Introducing "The Universe in Verse," animated edition

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[The Universe in Verse Animated Season | Episode 1: Emily Dickinson and the Birth of Ecology]( [The Universe in Verse]( was born in 2017 as a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — part resistance (to the assault on science and the natural world in an atmosphere of “alternative facts” and vanishing ecological protections) and part persistence (in sustaining the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.) For four seasons, it remained a [live gathering]( — thousands of embodied universes of thought and feeling, huddled together in a [finite space]( built in a faraway time when Whitman’s living atoms walked the streets outside. In this interlude between gatherings, as we face the biological and ecological realities of life with widened eyes, I have entwined visions with my friends at [On Being]( to reimagine the spirit of The Universe in Verse in a different incarnation, a year in the making: a season of stories about epoch-making events, discoveries, and unsung heroes from the history of science — this common record of our search for truth and the native beauty of reality — each illustrated in poetry’s lovely abstract language, with an animated poem. There are stories about relativity and the evolution of flowers, about entropy and space telescopes, about dark matter and the octopus consciousness, illustrated with poems new and old, by Emily Dickinson and Richard Feynman, by W.H. Auden and Tracy K. Smith, by Marilyn Nelson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, brought to life by a human constellation strewn across spacetime and difference: twenty-nine largehearted artists, musicians, writers, scientists, and other weavers of wonder, who have poured their time and talent into this improbable labor of love. The total distance between them exceeds the circumference of the globe. Half a century stretches between the youngest and the eldest. Among them are Yo-Yo Ma, Joan As Police Woman, David Byrne, Sophie Blackall, Amanda Palmer, Janna Levin, Ohara Hale, Maira Kalman, Debbie Millman, Toshi Reagon, Daniel Bruson, Zöe Keating, Garth Stevenson, Sy Montgomery, Jherek Bischoff, Edwina White, Marissa Davis, Tom McRae, Topu Lyo, Gautam Srikishan, Lottie Kingslake, Kelli Anderson, Liang-Hsin Huang, and Patti Smith. Released over the course of nine weeks, each of the nine episodes begins with a science story and ends with an animated poem chosen to illuminate the scientific fact with the sidewise gleam of feeling. Two of the poems (including [the premiere episode]( are set to song and seven are soulful readings scored with original music by a different composer. Each miniature totality is brought to life by a different performer and shimmers with visual magic by a different artist. Each is a portable cosmos of gladness at the chance-miracle of aliveness: all of us, suspended here in this sliver of spacetime, with our stories and our poems and each other. And so we begin: The first episode tells the story of evolution and the birth of ecology, illustrated with an Emily Dickinson poem — untitled, per her unconventional choice across her entire body of work, but known, per literary convention, by its first line: “Bloom.” Watch it, and find the transcript and poem text, on the [episode page](. HOW WE MADE IT Every true artist is a miniaturist of grandeur, determined to make every littlest thing the very best it can be — not out of egoic grandiosity but out of devotion to beauty, devotion paid for with their time and thought, those raw materials of life. When I invited the uncommonly gifted and uncommonly minded [Joan As Police Woman]( to bring the poem to life in a typical Universe in Verse reading, this true artist instead transformed it into a soulful song — an homage that would have gladdened the poet, who in her teenage years took regular music lessons and practiced piano for two hours a day, and who grew up to believe that, in its most transcendent stillness, the world is “thronged only with Music.” From the start, I envisioned using the teenage poet’s [herbarium]( — a forgotten treasure at the intersection of art and science, one of my favorite discoveries during the research for [the Dickinson chapters of Figuring]( — as the raw material for the animation art. Having collaborated on a handful of [previous]( [animated]( [poems]( I invited [Ohara Hale]( — artist, musician, poet, illustrator, animator, maker of [nature-reverent children’s books]( choreographer of beauty and feeling across a multitude of art-forms — to work her visual magic on the poem-song. In a small wood cabin at the foot of a Spanish volcano, she set about reanimating — in both senses of the word — Emily Dickinson’s spirit through her herbarium. Ohara composed all the creatures — the bee, the butterfly, the caterpillar, the human hand — from fragments of the poet’s centuries-old pressed flowers: digitized, restored, retraced by hand, and atomized into new life-forms. Individual petals, leaves, and stamens make the wings, body, and antennae of each butterfly. Layers of petals, sepals, and anthers stripe and behair the body of the bee. A large leaf folds unto itself to shape the hand that wrote this poem and nearly two thousand others — poems that have long outlived the living matter that felt and composed them, poems that have helped generations live. Strewing the animation are words from the poem, hand-lettered by the polymathic [Debbie Millman]( (whose script graces the Universe in Verse titles throughout the entire season) in a style based on surviving museum samples of Emily Dickinson’s handwriting from the period in which she composed the herbarium. In a lovely way, the art mirrors the music it serves. Joan’s composition is itself a time-traveling masterwork of layering: voice upon keys upon strings, feeling-tone upon feeling-tone, classical heritage beneath thoroughly original sensibility — all of it so consonant with the central poetic image, all of it “so intricately done,” all of it a triumph of that “profound responsibility” we have to the ecosystem of art and ideas abloom in the spacetime between Emily Dickinson and us. It has been an honor to collaborate with these uncommonly gifted women on honoring an uncommonly gifted artistic ancestor and celebrating our common evolutionary ancestry with all life-forms in nature. [Forward to a friend]( Online]( on Facebook]( donating=loving Every month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian ([formerly Brain Pickings]( going. For fifteen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. 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