Be patient.
Learn to love the questions.
[LAUGHTER]
"Attempting to articulate the unknown, to say the ineffable
is something shared by writers and scientists alike.
Writers, scientists like E.O. Wilson and Stephen Jay Gould
have done a great deal to heal the Cartesian mind-body rift.
And so that now scientists are not only
welcoming narrative and metaphor into their practices,
they're reading the work of poets in the same way
that poets read scientists for answers."
Oh.
[LAUGHS]
I met your Arizona ethnobotanist, Gary Nabhan,
at a three nation bison conference
where we were both doing presentations a few years ago
and then read his book Cross-pollinations
about the marriage between science and poetry.
And you probably already know this,
but I was delighted to discover it.
In one of his essays, he explains
how he used metaphors taken from an Amy Clampett poem
to discover a link between the destruction of Native plants
and the outbreak of diabetes among Native peoples.
Since 2004, I've been collaborating
with wildlife biologists to find metaphors to select poems that
might articulate or bring emotional resonance
to their important discoveries.
With the help of an Institute of Museum and Library Services
grant, I curated a six acre 27 century
permanent installation of poetry in Central Park that
celebrated the sustainability of tribes and species.
It's read by a million people from all
over the world each year.
When it went up, the understanding
of the international conservation message
improved by 48%, which was amazing to us all.
Basically, scientists gather the information
and they want to share it.
They're incredibly hopeful, hopeful people.
And they bring us to work with them
to find the poem that will somehow
share what they've discovered with an audience
and create an emotional resonance.
How do I know the 48%?
I was a little--
I wasn't quite sure of the science of this myself,
but we have a sublime person as part of our team.
He's actually the person who writes the grants
and does a lot of the thinking behind this.
And he does entrance and exit interviews.
So before the poems go up, they have a set of questions
that they ask people.
And then after the poems go up, they interview people.
One of the things that was interesting we discovered
is that some people would say, oh, I don't like poetry.
I didn't read the poems.
And yet, they will speak back verbatim a line from a poem.
And so there's something that takes place just walking
through the landscape surrounded by poetry.
It has an imprint upon these people.
OK.
So here-- can you all see?
Is my head in the way?
We have Coleman Barks's translation of the 13th century
Sufi poet, Rumi.
I wanted to have the poems in both languages if possible,
but Coleman follows Robert Bly's idea
of leaping poetry and leaping translations.
And so it was absolutely impossible to link
his translation to the Farsi.
And believe me, I tried.
It was so-- now we have this one little piece,
"let the beauty we love be what we do."