Gino's Ghazal Blog

Poetry and Science, 2nd Post

The general direction of the posts on poetry and science is on their relationship as modes of knowing, of understanding, and expressing. This post, though, deals with science as a subject for poetry. First, for your pleasure, I propose David Lunde's ghazal. "Of Stars," which appeared in the fifth issue of The Ghazal Page for 2004. A Persian ghazal in form, "Of Stars" traces the human fascination with the night skies and their bright, dazzling inhabitants. ("Of stars," as you might expect, is the radif.)

Here are the first two shers of the poem, but you really should read the entire piece:

    The Milky Way swirls, a wizard's cloak of stars;
    Around we wheel on a slim spoke of stars.

    Honor that most clever, most sapient ancestor--
    When first he spoke, he spoke of stars.

"Of Stars" can be seen as a science fiction or speculative poem. The Science Fiction Poetry Association is devoted to the SF genre of poetry. The SFPA is an active organization, with a journal, prizes, and other avenues into SF poetry. Their Dwarf Star prize anthology for 2006 was edited by Deborah P. Kolodji, whose work has appeared on The Ghazal Page. Her ""Dark Matter" explores scientific imagery in an open ghazal form. Kolodji also has a poem — a cinquain — on Astropoetica. David Jalajel also has a poem scheduled for Astropoetica.

A cinquain is a five-line form invented by the American poet, Adelaide Crapsey in the early twentieth century. Deborah Kolodji is editor of Amaze: the Cinquain Journal.

Another genre of science-related poetry is "lab-lit," which I just learned about through a discussion list. The lab-lit site seems interested in fiction and factual prose, not poetry. It is worth your time to visit, with a serialized novel and other items.

Finally, from The Scientist magazine's Web site, here's an article that explores the questions:

"What good is science to poets? And what good is poetry to scientists?"

Those questions are close to the ones I want to explore further in posts on science and poetry.

Poetry and Science, 1st Post

Why do I want to write about science and poetry? Those two fields of human creativity and discovery are important to me, and science is important to many people. Sadly, poetry doesn't seem to be as important to as many people as one would like. (Of course, lyrics to music are a genre of poetry and much more popular than written poetry. But that's another entry.)

Last year, I posted an entry about science and poetry in my blog. That was a preliminary statement that I'd planned to follow up with entries discussing the books by Richard Dawkins (Unweaving the Rainbow) and Aldous Huxley (Literature and Science) that I mentioned. I still believe these are important books by important writers and plan to post on them in the near future. Huxley's book is out of print but can be ordered through a used book store.

My interest in the relationship between science and poetry may be connected with my having taught for forty year's at "Missouri's premier technological research university." Technology and science are, of course, different, if closely related, endeavors. One early discovery I made here was how many engineering students write poetry — usually love verses to girlfriends. And, in the spirit of full disclosure, when I was a freshman in high school, 13/14 years old, I wanted to be an engineer. I fooled with old radio sets, learned some basic equations, such as the one for figuring bhp (brake horsepower) from an automobile engine, things like that. What happened? I started writing poetry then, discovered Thoreau, Plato, and Bertrand Russell, the French Impressionists, Picasso, and never looked back at engineering.

I have always read about science — popularizing books like those by George Gamow or Arthur Eddington, somewhat more technical books by Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmore, and others. The phenomenological and existentialist philosophers address issues that are very important to me. For instance, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's discussion of the differences between rational-scientific language and poetic is relevant to the relationship of science to poetry and, in fact, is not that much different from Huxley's much less technical discussion in Science and Literature.

That's enough abstractness for an afternoon with a temperature of 103 degrees F. or 40 degrees C. This isn't unprecedented weather for the Ozarks in August, but it may set a record.