North of the North Pole

Photo credit: NASA Goddard Photo and Video on Visual hunt / CC BY

About a year ago, Dennis Overbye wrote a beautiful obituary and a separate appraisal on Stephen Hawking in New York Times called “Stephen Hawking Taught Us a Lot About How to Live.” I took his words and ideas, pared them down, moved them around, and mixed in my own to create this poem, “North of the North Pole” (the phrase Hawking used to describe the absurdity of trying to understand what came before the Big Bang). For a few lines, I also adapted a tweet of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s and took two lines from Ezra Pound’s “E. P. Ode Pour L’Election de Son Sepulchre.” The last line is adapted from a sentence in Mark Mirsky’s essay, “The Novel: Dead or Just Difficult?”

You can read “North of the North Pole” on Medium here.