Episode fifteen
Australian Highlight: Tricia Dearborn
Ah! Moment: Bringing the science language she missed into her writing
Tricia is one of many poets around the world embedding science into their writing. There are poetry journals, competitions, books, conferences and studies dedicated to science poetry.
The award-winning writer and editor lives in a world where there is no divide between the artistic and the scientific. She has a Bachelor of Science in Chemistry, honours in biochemistry, and a Masters in Women’s and Gender studies, specialising in literature. After spending some time as a biochemist, she realised that words was her preferred medium for experimentation.
Tricia wrote her first poem at seven, and hasn’t stopped. She is a founding member of Plumwood Mountain, the ecopoetry journal and was the first Australian poet to be invited to the international Poetry on the Move festival.
Image: Tricia Dearborn
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“Science and poetry are both about observation and precision.”
I’ve been fascinated by science poetry since visiting Writing NSW’s Quantum Words which featured Tricia Dearborn.
To hear Tricia's thoughts and experiences in this recent episode has reminded me how important this genre is to myself and how useful it is for dissolving the silos that limit innovation by keeping creative thinking segregated.
Science poetry represents, to some, the crossing of worlds: an artistic medium in the hands of a scientist, or scientific experience examined by the eye of an artist.
But for many writers and readers, it is merely the extension of their interests – continued experiments with language describing personal experiences and exploring what it means to be human. Why wouldn’t that delve into the scientific every now and then?
For me, it's the necessary and natural coming together of creative thought in our modern world, pulling inspiration from everywhere and remaining limitless.
“I write about my life and I happen to have a fascination with science.”
says Tricia. She doesn't call herself a science poet, as she works across many genres. But it’s one of those things that, once you have a term for it, it gets easier to find. For example, there's a peer reviewed science poetry journal, Consilience, and related science poetry competition, Brilliant Poetry. These are just the tip of the iceberg - or the first shelf of a whole library.
Science poetry has existed for much longer than I’ve been conscious of it. In 1817, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe wrote that people ‘forgot that science arose from poetry, and did not see that when times change the two can meet again on a higher level as friends’. Dr Sam Illingworth, who’s become a leading advocate for the genre, reminds us in his book, A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and their Poetry, that John Keats was an apothecary and surgeon first, which explains his use of medicinal botany in his poetry:
Ode on Melancholy
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf's-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss'd
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow's mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
or,
Ode to a Nightingale
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
'Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
Even so, the shock regularly exhibited at the concept of science and poetry co-existing implies that it is still not seen as symbiotic a relationship as many of us feel.
“It was not the facts that interested me but the possibilities they opened up to the imagination.”
is the paraphrased quote (so I can fit it into the header) by Canadian astronomer and poet Rebecca Elson. Discovering the weird and wonderful through science can lead to coalescing the weird and wonderful into the written word.
Resistance to the concept that science poetry can exist is similar to the sense that science lacks humanity, an idea called into question by Corey Tutt and others, particularly in this series.
With the stereotypes and cliches that surround us, its easy to forget that science requires imagination and creativity, key components for problem solving.
Creativity is not the sole property of artists – we all need to tap into our creative well on regularly basis – think about a time you were cooking but had to improvise around a missing ingredient, fixing a wobbly chair, finding the perfect way to phrase a damning email.
The creativity embedded in science can feed poetry and vice versa.
“There's a sort of a condensedness and intensity to poetry that you don't find often in prose.”
which is Tricia's great observation. It’s important that a feeling, impression, sense of, curiosity or wonder are shared. Poetry is a great tool to do just that.
But my love of poetry has been a constant for as long as I can remember. Creatively, I’ve always tended towards making art inspired by science. So once I discovered a field of science poetry, I was hooked! I even made some science inspired by art. With co-author Dr Michael Leach, we studied science poetry in Australia, and filled it with observations like,
“When science and poetry unite, the product may be thought of as a ‘science poem’. Such poems can be delightful, charming, intriguing, novel, memorable, mystifying and eye-opening. An interdisciplinary approach to writing and creativity is a prerequisite to writing a science poem.”
To study such a thing, we had to form a definition:
“a science poem is any verse in which the author has correctly used scientific terminology, concepts, principles, or knowledge to provide an analytical view of the world or surrounding universe. The poem could be related or responding to stimuli or reflecting the scientific method in some way.”
It may not be a perfect definition, and I feel it isn't these days, but perhaps nothing can ever by clearly defined, especially a writing style that aims to break the rules of language.
The study, published in Axon: Creative Explorations, Vol 10, No 1, May 2020, looked at 100 Australian science poems and found that the majority were focussed on the human condition, life and death (less on stars and galaxies as we hypothesised). It found that most science poets per capita were in Canberra and were mostly women.
There were some wonderful observations we collected along the way, such as this by writer Raymond Chandler in 1978: “The truth of art keeps science from becoming inhuman, and the truth of science keeps art from becoming ridiculous.” Whether you agree or not you agree with that sentiment, it still stands that there is no reason art and science should be separated. And why not bring them together in poetic style?
A non-fiction, non-friction poem
Within the episode, I mention a poem that I had submitted to the Rabbit Journal's science edition, edited by Tricia. It did not make the final cut, for many reasons. One would be that it is not really non-fiction and it needs a mathematician to review the calculations. And perhaps a check-over by a physicist working in momentum. After all, a science poem can be anything, but the terms must be correct.
So here it is, still a work in progress.
Moment of Inertia
“If I had slippery enough shoes,
I could slide around the world.”
What a diversion
to sail, arms swinging wildly,
as shoes slide across terrain.
The red shoes –
dancing around the world.
My moment of inertia
calculated for a full rotation:
the radius of the Earth, squared,
multiplied by my meagre mass –
the needed rotational inertia
is two trillion units.
I will be one significant figure.
With a running start, I push off from the Arctic,
Picking up speed on the shining icy surface.
Stumbling at first – weight forward, weight back,
hands pink as the cold moulds them.
I don’t have the chance to look for narwhals.
Smoothing out my balance, now taking
bumps in my stride, I slide
over Russia, Ukraine, skid the Black Sea,
the Med Sea, Egypt and South Sudan.
I slip through Africa, the origins of the Nile
a wax on the soles of my shoes,
I see the giraffes downwind of the acacia,
long tongues on long days.
I sail past my past in South Africa,
and onto the Indian Ocean.
To make it round the other side I slide,
shimmying over the Southern Sea,
the phytoplankton dancing alongside
are jumping from the arching whale.
It’ll feel like a slingshot around the South
a shot across the Pacific Ocean –
continuing in a continuous motion
around the whole of the Earth
in these slippery red shoes.
Keep an eye out for me.
I’d like to share an inert moment
with you, but you’ll need
to be someone who absorbs
my moment of inertia.
This episode's comedic guest: Jeeves Verma
Jeeves is a Sydney comedian, specialising in professional scripted and improvised comedy, built across nearly a decade of experience. Jeeves performs a new live show every year (which is madness) at the Sydney Comedy and Melbourne International Comedy Festivals; he's a faculty member at Improv Theatre Sydney; and hosts weekly trivia events. He could also host your wedding!
Jeeves studied Medicine once upon a time and chose to leave his medical career in pursuit of the "best medicine". Timeout described his trivia hosting as "taking you, and your most-hidden brain corners, for a whirlwind of a spin".