Diane Ackerman — The Planets: a cosmic pastoral
Poet and naturalist Diane Ackerman presents a soaring, scientifically grounded ode to our solar system that blends astronomy, imagination, and wonder into cosmic poetry.
Why we picked this
Ackerman has spent a career dissolving the border between science and poetry — this talk brings that rare sensibility to the solar system, where the language of wonder is not a substitute for precision but a companion to it.
Diane Ackerman, poet and naturalist, presents The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral — a work that ranges across the solar system in verse and prose, blending scientific rigor with the kind of imaginative reach that has defined her career. Ackerman is the author of A Natural History of the Senses and more than two dozen other books that refuse to treat science and art as separate enterprises.
The afternoon event at Politics and Prose offers a chance to hear a writer who has consistently found language for the phenomena that most of us experience in silence — from the texture of starlight to the choreography of planetary motion. Her work reminds us that wonder is not the absence of understanding but its deepest expression.
The event is free with livestream available.