A holiday gift: The Universe in Verse 2020 free limited-time rebroadcast

NOTE: This newsletter might be cut short by your email program. [View it in full](.  If a friend forwarded it to you and you'd like your very own newsletter, [subscribe here]( — it's free.  Need to modify your subscription? You can [change your email address]( or [unsubscribe](. [Brain Pickings]( [The Universe in Verse 2020: Holiday Rebroadcast]( [Welcome]Dear {NAME}, In April 2020, to mark National Poetry Month and to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day amid the global confusion of the pandemic we had only just begun to parse, I hosted The Universe in Verse — the annual charitable celebration of science and the natural world through poetry, into which I pour my heart and soul each spring. This year, in a moment particularly trying for the collective psyche and bounded by particularly challenging practical limitations, I and everyone else involved poured manyfold more time, thought, care, strained resources, and unrestrained heart, in the hope that the poems and the stories may be of succor and service. Nearly 90,000 people around the world tuned into this ephemeral gathering, which bore the working title Possible Futures as it was coming together months before the pandemic. This week, I am making a weeklong rebroadcast of the show available — an alternative to the television replays of old movies, and above all a humble offering of optimism and perspective to buoy the new year. Because — holy stardust! — couldn't we all use some of that as we face our possible futures. The original program description, as it appeared in April, can be found below. You can watch the broadcast [on this page]( where it will be available between December 24 and January 1 and where recordings of the first three years of The Universe in Verse are also available without expiry. (My personal favorite is Year Two, 2018.) Here is to our possible futures. Waving warmly from chilly Brooklyn, Maria [d941e0d0-101f-49dd-9d7e-e0d2c5b7f0d5.png]( ABOUT THE UNIVERSE IN VERSE 2020 Since 2017, [The Universe in Verse]( has been celebrating the natural world — the science, the splendor, the mystery of it — through poetry, that lovely backdoor to consciousness, bypassing our habitual barricades of thought and feeling to reveal reality afresh. And now here we are — “survivors of immeasurable events,” in the words of the astronomer and poet [Rebecca Elson]( “small, wet miracles without instruction, only the imperative of change” — suddenly scattered six feet apart across a changed world, blinking with disorientation, disbelief, and no small measure of heartache. All around us, nature stands as a selective laboratory log of only the successes in the series of experiments we call evolution — every creature alive today, from the blooming magnolias to the pathogen-carrying bat, is alive because its progenitors have survived myriad cataclysms, adapted to myriad unforeseen challenges, learned to live in unimagined worlds. The 2020 Universe in Verse is an adaptation, an experiment, a Promethean campfire for the collective imagination. (Here is a lovely [trailer]( of sorts.) Originally, this year’s edition was migrating to a majestic outdoor amphitheater in the redwoods of California, exploring the question What Is Life. Four days later, I was to host another event across the landmass — a celebration of the 50th anniversary of Earth Day and [Rachel Carson’s legacy]( — on the steps of the New York Public Library, where the inaugural Earth Day took place in 1970. Both were colossal labors of love many months in the making, with many remarkable humans involved. Both were cancelled out of necessary regard for the resilience of life as we face its fragility together — a world of hostages to a submicroscopic assailant, a world of refugees from ordinary life, struggling for safety, sanity, and survival of body and soul. Adapting to this extra-ordinary shared circumstance, The Universe in Verse is taking a virtual leap to serve what it has always aspired to serve — a broadening of perspective: cosmic, creaturely, temporal, scientific, humanistic — all the more vital as we find the aperture of our attention and anxiety so contracted by the acute suffering of this shared present. I have once again joined forces with my friends at [Pioneer Works]( the birthplace of The Universe in Verse — that improbable brick-and-mortar spaceship of possibility, where we have been quietly building [New York City’s first-ever public observatory]( to offer precisely such a portal to cosmic and creaturely perspective, a place devoted to education and enchantment, democratizing the science and the poetics of the universe, and making, in Walt Whitman’s words, “all spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets” available to “all souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different.” Expect readings of Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Adrienne Rich, Pablo Neruda, June Jordan, Mary Oliver, Audre Lorde, Wendell Berry, Hafiz, Rachel Carson, James {NAME}, and other titans of poetic perspective, performed by a largehearted cast of scientists and artists, astronauts and poets, Nobel laureates and Grammy winners: Physicists Janna Levin, Kip Thorne, and Brian Greene, musicians Rosanne Cash, Patti Smith, Amanda Palmer, Zoë Keating, Morley, and Cécile McLorin Salvant, poets Jane Hirshfield, Ross Gay, Marie Howe, and Natalie Diaz, astronomers Natalie Batalha and Jill Tarter, authors Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Masha Gessen, Roxane Gay, Robert Macfarlane, and Neil Gaiman, astronaut Leland Melvin, playwright and activist Eve Ensler, actor Natascha McElhone, entrepreneur Tim Ferriss, artists Debbie Millman, Dustin Yellin, and Lia Halloran, cartoonist Alison Bechdel, radio-enchanters Krista Tippett and Jad Abumrad, and composer Paola Prestini with the Young People’s Chorus. Expect glorious surprises. [UiV_2020_1200.jpg?resize=680%2C680]( Every golden human thread weaving this global lifeline is donating their time and talent (and oh how much time this has taken!), diverting from their own work and livelihood, to offer this generous gift to the world. We’ve made this just because it feels important that it exist, that it serve some measure of consolation by calibration of perspective, perhaps even some joy. The Universe in Verse is ordinarily a ticketed charitable event, with all proceeds benefiting a chosen ecological or scientific-humanistic nonprofit each year. We offer this year’s broadcast freely, but making the show exist and beaming it to you had significant costs, paid out of (shallow, personal, non-profit) pocket. If you are so moved and able, please support this colossal labor with [a donation to Pioneer Works]( whose doors are now physically closed to the public but whose hearts remain open to the world as they pirouette to find new ways of serving art, science, and perspective, including a new community-driven [Advocate Membership]( which I encourage you to consider in helping make our possible futures possible. Your donation to Pioneer Works is tax-deductible and appreciation-additive. There would be no Universe in Verse without this exposed-brick spaceship of possibility. [d941e0d0-101f-49dd-9d7e-e0d2c5b7f0d5.png]( [ GO TO BROADCAST PAGE]( [Forward to a friend]( PAGE]( [Like on Facebook]( donating=loving In 2020, I spent thousands of hours and thousands of dollars keeping Brain Pickings going. For fourteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has enlarged and enriched your own life this year, please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference. monthly donation You can become a Sustaining Patron with a recurring monthly donation of your choosing, between a cup of tea and a Brooklyn lunch.  one-time donation Or you can become a Spontaneous Supporter with a one-time donation in any amount. [Start Now]( [Give Now]( Partial to Bitcoin? You can beam some bit-love my way: 197usDS6AsL9wDKxtGM6xaWjmR5ejgqem7 [---] You're receiving this email because you subscribed on Brain Pickings. This weekly newsletter comes out on Sundays and offers the week's most unmissable articles. 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