Maria Popova

I mean, look at elementary and primary education.

There's no real scientific foothold, you know?

And so it's not so much that I feel an urgency to,

as that I love a creative challenge, I love creative constraint.

How much can you do with very limiting parameters and how many doors can you open when everything is walls?

Yes, I'm an extremely latecomer to poetry.

I would roll my eyes at it the way we do at things we don't understand because I was illiterate in it.

I did not have an education in poetry.

I didn't know how to read it, how to relate to it.

And then in my 20s, on a transatlantic flight, red-eye transatlantic flight, I met across the aisle this older woman who was in her 70s named Emily Levine, who was a comedian, philosopher of science, extraordinary person, extraordinary.

We hit it off so hard, much to the discontentment of the whole coach cabin.

And we talked all the way to New York from Edinburgh, wherever we were.

And over the years, she took it upon herself to educate me in poetry.

And in fact, we're here recording on the corner of 29th Street and 7th Avenue.

One day, Emily came.

She lived in Northern California.

She came to visit and went to a cafe that is literally diagonally on the corner here on the other side of the street on 29th and 7th.

And it was a Sunday.

We went in.

It was packed.