The Poetry Handbook by Lennard John;

Author:Lennard, John;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 2005-07-10T16:00:00+00:00

Whereas I took the Butterfly—

Aforetime in my hat—

He sits erect in ‘Cabinets’—

The Clover bells forgot

(“‘Arcturus’ is his other name”, Johnson 70)

Her first stanza provides a motto, “It’s very mean of Science [/] To go and interfere!”, and A Quark for Mister Mark : 101 Poems about Science (2000) confirms that even when science is positively the matter in poetic hand its terminology is usually thought beyond the poetic pale.

It is, of course, hard for the uninitiated. Muldoon did manage to get into his long poem ‘Yarrow’ “a sprig of Achillea millefolium, as it’s classed. [/ centred rule /] Achillea millefolium : with its bedraggled, feathery leaf”, “my precious Bufo bufo”, and “the larva […] of Pieris [/] brassicae”— but presuming by analogy with Bufo bufo, the common toad, he wrote in ‘Incantata’ of “a sherbet-green Ranus ranus [/] plonked down in Trinity”; alas, the common frog is Rana temporaria, and Muldoon later made the change at some cost to rhyme and metre. His ‘Author’s Note’ is pithy :

Other than to correct such factual errors as my having written ‘painfully’ for ‘painstakingly,’ ‘bathyscope’ for ‘bathysphere,’ ‘Ranus ranus’ for ‘Rana temporaria,‘ ‘jardonelle’ for ‘jargonelle,’ and ‘aureoles’ for ‘areolae,’ I have made scarcely any changes in the texts of the poems, since I’m fairly certain that, after a shortish time, the person through whom a poem was written is no more entitled to make revisions than any other reader.

“scarcely any changes” cannot be taken at face-value from the author of ‘Errata’ (“For ‘ludic’ read ‘lucid.’ […] For ‘ode’ read ‘code.’ “), and an author’s right to revise must be deferred to ‘Biography’ (p. 319), but of the given examples all but first and (perhaps) fourth are errors of scientific nomenclature. Implicitly these errors are “factual”, as science is, and so command revision as artistic second thoughts should not : I’m not sure I agree, but the belief interestingly glosses the reluctance of poets to sully their work with scientific language.39

Yet as in many things interdisciplinary connections are breaking into hoarded privacies and discourses, and as there have been very good recent scientific plays, so scientific poems are appearing in greater numbers from more scientifically-minded poets. Most impressively and sadly, Rebecca Elson worked as an astronomer, and even in her lyric poems, dominated by personal life and latterly the cancer that killed her at 39, uses words like “geodesic” (‘Explaining Relativity’), “calculus” (‘Carnal Knowledge’), and “murine […] synapses” (‘OncoMouse, Kitchen Mouse’) with exact force. The posthumously published ‘Extracts from the Notebook’ shows in poems she didn’t (or couldn’t) publish a more sustained use of scientific language carrying thought at once scientific and poetic : ‘Simulations of the Universe I’ has “particles which could be dust [/] Or stars, it makes no difference” and “hyperbolae [/] The magnetism of each mutual centre [/] When sufficient time has elapsed”; ‘Origins’ has “seeds of galaxies [/] Shaken in the dark soil of space”; and an untitled entry for 9 February 1994 “a storm of galaxies [/] Like snowflakes in the vortex of a streetlamp”.

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