WEBVTT

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Be patient.

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Learn to love the questions.

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[LAUGHTER]

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"Attempting to articulate the
unknown, to say the ineffable

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is something shared by
writers and scientists alike.

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Writers, scientists like E.O.
Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould

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have done a great deal to heal
the Cartesian mind-body rift.

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And so that now
scientists are not only

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welcoming narrative and
metaphor into their practices,

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they're reading the work
of poets in the same way

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that poets read
scientists for answers."

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Oh.

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[LAUGHS]

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I met your Arizona
ethnobotanist, Gary Nabhan,

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at a three nation
bison conference

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where we were both doing
presentations a few years ago

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and then read his book
Cross-pollinations

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about the marriage between
science and poetry.

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And you probably
already know this,

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but I was delighted
to discover it.

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In one of his
essays, he explains

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how he used metaphors taken
from an Amy Clampett poem

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to discover a link between the
destruction of Native plants

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and the outbreak of diabetes
among Native peoples.

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Since 2004, I've
been collaborating

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with wildlife biologists to find
metaphors to select poems that

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might articulate or
bring emotional resonance

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to their important discoveries.

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With the help of an Institute
of Museum and Library Services

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grant, I curated a
six acre 27 century

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permanent installation of
poetry in Central Park that

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celebrated the sustainability
of tribes and species.

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It's read by a million
people from all

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over the world each year.

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When it went up,
the understanding

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of the international
conservation message

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improved by 48%, which
was amazing to us all.

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Basically, scientists
gather the information

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and they want to share it.

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They're incredibly
hopeful, hopeful people.

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And they bring us
to work with them

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to find the poem
that will somehow

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share what they've
discovered with an audience

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and create an
emotional resonance.

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How do I know the 48%?

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I was a little--

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I wasn't quite sure of the
science of this myself,

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but we have a sublime
person as part of our team.

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He's actually the person
who writes the grants

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and does a lot of the
thinking behind this.

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And he does entrance
and exit interviews.

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So before the poems go up,
they have a set of questions

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that they ask people.

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And then after the poems go
up, they interview people.

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One of the things that was
interesting we discovered

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is that some people would
say, oh, I don't like poetry.

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I didn't read the poems.

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And yet, they will speak back
verbatim a line from a poem.

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And so there's something
that takes place just walking

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through the landscape
surrounded by poetry.

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It has an imprint
upon these people.

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OK.

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So here-- can you all see?

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Is my head in the way?

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We have Coleman Barks's
translation of the 13th century

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Sufi poet, Rumi.

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I wanted to have the poems in
both languages if possible,

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but Coleman follows
Robert Bly's idea

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of leaping poetry and
leaping translations.

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And so it was absolutely
impossible to link

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his translation to the Farsi.

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And believe me, I tried.

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It was so-- now we have
this one little piece,

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"let the beauty we
love be what we do."

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