I have become a person on the pages and in the margins of books. In nearly two decades of reckoning with my reading in writing, it has been my ongoing lamentation to see works of enduring beauty and substance perish out of print — because the ideas they conduct are not the easiest and most marketable, because amid a culture that reduces literature to a commodity and binds readers in a moral paradox they ask us to think more widely and feel more deeply.

Having always believed that the most valiant way to complain is to create, I have joined forces with my friends at McNally Jackson — New York’s most beloved independent bookstore, and the independent publisher with whom I partnered on my Almanac of Birds — to launch Marginalian Editions: an act of resistance to the erasures of culture and a loving corrective for the collective selective memory called history.

Every year, Marginalian Editions revives three such out-of-print treasures that offer a torchlight in our search for meaning — from science and philosophy to poetry and children’s books. I introduce each with a reflection on how it has shaped my inner world and why our world needs it. Some are forgotten books by beloved writers like Margaret Wise Brown, Henry Miller, and Diane Ackerman. Some are books of timeless resonance by forgotten visionaries like Kathleen Lonsdale (the pioneering X-ray crystallographer and peace activist who became the first woman to preside over the British Association of Sciences and helped keep the Cold War from ending in a nuclear holocaust), Jane Ellen Harrison (the iconoclastic historian who brought Ancient Greece to the modern world, bridged science and religion, and influenced writers as various as Virginia Woolf and Mary Beard), and Hockley Clarke (a onetime teenage soldier who spent a decade befriending a family of blackbirds).

This is our inaugural trio:

A deep bow to Margaret Harring at McNally Jackson for the raptures of geometry and color gracing our covers and fathoms of gratitude to Elizabeth Alexander, whose poem “Amistad” led me to the stunning Muriel Rukeyser book I was so determined to save from oblivion that I launched this entire imprint.

Below is my foreword as it appears in that spark-book of the series:

MARGINALIAN EDITIONS # 1 | FOREWORD

A mind is a strange place, strange and solitary — the only place where, with all our passions of reason and all our calculations of emotion, we render reality what it is; the only place where truth is won or lost, where beauty means anything, where mathematics, God, and the color of your mother’s eyes exist. That out of such solitude and such strangeness one mind can touch another, touch a constellation of others, touch the spirit of its time and the soul of the future — this is the great miracle that makes the loneliness bearable and life more alive.

“Whatever has happened, whatever is going to happen in the world, it is the living moment that contains the sum of the excitement, this moment in which we touch life and all the energy of the past and future,” Muriel Rukeyser (1913–1980) begins her book-length prose poem about the creative spirit, anchored in the life and legacy of Willard Gibbs (1839–1903) — a benediction of science, democracy, and the imagination, disguised as a biography of a lonely forgotten genius who shaped the modern world: “a phantom of science to haunt inventors who did not know his name, to overreach dimension touching history and touching art”; a mind that unraveled the mysteries of matter by following “the imperative in his loneliness, the creative loneliness of the impelled spirit.”

Rukeyser was twenty-one when Theory of Flight — her debut poetry collection, based on the flying lessons she had taken barely out of her teens — won the prestigious Yale Younger Poets Prize. Critics didn’t know what to make of her. Some were offended by “the confident self-assurance of the young woman taking on the Whitman mantle of prophecy.” Others saw her unexampled art as the kind “that makes people act a little more valiantly when they have understood it.” A year earlier, she had been arrested in Alabama while reporting on the Scottsboro case; a year later, she would arrive in Spain on the eve of the Civil War to cover the defiant alternative to the Nazi Olympics in Berlin–the People’s Olympiad in Barcelona. She would go on to place her very body in the path of a South Korean dictatorship that had sentenced an obscure radical poet to death. Her motto would become: “Breathe-in experience, breathe-out poetry.” She would never cease defending and celebrating the “axiom-breaking” visionaries who dismantle the world in order to reimagine it. She would become the poet of possibility.

The daughter of a Yonkers bookkeeper and a concrete salesman, Rukeyser had been writing poems since she was a teenager; she had been trying to see the world whole. The Yale prize conferred upon her the thorny crown of expectation to become America’s next great poet. And she would. Adrienne Rich would regard her as a genius “beyond her time,” and Anne Sexton would call her “Muriel, mother of everyone.” But first she would spend seven years immersed in the world of this strange and solitary axiom breaker, whose story interlaces with the story of science, of America, of our search for equilibrium in the very substance of being.

Working in silence and isolation, through indifference and rejection, Willard Gibbs, with his gentle beautiful face and his unwillingness to concede that anything is unknowable, revolutionized thermodynamics — the science of heat, work, and energy that governs the universe and its every echo in an engine, in the ocean’s tides, in the energy metabolism that keeps us alive. “He becomes a shadow radiating light; by that light we see the map of possibilities,” Rukeyser writes. “He had taken a field not regarded as fertile and had taught the laws of its fertility; this lean, laconic gardener still gives us harvest, and promise of more.” Einstein placed him in the highest rank of genius. Ludwig Boltzmann lauded his statistical mechanics as the greatest achievement in science since Newton’s theory of gravity. Many consider him the greatest scientist America has so far produced. The head of the American Telephone and Telegraph Company — an industry that could not exist without Gibbs’s work, an industry that evolved to become the internet — lamented that Gibbs’s science is so difficult to convey precisely because it is so fundamental: “a ponderous foundation on which so great a superstructure has been built that no one notices the foundation anymore.”

The foundation was vast and various. The statistical mechanics he invented came to underpin fields as disparate as game theory, weather forecasting, the study of neural networks, and the calculation of life insurance. His vector analysis shaped the geometry of motion applied in miracles of invention he could have never imagined: cinema, space flight, self-driving cars. His equilibrium studies shed light on the ancient mystery of human blood. His work on heat fostered a new understanding of the most haunting and intimate consequence of thermodynamics — entropy, that grand cosmic march of dissolution dragging us along the vector of irreversibility from order to disorder and dissolution: the salad that will never again become a garden, the first gray hair auguring the grave; it was Gibbs’s entropic thermodynamics that led Max Planck, in his passionate debates with Boltzmann, to come up with the notion of energy quanta that lit the dawn of quantum physics. His phase rule — Gibbs’s great triumph — illuminated the thermodynamic properties of a system as matter changes from one state to another across solid, liquid, and gas, a system for “the gathering of atoms, of constellations.” It made rubber gloves and rockets possible. It sparked a new use of alloy systems that ushered in the birth of automobiles, air travel, and radio; it helped agricultural chemists better understand soil, that lifeblood of the biosphere; it made Rukeyser’s father’s work, cement, possible. Edison profited greatly from knowledge of the phase rule — without it, there could be no incandescent bulb. The pioneering polar explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his team froze to death by ignorance of it — they had left their oil cans, precious source of heat and fuel, atop an icy cairn, not aware that at extremely low temperatures, the tin alloy changes phase and turns to powder. Today, the phase rule underpins the new field of computational material science, which allows us to computationally model the properties of alloys never previously imagined and then to make them — high-entropy alloys that can withstand the roiling atmospheres of other worlds to let our space probes gather clues about the origin, nature, and possibility of life.

“Here was a principle that had made a clean sweep,” Rukeyser writes, “not only of its science, but of a whole way of thinking.” Here was a mind “controlled and flowing, the source of a flashing river,” heavy with the burden of communicating itself to a world not yet ready for him — this reserved and intensely imaginative man who lived with his sister and never married, who honed his equations walking the garden and climbing the red canyons around New Haven, who spent nights delighting in the chess puzzles of Alice in Wonderland with the neighbor’s children, who wrote poetry and believed above all else that “the whole is simpler than its parts.” A visitor to one of his lectures remembered walking into a classroom with only four students “sitting with faraway looks like angels’ on their faces” as Gibbs drew circles on the blackboard, tears streaming down his cheeks.

Through his arcane equations, Muriel Rukeyser saw an expression of “the great dream of order that moved any man or woman living in protest against the forces of the nineteenth century”; saw a creator who “lived closer than any inventor, any poet, any scientific worker in pure imagination to the life of the inventive and organizing spirit in America”; saw the kinship between his time and hers, as we see the kinship between her time and ours: the way “people seemed, as they do in any wartime, to open their minds to their relation to human beings,” and how “in these sudden wakening to old relationships, they searched for new ideas”; saw work that “led up to fearfully significant and branching changes: a fountain of results, reaching in war and peace, not only to our moment, but to the future” — work done in science but furnishing a framework for society, for creativity, for the life of the human spirit.

Through her twenties, through the outbreak of World War II, Rukeyser labored at this elaborate lattice of ideas, never losing sight of the parallels between his science and her art: “He was in the position of a great poet whose idiom must reach its audience through dilution after dilution, the work of prose writers and lesser poets, imitators and contemporaries who in their detailed flashes indicate his wider constellations.” She would later say she wrote the book she needed to read. At its heart is a search for an organizing principle of the imagination — in science, in art, in politics, in the collaborative creation we call culture:

The parable of his acceptance and rejection, of his background and his emergence, becomes a parable of human freedom and a free attitude toward the gifts which the imagination makes. Truth, belonging to no group, no leader, no army, may be chosen by a free people; that is a test of both for freedom and for truth. This power, which may emerge from the stillest of centers, which has emerged from the imagination of Gibbs, is to be used. It belongs to the stream of that great tradition from which free people are at liberty to choose their own ancestors. Gibbs is an ancestor and a contemporary of our moment in history. We bear many of the penalties he bore; many of the narrownesses are what we suffer from today, in our time and in our war; but in the generosity of his spirit he made his gifts. They, in their turn, enter into history; they are an image of its tendency.

We are still living these tendencies of history a century after Rukeyser and two after Gibbs, in our time of new wars and new leaps of the imagination. Our redemption, if it is to be had, lies still in the same recognition:

The sight of the truth is the crucial vision; the sight of the chance of America, or the chance of people anywhere in the world, to use the gifts that are offered. War is made by imagination, and the peace that follows is made in the same way. The tendencies of history are directed by the acceptance or rejection of the imagination. Economic pressures and the will of the people, aroused to resistance or producing in the full vividness of conscious life — they make these tendencies, which may go burning to war, or flow toward creative belief and the wish for a living order.

There is a lineage that emerges, a lineage of revelations and responsibilities, of which we are the inheritors and stewards. Likening Gibbs to Melville and to Whitman — creators all obscure and neglected at the peak of their creative powers, who went on to become great catalytic forces for other minds — Rukeyser writes:

We look for ancestors as if the world were completed. It is constantly being torn away. Wars and suppression on every level tear it. The life of the world is in its living people, in those who express that life and the dynamic equilibrium, which is its home. Once that expression is made, the responsibility is to receive it.

“It is said that his time was easier than ours,” James Baldwin wrote in his consummate essay on Shakespeare, “but I doubt it — no time can be easy if one is living through it.” Muriel Rukeyser never fell prey to the ahistorical self-pity of the present. Writing at the peak of the second planetwide war of the twentieth century, she still saw the nineteenth as “more desperate and contradictory than any other hundred years” and its final quarter — the years when Gibbs’s great breakthrough was lighting other minds afire — as “ill-equipped and grasping, romantic and wasteful, tinkering with the details of the democratic state and ignoring the vast hope and invention that would have to come before that state could be confirmed.” Still, she saw deeper into the heart of the epoch than its want and waste and farther past the horizon of possibility:

Even so, in these years, the country lifted up freshness and hope, a frontier brightness as the frontier passed. That line had wandered West as the equilibrium of America changed — indeed, as an image, the country might be seen as one of Gibbs’s mixed fluids, with the frontier, a barrier of single molecules, drawn down the map as a surface of discontinuity. The hope was always there: a lawless hope, since no one could predict the future of this system, unless they worked as Gibbs was working, frankly with partial knowledge, toward great and partial ends.

Throughout the book, Rukeyser keeps widening the aperture of attention and connection without sacrificing the finest detail, writing with the same vigor of mind about democracy as she does about vector analysis and membrane equilibrium and the crystalline phases of ammonium nitrate. To paint the landscape of thought in which Gibbs worked, she invokes John Quincy Adams and William James and a constellation of scientists, writers, and politicians who were once household names and who now draw a blank in most minds — a haunting reminder of how ahistorical our lives are, how limited our perspective by the collective selective memory of our culture, with all its erasures and indifferences. Over and over, Rukeyser counters this loss of perspective, drawing a continuous thread of revelation between the Amistad slave uprising and America’s first observatory, between Newton and Whitman, between the phase transition of alloys and the political forces behind World War II. Over and over, she zooms in to the level of the atom and out to the level of the world — the human world, that thing of chaos and contradiction, charged and fractal in its narratives of history, in its visions of possible futures. Adrienne Rich would come to laud her as “one of the great integrators, seeing the fragmentary world of modernity not as irretrievably broken, but in need of societal and emotional repair.” It was through the life of Gibbs that the young Rukeyser honed her reparative vision, her lifelong insistence on the need to integrate and connect — people, ideas, disciplines, differences. Later, she would come to see poetry as an “exchange of energy,” a “system of relationships” — notions at the center of Willard Gibbs’s science, at the center of her vision for a thriving democracy that permeates the book like a spell and a summons, cast upon our own time, calling us to rise to it with our own lives:

The highest level, that level of our thought at which Gibbs stands, looks to the past with re-affirmation and to the future with foreboding. Such foreboding is not the dark gaze, but the creation of images, which speak for the future as it arrives, with the speed of the poet . . . The re-affirmations are on the side of human chance. And it is this combination that permits Gibbs to play his immense part in a world in rearrangement, whose development he, as a mortal man, did not foresee.

What emerges from his story is a portrait of a country, a century, a cosmos of creativity that would color every realm of the human endeavor for epochs to come — an antidote to the artificial split, often antagonistic, between the different kinds of imagination. Enveloped in Rukeyser’s passionate and rigorously researched prose, Gibbs’s life becomes a living poem of possibility.

All the crafts of subtlety, all the effort, all the loneliness and death, the thin and blazing threads of reason, the spill of blessing, the passion behind these silences — all the invention turns to one end: the fertilizing of the moment, so that there may be more life.

Willard Gibbs: The Whole Is Simpler than Its Parts by Muriel Rukeyser