rhyme schemes: science poetry

This was a post I hadn't planned to write. It leaped out at me while I was trolling the back issues of the science blog carnival, Tangled Bank, catching up and looking for other topics. There, I stumbled across the blog Science Creative Quarterly, run by David Ng, Director of the Advanced Molecular Biology Laboratory at the University of British Columbia. The blog is an odd and charming mix of science information, educational pieces, and humor. What attracted my interest was a side project Ng is promoting called Haiku Phylogeny. I thought, Great! Two of my major areas of interest in one! Better than Doublemint Gum.

This is not such an odd combination as you might think. The things science explores are generally pretty awe-inspiring, and that's just the kind of subject poets gravitate toward. If you're not familiar with the history of poetic science and scientific poetry, click on over here [pdf] and read a nice capsule summary of the subject, which dates back at least to the Romans, if not the Greeks. Frankly, it's probably gone on as long as people were making up poems and wondering about the world around them. The urge to study and explain resides in most of us, and the urge to write about those discoveries, or just the questions, in beautiful, formalistic language coincides more often than one might suspect. There are a couple of interesting interviews with poetic scientists and poets of science over at Qarrtsiluni (which, wonderfully, takes its name from the Inuit word for sitting together in the darkness, waiting for something to burst), where science and poetry is an occasional subject.

There's also a forthcoming anthology that's a collaboration between scientists and poets, soon to be published by Oxford University Press. I'm looking forward to this, as it's a true collaboration: each poem is introduced by the scientist whose work inspired it. "Readers can see how a poet and a solar physicist may share working assumptions; how poetic insight may inform psychiatric practice; how a poet's encounter with an MRI scanner leads to a fresh neurological experiment." The project is meant in part as an antidote to C.P. Snow's prevailing "two cultures" argument, where never the twain shall meet. I'm not very hopeful about one book bridging that gap, but at least it's a start. It could only be a good thing if the literati were more literate in science and the scientists became more acquainted with why the other subjects are called "humanities."

All kinds of poets mine science for images and ideas, without even mentioning the uncountable hordes of nature poets and their subdivisions. Some, like Lavinia Greenlaw, are well known and even commissioned for it. Diane Ackerman, who took astronomy from Carl Sagan at Cornell, is another of these. Emily Dickinson wrote a number of poems about contemporary scientific discoveries. Robert Browning did a snide little piece on the laboratory and e.e. cummings had the same take on it too. Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote eloquently about the behavior of comets and Amy Lowell about the fish in her aquarium.

The chosen subjects range from living creatures to the strange and vast realms of the physical sciences, to the tools of the sciences themselves. The life sciences probably get the most play, but astronomy gets more than a fair share. Astropoetica an on-line journal launched in 2003, publishes nothing but astronomy-related poetry. (You can read one of mine there, in their debut issue.) In the latest issue there's a series of poems commemorating Dr. Harald Alexandrescu,  "of the greatest personalities in Romanian astronomical history, [who served] as coordinator of Admiral Vasile Urseanu Municipal Observatory in Bucharest between 1984 and 2005. . . . [I]n 1998 he invited the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy-SARM to hold astropoetry galas at the observatory, making it one of the first opened for such events. In November of 2004 he officially became “the Friend of Honor”of SARM’s Cosmopoetry Festival." Isaac Newton is commemorated in another poem by Scottish poet James Thomson. And there's one of my favorites, Robert Frost's wonderful "The Star-Splitter." Of course, poets can be a bit cranky about all the facts too, like Walt Whitman in "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer."

Then there's the flip side, the scientist-poets, a bit fewer and farther between, unless you want to count the APS limerick contest. In that same spirit, there's good old Anonymous's "The Astronomer's Drinking Song" collected and published by English mathematician Augustus De Morgan, which was apparently sung at least once at a meeting of the Mathematical Society of London. Among the more contemporary is Paul Board, and his ode to Benzene, complete with footnotes, without which no scientific document is complete.

There tends to be a vast difference, not in quality, but in method between the two camps. The poets, unsurprisingly, are less concerned with absolute accuracy, by and large, and drawn more often to the big questions and overarching theories, and the most spectacular discoveries: the Big Bang, splitting the atom, evolution. The poems of scientists more often delve into the minutiae of research and the fine details of whatever they're studying, echoing in their structure the composition of a lab report. These are actually the kind I find most fascinating to read and to write, because it can be such a challenge to take the jargon of scientific discipline and employ the usual tools of poetry to weave it into a meaning larger than itself, without distorting the facts. And science has such wonderful words with lovely sounds to toss around: quark, gluon, nudibranch, silicate.

So I was really delighted that someone was putting together a book of haiku on phylogeny. Then I read a sample of the submitted haiku. And wept. The one that brought me to tears was this:

E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt

~Henry James

The author's namesake, though no poet, is surely rotating at high speed in his grave. I know it sent me running for my copy of The Essential Haiku, edited by Robert Hass, where I found two appropriate beauties from Basho within less than a minute:

First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.

A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.

In the first you have a perfect metaphor for the genetic similarities of primates. In the second, you have an illustration of the interesting fact of molting. C'mon people! It's only 17 syllables! It's not that hard! Truth and Beauty, shake hands here!

It used to be that a liberal arts education would give one a concentration in one subject and a smattering of everything else. But the pursuit of a science degree is now such an intensive course of study that there often isn't much room for anything else, certainly not anything as frivolous as poetry (or even a good writing class). And yet, when you mix the two cultures up—pull back the curtain on the lab and what goes on there, embrace the use of metaphor and simile in the correct context—it makes both disciplines richer and easier for the other to understand. To use a scientific metaphor: cross-pollination only makes for more robust offspring. Science and poetry are both creative human endeavors and can only enrich each other.

Comments

[Blake Stacey]

"O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem
By that sweet ornament which truth doth give."

-- Wm. Shakespeare, Sonnet 54

[Lee Kottner]

Yay! Exactly!

[skids]

level energy
sun framing silhouette blinds
cloud showing hiding

[Neal Deesit]

Kekule dreamed it;
A snake biting its own tail
Benzene's structure wakes.

A ripe apple falls
in Isaac Newton's garden
Above all hangs the moon.

[James Kotsybar]

There are posts to a contest here:
http://www.the-nucleus.org/bulletinboard/TDetails.cfm?ViewType=2&TID=660&CID=12185&#PID12185

[James Ph. Kotsybar]

UNPUBLISHED FINDINGS

They granulate the universe to pulp
Crashing particles only newly found.
They figure their trajectories and gulp,
“So much data upon which to expound!”
Their energies unbound by quantum course,
They separate the world we think we know.
They rip particles into force by force.
Unification’s where they say they’ll go.
When they finally prove life’s illusion,
Where do you think they’ll publish the result?
They may just ascend beyond confusion
And leave us in the lurch of the occult,
For once that testimony’s imparted,
Expostulation just seems false-hearted.

[Lee Kottner]

James, this is lovely, and sounds very Buddhist, too. I'm so glad this post is still drawing comments, two years later.