| You Passed 8th Grade Science |
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Well, thank God for that! If only I'd done that well on the SATs!
Found a cool-ish new blog via Tangled Bank called Science Creative Quarterly, which is not a quarterly, but is creative and scientific. They've got a project going to collect haiku that "reflect on an organism" as an eventual exercise in phylogeny. I love this idea. I love the idea of using poetry to teach science, and science to teach poetry. And with poetry at an all time high in popularity right now, it makes a great vehicle for getting people interested in science. Can you imagine science poetry slams? Geek ecstasy! However, the quality of what's been submitted so far provokes me to say they would have been better off with limericks than haiku (except the physicists have already done that). Some person (no doubt an undergraduate) calling himself Henry James (might even be his real name, who knows?) submitted this:
E.COLI IN MY BUTT
I learnt this today
there’s e.coli in my butt
also in my gutt
I mean, really. How execrable (pun intended) is that? By contrast, here's two beauties from Basho (remember these are translated, so the syllable count isn't necessarily correct:
First winter rain—
even the monkey
seems to want a raincoat.
A cicada shell;
it sang itself
utterly away.
Even the Haiku Generator did better after a couple of whirls:
priest captures gently
drums grope, gusting horsefly licks
disheveled apes pass
And at least one of the physicists (Robert D. Cowan) came up with a limerick better than that E. coli thing:
There once was a fly on the wall
I wonder why didn't it fall
Because its feet stuck
Or was it just luck
Or does gravity miss things so small?
I used to write a lot of science-inflected (no, not inflicted!) poems, when I was in grad school and all the biology stuff was still pretty fresh in my mind. I loved the metaphors one could spin from the characteristics of critters and basic principles, and how interconnected it all seemed. Here's one of the ones I still like:
Swimming: Ontogeny Recapitulates Phylogeny
Ontogeny: the stages of development through which an embryo passes
Phylogeny: the evolution and development of a species or phylum
Alveoli: small air sacs in the lungs.
Vision of a dancer,
he skims through water blue
as tundra snow,
drifted with leaves
and mayfly corpses empty and papery
as abandoned wasp nests,
over white silica and quartz bottom
like a manta or skate.
O that we had not forever lost our gills,
that we had learned to inhabit water too,
breath through our skins, amphibious.
perhaps we would not yearn
so much for space then,
sprinkled with stars like diatoms,
where gravity bubbles around bits of rock
but really draws upon nothing
beyond their circumferences.
An expanse of blue, deeper,
tempts us there also,
to where there is no air,
where we may drift like lost kites
or wreckage,
swayed by currents or
the twitch of a fingertip.
But we become air breathers
in one blue slithering gasp,
confirmed groundlings
with earth's salts in our blood.
Before this,
we were truly aqueous,
tethered like a space walker,
our alveoli filled
with the suspended detritus of growth,
shed cells like plankton:
the flotsam and jetsam of ontogeny.
And now, when we hold our breath
and dive
for pearls, sponges, coral,
lost rings on tile bottoms,
grasp our treasures and bring them to the surface,
inhale,
we continue recapitulating
our search for thinner atmospheres.
Poets, help out the folks at Science Creative Quarterly, please! Let's show them science and literature can coexist not just peacefully but in good taste.
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