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Science and Poetry:
Suggested Readings

John Hildebidle

Some months ago, in these pages, I argued that Science and the "Humane" art of poetry are in fact congruent activities. I mean now, and perhaps belatedly, to offer some data by which that conclusion might be tested, and (typically, for a teacher of literature) to offer a list of "suggested readings."

The first is an anthology, edited by Cambridge poet Kurt Brown and published by Milkweed Editions of Minneapolis. Its title offers the key: Verse and Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics. Brown construes that "about" broadly, it must be admitted. He might have taken, as his epigraph, one of the assertions I quoted here: "Both science and art have the habit of waking us up, turning on the lights, grabbing us by the collar and saying Would you please pay attention!" (Diane Ackerman). But instead, Kurt Brown invokes, as tutelary spirits Edward Abbey ("Any good poet, in our age at least, must begin with the scientific view of the world, and any scientist worth listening to must be something of a poet") and George Steiner ("The notion that one can exercise a rational literacy in the latter part of the twentieth century without a knowledge of calculus, without some preliminary access to topology or algebraic analysis, will soon seem a bizarre anachronism"). Lest it be thought that Brown dips into the lower ranks of poets, the table of contents contains such names as Charles Simic, Albert Goldbarth, A. R. Ammons, Howard Nemerov, Forrest Gander, Jorie Graham, John Updike, William Stafford, and Billy Collins. The titles are a delight: "This Is Your Geode Talking," "The Possible Advantages of the Expendable Multitudes," "Somebody Ought to Write a Poem for Ptolemy," "The Leaves of a Dream Are the Leaves of an Onion," "The Monkish Mind of the Speculative Physicist," "The Sciences Sing a Lullaby." And, perhaps my favorite, because I haven't a clue what it means: "The 9 + 2 Roseate Anatomy of Microtubules."

Not that all the poems are arcane, however – consider this one, by Howard Nemerov:

 

MOMENT

Now, starflake frozen on the windowpane
All of a winter night, the open hearth
Blazing beyond Andromeda, the sea-
Anemone and the downwind seed, O moment
Hastening, halting in a clockwise dust,
The time in all the hospitals is now,
Under the arc-lights where the sentry walks
His lonely wall it never moves from now,
The crying in the cell is also now,
And now is quiet in the tomb as now
Explodes inside the sun, and it is now
In the saddle of space, where argosies of dust
Sail outward blazing, and the mind of God,
The flash across the gap of being, thinks
In the instant absence of forever: now

And the volume, having wandered through physics, biology, Boolean algebra, fractals, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle," "Genetic Sequence," "Astrophysicists," "Chaos Theory," and many another subject about which my MIT students could and no doubt should educate me, ends rather poignantly:

THE MATHEMATICIAN'S DISCLAIMER

What I would give for a clear field
of vision, to rid myself of the crippling
disorder of my desk, my only child
standing before my wife, the wild
grass growing slowly over my shoetops.
I have given my life to numbers, and these
numbers, in return, have given me a life
I cannot control. But that is all
beside the point. Nothing is really solved;
as the photograph resolves in its pan,
the plan to map the path of the sun
cannot be won. What a relief to know
that if my days are numbered I have numbered
them myself, the pleasure of the music
of my life is not left in the clock, nor
the tock of the metronome, but in the moment
between moments, the measure left unmeasured

(Ira Sadoff)

A former student of mine, now a professor of computer science and other applied mathematics, observes about this poem that it limns the dilemma of almost any creative person, full of a conviction of the value of his/her enterprise, and as well of the impossibility, or at least improbability, of achieving breakthroughs, given the distinguished other workers in the field, past and present. Maybe, as I have long suspected, the "two cultures" are not so distinct as the common mythology would have it. Or, as Marge Piercy has said, "There are no poetic subjects, only subjects to which we pay the right kind of attention."

My second set of test cases, also from Milkweed, and (as it happens) edited by Brown's wife, Laure Anne Bosselaar, is entitled Urban Nature: Poems About Wildlife in the City. This collection is at once broader and more sharply-focused. A sample of titles will demonstrate the former quality: "Pigeons," "The Cabbage Butterfly," "The Taxidermist at the Zoo," "Watching Ants Play Soccer in Central Park," "A Diver for the NYPD Talks to His Girlfriend." Such an assortment of observers, and such an assortment of things observed. As Emily Hiestand observes, in a lucid and informed prefatory essay to the volume, "Ideas about nature are famously malleable. . . The word 'nature' can mean 'everything that is,' . . . Just as often 'nature' is used in contradistinction to 'culture.'" I like to challenge my students to write an adequate definition of the word, usually just before we take up Wordsworth (I do the same with love as we are about to take up Shakespeare's sonnets). The results are always fascinating.

As the first poem in the anthology wittily reminds us, "nature" is omnipresent in our urban lives, and even in our contemporary idiom - "it's a jungle out there," as we are given to saying. But if the poems in this anthology necessarily range widely, they also pay close attention to detail (like that cabbage moth or the soccer-playing ants). And how rewardingly they help us do so, as when Larry Levis observes "The Oldest Living Thing in L.A.":

At Wilshire & Santa Monica I saw an opossum
Trying to cross the street. It was late, the street
Was brightly lit, the opossum would take
A few steps forward, then back away from the breath
Of moving traffic. People coming out of the bars
Would approach, as if to help it somehow.
It would lift its black lips & show them
The reddened gums, the long rows of incisors,
Teeth that went all the way back beyond
The flames of Troy & Carthage, beyond sheep
Grazing rock-strewn hills, fragments of ruins
In the grass at San Vitale. It would back away
Delicately & smoothly, stepping carefully
As it always had. It could mangle someone's hand
In twenty seconds. Mangle it for good. It could
Sever it completely from the wrist in forty.
There was nothing to be done for it. Someone
Or other probably called the LAPD, who then
Called Animal Control, who woke a driver, who
Then dressed in mailed gloves, the kind of thing
Small knights once wore into battle, who gathered
Together his pole with a noose on the end,
A light steel net to snare it with, someone who hoped
The thing would have vanished by the time he got there.

(P. 240)

Or this unexpected epiphany, recorded by Bruce Berger:

SILVER-PACED

Every weekday morning heading east
Onto the bridge's six lanes
Of bored connivers at the wheel,
Steeped in exhaust,
Aware he must head back
Among the bridge's six opposing lanes
Gridlocked before dark,
Upholstered and encased, he still can feel
How ropes of iron soar to a peak, then swoop
As he nears the central span,
Least girded spot between his sedan
And water, twice-daily terror
That gapes through his entrails; while overhead,
On top of the oncoming tower,
Peregrines - long-driven away
From this stretch by the species that makes -
Have laid four eggs in a box
Put up by the makers. From its rim they stoop
Headlong at gulls and orioles, prey
That trusts to sheerest air, like them.
Talons snug in stunned meat, they speed
To their pinnacle of steel,
Their new home.

It is a mixed moment – but are not such encounters with the (possibly) sublime often so - remember the shepherds who were "sore afraid." As it happens, I had a remarkably parallel experience one morning on my way from the T to Building 14, when I (and other passers-by) encountered some variety of hawk on the railing of a fire escape at East Campus:

AT FIRST I WAS SURE IT WAS STUFFED

<life is what happens while you're making other plans. John Lennon>

or one of those plastic "keep the squirrels out of your strawberries"
owls you can pick up cheap at Home Depot. Perched on a fire-escape,
at the end of a dormitory hallway - hardly Mutual of Omaha's
Wild Kingdom, where one imagines such creatures ruling.

Then it moved, slowly, grandly, just its head, surveying
what it clearly took to be its own well-merited kingdom.
Peasants - well, all right, students and researchers,
stopped in their tracks en route to some dreary lab -

could only peer in amazement and ignorance. A hawk, surely.
Too small, too broad in the girth to be a peregrine.
Too hefty, too cream-breasted, I thought, to be a red-tail,
although, perversely, they favor this urban terrain.

Not so much a rare bird as a bird rarely, magnificently placed.
Proof, if it were needed, that what is will fool you, every time.

 

But I let my own ego urge me into digression; Bosselaar's collection, having begun with an ironical rebuttal of the idea of the unnaturalness of the urban landscape, ends with what seems like a dark prophecy of "The End of Civilization As We Know It." But that poem too has a punch line, recounting as it does the state of monkeys taken to Florida to help make Tarzan films, now left bemoaning – praying, indeed – "Tarzan! Tarzan! Why has thou forsaken us?" (P. 244).

One more recommendation, of a book by a card-carrying teacher of science but an unabashed devotee of poetry, as well. Finding myself, somewhat quizzically, as a teacher of the Humanities at what announces itself as the Finest Technological School in the known universe, I turn regularly to Chet Raymo's column, "Science Musings," in The Boston Globe. One column in particular - it must be more than five years old, by now, I regularly xerox and distribute at the first meeting of any class devoted to the study of poetry. Its title presents its argument, pithily: "A little poetry with the facts, Ma'am." Raymo, as it happens, teaches physics and astronomy at a small college in exurban Boston. But he is also an avid and voracious reader. Preparing for this review, I made a quick list of the "authorities" Raymo cites. Rilke, Emerson, Thoreau (repeatedly), Mary Oliver (a particular favorite of his), Merton, Tielhard, Dylan Thomas, Updike, Ruskin, Lewis Thomas, E. O. Wilson, the propounders of the so-called "Gaia Hypothesis," Thomas Huxley, Virginia Woolf, Darwin, Gary Snyder – that only in about the first third of the book, at which point I let myself sit back and just read. I inflict the list on you now not just to demonstrate my diligence, but to represent the pure reach of these witty, low-key, meditative essays.

Or perhaps one should say homilies. The title is misleading – this is no sort of devotional guide, in the customary sense (although Raymo does admit to a Catholic rearing). Late on, spinning a tale about an obscure Irish naturalist named Robert Lloyd Praeger, Raymo remarks that "[h]is account of his travels . . . affirms the value of 'stopping often, watching closely, listening carefully' – in short, what I have called her natural prayer." To that brief catalog of necessary virtues should be added one more – thinking subtly and meditatively.

I proposed the label "homily" for these essays, and like any good homily, these pieces "open" a text. As it happens, the text comes from the poet Mary Oliver, not the Gospels or the Psalms. It forms the first sentence of the first essay: "To pay attention, that is our endless and proper work." That paying of attention does lead Raymo to a sort of belief – in the fundamental and rich interdependence of things. He worries about the perception of science as a dissassembler, a work of destroying rather than enhancing and enriching the whole. He cannot help but ponder large issues – the origin of life, the origin of the universe [one of his most delightful propositions is a variation on the Big Bang, namely "the Big Sneeze"], the issue of animal rights. Near the end of the book, he finally reaches what he offers as the Largest Philosophical Issue of Our Time – "What is a weed?" He knows he is being jocular, but (in the spirit of the best comedy) the joke leads to a serious consideration of the ethics of being human.

To me, the best thing that can be said about this utterly admirable and enlivening book is that it compels the intense desire to re-read it, and to experience once again the particular pleasure to be found in the best writing of Lewis Thomas, John McPhee, and Stephen J. Gould – the possibility of learning while feeling delight. And my polemical intent in urging all three of these volumes on my colleagues is to seduce them into a fuller and richer understanding of the way that thinking, be it in pure Math, Chem E, the sonnet, the personal essay – that thinking is, at a fundamental level, thoughtful in much the same way, despite wide variations in terminology.

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