Скачать или смотреть My God, It’s Full Of Stars (The Universe in Verse, Part 2)

A poet looks at her father, an engineer for the Hubble Telescope, and sees our human hunger to know the universe.

“My God, It’s Full Of Stars”, poem written and performed by Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy K. Smith, is transformed into stop motion animation with cosmic and human imagery handcrafted with paints and liquids on glass and optical distortions.

It's the second episode in the animated series of The Universe In Verse, a celebration of the wonder of reality with stories of science told through poetry, a project by Maria Popova (https://www.themarginalian.org/) with On Being (https://onbeing.org/)

Created for a story about Henrietta Leavitt, Edwin Hubble, and our human hunger to know the universe. Read the story, the poem and more about the animation process here: https://www.themarginalian.org/2022/0...

About the series: https://www.themarginalian.org/the-un...

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poem + reading by Tracy K. Smith
art + animation by Daniel Bruson
music by Gautam Srikishan
with creative direction by Erin Colasacco

Created for The Universe In Verse
a project by Maria Popova with On Being

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MY GOD, IT’S FULL OF STARS (PART 5)
By Tracy K. Smith

When my father worked on the Hubble Telescope, he said
They operated like surgeons: scrubbed and sheathed
In papery green, the room a clean cold, a bright white.

He’d read Larry Niven at home, and drink scotch on the rocks,
His eyes exhausted and pink. These were the Reagan years,
When we lived with our finger on The Button and struggled

To view our enemies as children. My father spent whole seasons
Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.
His face lit up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending
Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons
For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed
For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,
The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is —

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.