Centennial Conversations | Maria Popova & Marie Howe: How to Be a Living Poem

A conversation with Maria Popova and poet Marie Howe, lensed through the original manuscripts of William Blake's Auguries of Innocence and Walt Whitman's "O Captain, My Captain!"

"To celebrate the centennial of the Morgan Library & Museum–one of my favorite cultural institutions, stewarding some of the most influential works in the history of creative culture–I have chosen several items from the collection that I especially love to serve as springboards for larger conversations about art and life with some of the most interesting and creative people I know. We will be investigating questions like the nature of time and self, the art of observation and the art of vision, the relationship between memory and self-forgetfulness in creative work, and the power of being an outsider, lensed through Whitman and Dickinson, The Little Prince and Alice in Wonderland, the invisible women in the margins of classical music and the hidden philosophy in the margins of children's books."

– Maria Popova, writer, thinker, and creator of The Marginalian

Marie Howe is the author of New and Selected Poems ( W.W. Norton 2024), which includes poems from her four previous books. From 2012-2014, she served as the Poet Laureate of New York State. She is the poet in residence at The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, and a chancellor of the Academy of American Poets.

Maria Popova thinks and writes about our search for meaning—sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children's books, always through the lens of wonder. She is the creator of The Marginalian (born in 2006 under the name Brain Pickings), which is included in the Library of Congress permanent digital archive of culturally valuable materials, author of Figuring, and maker of the live show The Universe in Verse—a charitable celebration of the wonder of reality through stories of science winged with poetry — which is now also a book.

Held Tuesday, October 15, 2024.