The Marginalian
The Marginalian

Reads tagged with “The Universe in Verse”

From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne
From Stars to Souls: The Science of What Made You You, with a Dazzling Poem Read by David Byrne

“Look at the clever things we have made out of a few building blocks — O fabulous continuum.”

read article

Facts about the Moon: Dorianne Laux’s Stunning Poem about Bearing Our Human Losses When Even the Moon Is Leaving Us
Facts about the Moon: Dorianne Laux’s Stunning Poem about Bearing Our Human Losses When Even the Moon Is Leaving Us

read article

O Sweet Spontaneous: E.E. Cummings’s Love-Poem to Earth and the Glory of Spring
O Sweet Spontaneous: E.E. Cummings’s Love-Poem to Earth and the Glory of Spring

The ultimate anthem of resistance to the assaults on life.

read article

A Language for the Exhilaration of Being Alive: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Music and the Universe
A Language for the Exhilaration of Being Alive: The Poetic Physicist Alan Lightman on Music and the Universe

“Nowhere is the joy of existence so apparent as in music… Intelligent life-forms have created a multitude of sounds that express their exhilaration at being alive.”

read article

The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe
The Beginning and the End: Robinson Jeffers’s Epic Poem About the Interwoven Mystery of Mind and Universe

“Pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these thing grow from a chemical reaction?”

read article

The Universe in Verse Book
The Universe in Verse Book

“We need science to help us meet reality on its own terms, and we need poetry to help us broaden and deepen the terms on which we meet ourselves and each other. At the crossing point of the two we may find a way of clarifying our experience and of sanctifying it.”

read article

But We Had Music: Nick Cave Reads an Animated Poem about Black Holes, Eternity, and How to Bear Our Lives
But We Had Music: Nick Cave Reads an Animated Poem about Black Holes, Eternity, and How to Bear Our Lives

read article

Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit
Mushrooms: Cellist Zoë Keating Brings to Life Sylvia Plath’s Poem About the Tenacity of the Creative Spirit

“Our foot’s in the door.”

read article

To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem
To the Young Who Want to Die: Roxane Gay Reads Gwendolyn Brooks’s Lifeline of a Poem

“The gun will wait. The lake will wait. The tall gall in the small seductive vial will wait will wait.”

read article

Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost
Consciousness and the Constellations: Cognitive Scientist Alexandra Horowitz Reads and Reflects on Robert Frost

“You’ll wait a long, long time for anything much to happen…”

read article

View Full Site

The Marginalian participates in the Bookshop.org and Amazon.com affiliate programs, designed to provide a means for sites to earn commissions by linking to books. In more human terms, this means that whenever you buy a book from a link here, I receive a small percentage of its price, which goes straight back into my own colossal biblioexpenses. Privacy policy. (TLDR: You're safe — there are no nefarious "third parties" lurking on my watch or shedding crumbs of the "cookies" the rest of the internet uses.)