In the way poetry often begins - is this eureka-ish or just another day? -- last spring a few people from history bumped against another in my mind, which set off other mini collisions about the ways we might understand plants, rocks, and stars. History and science seem like good subjects for verse narratives, for paring down the bulk of history ( Read more... )

Many of us grew up looking at stars, but found our original wonder got washed away by familiarity or the sort of science that seems to diminish: Sorry, but your lucky star may be just a big hot rock, dust, or gasses. We get pretty songs and stories about the stars, then learn about distances and speed of light and that neither we nor the earth are ( Read more... )