THE UNIVERSE: WHAT IF IT'S ALL POETRY?

ESO/T. Preibisch

We have been on earth for thousands of years.

Wandering and wondering, roaming and  researching, exploring and examining our world.
Seeking to understand, to number, to order, to name-- all that is...

Ever attempting to answer the perennial questions:
What is real?  What is true?
How did it all begin and how does it all work?
Who are we?
And why are we here?

What if the answers are more complex than we ever imagined, yet far simpler than we have guessed?

What if it's all poetry?

I recently discovered several amazing books that seem to suggest just such an answer.

In CosmoLyrical: what if it's all poetry?, Phievalon (stage name of spoken-word artist Phil Long) offers answers from across the cosmos, pointing us to language  and ideas and poetry as the question and the answer.   And the source of it all-- A Poet!

In an excerpt from What if it's all poetry?  He offers the following:

What if matter is actually made up of what really matters?..... what if atoms were iambs.... and rocks  are merely metaphors?....

And in another excerpt he asserts:

That we are absurd,
we spoken words,
language in dust,
poetry in protein,
amino acid adventures,
prose, still waiting for answers.

This IS my reason to believe; a fairy-tale God-poet
writing souls into eternity
with dust...

Click  to listen to What if it's all poetry? or  watch a live performance at the Java Monkey in Decatur, Georgia.

Likewise,  we are invited to continue our ponderings and wonderings about the cosmos, our existence, and the whys of it all in The Universe Verse by James Lu Dunbar.

His book serves up a double dish of delight--- poetry and comics converge to explain the origins of the universe, our own earth, and life, including human beings  He spans all time and theories, from the Big Bang to the invention and benefits of writing.  In between he considers energy, space, time, matter, DNA, and much more.

He ends with an invitation to continue to question what we know and what is known;

While science is new
and still in it's youth,
already it's shown us
such beautiful truth,
all it needs is a question
and some willing sleuth.
Do you like to wonder?
Do you like to ask?
You might be just who
we need for this task....
The universe is a chain
 and you're one lucky link,
 so be grateful and kind,
 and do try to think!

Science in rhymes and frames.
Theories in verse and panels.

In order to appreciate this book, you must see the text integrated with the images--- They cannot be separated.  Click here to see images, as well as a brief  video allowing you to peek inside the book.


Poets have always contemplated, metaphorized, and versified the universe, their world, and their place in both.  They have pondered in galactic generalities, as well as personalized specificities.  We have volumes of poetry which support the notion that it's all poetry.


 In Verse & Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics, editor Kurt Brown has gathered  quintessential representations of such poetry by poets we know and love, including Charles Simic, Howard Nemerov, Albert Goldbarth, Jorie Graham, John Updike, William Stafford, Rita Dove, Billy Collins, and more.

This collection of verses tackles all that exists.  The selections include topics such as the universe, space, time, matter, heavenly bodies, earth, animals, and humans, as well as theory and speculation, and numbers.

Science and math translated into poetic wisdom, reflections, and questions.
Theory and research in stanzas.

One of the epigraphs chosen by Brown, a quote by Edward Abbey from The Journey Home, says it all:

Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world; and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet, must possess the ability to communicate to the rest of us his sense of love and wonder at what his work discovers.

Abbey seems to agree--- it's all poetry.


I remember my  amazement at Carl Sagan's Cosmos.  These poetic texts on the same subjects make perfect companions to Sagan's now classic scientific work.

And not only is it all poetry on the cosmic scale; it is all poetry in our personal lives, as we consider where we fit in the larger plan, place, and purpose.

In the Bible, Ephesians 2:10 asserts that we are God's workmanship,  his masterpiece, his opus, his handiwork------  the Greek word here is poiema.  
Yes....we are God's poems.
It is all poetry.

In poetry, we can  seek, name, number, and order our lives in the context of the cosmos. We can observe, reflect, and question who we are individually, as well as cosmically.


In Secrets to the Universe, Wit Woliczko has recorded, in haiku and senryu, personal observations and theories of his own life in the universe.  Here are two samples:

How does one slow time?
Listen to every second....
for Infinity.


I anticipate
to look at the world anew
with every poem


And young writer, eleven -year old Savion Harris writes poetry to explore his narrow, homeless universe. His poem Questions is included in  2014 Rattle Young Poets Anthology.

Who am I?
Where do I belong?
Do I have a home?...
I'm not even sure if
I exist.

And finally, as we consider our lives in our world, lived in relationship to all that exists, there is nothing that we think, feel, say, do or encounter, that is not poetry, that cannot become a poem.

So in closing I offer Everything is a Poem: The Best of J. Patrick Lewis.  In this collection,we find people, animals, places, riddles and reading, nature and nonsense---- all become poems.


What if it's all poetry?

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Consider those perennial questions:

What is real?  What is true?
How did it all begin and how does it all work?
Who are we?
And why are we here?

Write a meditation exploring these questions.


Consider the notion that it is all poetry.  Write an essay, personal narrative, or poem entitled What if it's all poetry?

SPRINGING INTO LIFE

I saw my first robin of the season on the way to church last week.

The sun was shining.  It was warmer that day than it had been in a long time.

I did not wear my puffy down coat.
No hat.
No gloves.
No boots.

Just a light shawl.

I have been hearing birds singing ever since that day.

Spring is here.

And we welcome this season of new life.
We welcome the shedding of  heavy clothes--the stripping of  winter skins
We look with anticipation at bare limbs beginning to sprout buds-- the foretaste of green leaves  and colorful blossoms.

We even welcome the rain that will come in seasonal abundance, smelling of soil and growth and sunshine.

Spring inspires poets.

We can't look at all the changes and beauty of this time of year without painting images on paper, seeding our world with words of  resurrected life, and welcoming the new lightness that we are beginning to feel.

We can't help but stand at our windows with Billy Collins in his poem, Monday,  and watch the world gradually dress itself in lovely Easter finery.

The birds are in their trees,

the toast is in the toaster,

and the poets are at their windows.

We experience these changes with Basho in his haiku--- with our eyes and our noses.

Spring air —

woven moon      

and plum scent.

 The  rays shift and shade new angles--in 812, Emily Dickinson highlights that spring light

A Light exists in Spring

Not present on the Year

At any other period —

When March is scarcely here

A Color stands abroad

On Solitary Fields

That Science cannot overtake

But Human Nature feels.

It waits upon the Lawn,

It shows the furthest Tree

Upon the furthest Slope you know

It almost speaks to you....

 Several years ago, as my fifth graders and I were walking back in to our school from recess, we saw several crocuses just blooming.  These were the first flowers we  had seen that spring.  At their insistence, I snapped a picture.

Once back in our room, we immediately engaged in a cumulative sentence process (Holland 2012, pp 171-175) to  collaboratively produce the following cumulative poem:

Five purple crocuses
pushed their heads up
through the hard winter soil
greeted the sun
opened their silken petals
drank the sweet spring rain
and danced--
just for us.

As you search for poems that reflect your spring spirit, there are many resources that offer what you seek.

The Academy of  American Poets Website, Poets.Org, offers a range of spring poems


Poetry Foundation also offers us a range of poems and articles about spring

Another source for classic and contemporary spring poems is the poetry section of About.com

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

 Stand at your window and observe the seasonal signs and changes that indicate spring is here.

Take a walk noting the evidences of new growth and life.

Write the longest sentence you can, detailing your observations.  Include many clauses, phrases actions, and descriptions.

Then begin to choose several phrases from your sentence to create your own cumulative poem.

Here is my sentence and resulting cumulative poem:

New life hides beneath the surface waiting for one more drop of rain,  reaching for one more ray of sunlight, hoping for a quiet breath of spring air, while judging just the right moment to poke through the hard dirt, to show one bare bud, to furl one green leaf,  gasping at the struggle to defy winter death.


New life hides
beneath the surface
waiting for one more drop of rain
one more  ray of sunlight
and a quiet breath of spring air
while judging the right moment
to emerge
poking through the hard dirt
showing one bare bud
unfurling one green leaf
gasping---
at the struggle
to defy winter death.

A WORD OR TWO OR NONE

 I talk a lot.

Sometimes it would be better if I didn't utter so many words.  Or maybe no words.

When I write, I also use many words. Writing group members and friends who edit my work are always suggesting that I not be so repetitive--- that I use fewer words.

In order to control and combat that wordy urge in writing, I naturally gravitate toward short forms--- haiku, haibun, tanka and the like. (See my earlier posts related to short forms: Haiku Meditations and Conversations in Poetry.)

As an illustrator, I would probably be that artist with too many lines, too much color, and many unnecessary details.

I recently discovered two delightful new books that have perfected the minimalist approach-- in both words and images.

 Work: An Occupational ABC  by Kellen Hatanaka  challenges us to revisit our classic conceptions and connotations of jobs, who can do them, and how they are to be done. Women are engaged in jobs we stereotypically portray as male-centered.  Elderly folks are included, as well, as young folks.  And the illustrations offer people of a variety of colors, and even include, on the xenologist  pages, a four-legged person from another world.

Each  page (and some two-page spreads)  include a large capital letter and one word identifying an occupation. Simple.  Yet as we ponder the array of jobs-- some we have heard of and others that  may be unfamiliar-- we begin to notice connections and  embedded stories. We begin to see hidden visual jokes and surprises. Complexity.

The cover shows the illustration from the grocer page, but to be fully enjoyed, this illustration cannot be separated from the forest ranger page preceding it, and the  horticulturist page following it.

I collect ABC books, and this is that, but so much more.  Children and adults alike will delight each time they discover a new  twist and turn in Hatanaka's creative offering.

To view images from this book and read Maria Popova's related article, Rethinking Our Atlas of Possibilities: An Alphabet Book of Imaginative, Uncommon, and Stereotype-Defying Occupations, click here.


 Before After by Anne-Margo Ramstein and Matthias  Aregui enchants our eyes and our minds.This wordless book will provide hours of contemplation and fun for everyone who opens these pages.
What comes before? What comes after?  We all know the koan about the chicken or the egg-- in this book  the egg comes first...or does it?

Again, children and adults will delight in discovering  connections, humor, reappearance of previous items and ideas, literary allusions, political statements and more--- all with no words.  Much discussion, laughter, and after-thinking will be generated around reasons an item is before or after.

Click here to see sample images from Before After.

Both of these books, discovered within days of each other, immediately reminded me of the artistic and intriguing visual conundrums offered by Blexbolex. With only one or two  words  to  label each image, he also creates connections-- some obvious and some obscure.   His books,People and Seasons, will make perfect companions for Work: An Occupational ABC  and  Before After.

Click here to see images from People.

Click here to see images from Seasons.

     
When the words are few
the images can grab you
and say it all.

Today's Deeper Writing Possibilities

Examine the images in the above books. Note and write about some of the connections, patterns, humor, literary allusions, political or societal statements.  

Reflect on times when images, rather than words, delivered strong messages for you.

Write an essay or poem about that event or situation or moment.