece of image and insight, found in his altogether wondrous Collected Poems (public library), winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award.

On Being creator and Becoming Wise author Krista Tippett brought the poem to life at the third annual Universe in Verse, with a lovely prefatory meditation on the role of poetry — ancient, somehow forgotten in our culture, newly rediscovered — as sustenance and salve for the tenderest, truest, most vital parts of our being.
FIGURES OF THOUGHT
by Howard NemerovTo lay the logarithmic spiral on
Sea-shell and leaf alike, and see it fit,
To watch the same idea work itself out
In the fighter pilot’s steepening, tightening turn
Onto his target, setting up the kill,
And in the flight of certain wall-eyed bugs
Who cannot see to fly straight into death
But have to cast their sidelong glance at it
And come but cranking to the candle’s flame —How secret that is, and how privileged
One feels to find the same necessity
Ciphered in forms diverse and otherwise
Without kinship — that is the beautiful
In Nature as in art, not obvious,
Not inaccessible, but just between.It may diminish some our dry delight
To wonder if everything we are and do
Lies subject to some little law like that;
Hidden in nature, but not deeply so.
For more science-celebrating splendor from The Universe in Verse, savor astrophysicist Janna Levin reading “A Brave and Startling Truth” by Maya Angelou and “Planetarium” by Adrienne Rich; poet Sarah Kay reading from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman; Regina Spektor reading “Theories of Everything” by the astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson; Amanda Palmer reading “Hubble Photographs: After Sappho” by Adrienne Rich; and Neil Gaiman’s original tributes-in-verse to women in science, environmental founding mother Rachel Carson, and astronomer Arthur Eddington, who confirmed Einstein’s relativity in the wake of a World War that had lost sight of our shared belonging and common cosmic spring.
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Published January 2, 2020
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https://www.themarginalian.org/2020/01/02/krista-tippett-howard-nemerov-universe-in-verse/
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