“Ode to Origins”
Collaborators’ Q&A: Poet Mara Jebsen: The poem is a praise-poem and sort of lifts its hands and says, “yes.” Artist David Bernardy: Mara’s poem reveals a sense of the scientific that really delighted me—to go from the doubled image to the “bilateral human,” and from there, to cell division and the connections that exist between us humans, jellyfish, and poppies… lovely, lovely.
Mara Jebsen is a poet, performer, and essayist. She is a New York Foundations for the Arts fellow in poetry and was raised by folklorists in Philadelphia and in Lome, Togo. Artist David Bernardy is an artist, a writer and a dad. He likes lost things, old things, and dogs. www.davidbernardy.com