Science in Poetry - the comments

bookmark

I would like to have submitted more entries, but it is near impossible to focus with an ear infection that 6 days of antibiotics failed to knock out. It's also affecting an old dental filling at random moments, making my back tooth want to explode right out of my jaw.

Magnetron said:

I would like to have submitted more entries, but it is near impossible to focus with an ear infection that 6 days of antibiotics failed to knock out. It's also affecting an old dental filling at random moments, making my back tooth want to explode right out of my jaw.

Click to expand...

Sounds truly horrible! So sorry! Hope you get it fixed soon.

Updated poets' list & don't forget to vote

Updated poets' list, in alphabetical order:

AlwaysHungry (2)
Ashesh9
Black13
Butters
EllenMore
Greenmountaineer
HarryHill
Legerdemer
Magnetron
Piscator (2)
Seanathon
Todski28
Tristesse2
Trixareforkids
Tzara

i'll send my votes in very soon - i've 1 favourite, but it's hard choosing between several others i like about equally but differently

I am starting to post authors and votes... should be about 15 minutes, stay tuned.

Voting results

Congratulations, all!

First place (4 votes)
Theoretical by EllenMore

Second place tie (3 votes)
Piezoelectric by Tzara
How to Explain Magnetism by Todski28

Third place tie (2 votes)
Some Say Love by Butters
Let Me Be Your Memory by Seanathon
The Amorous Molecule by AlwaysHungry


A number of folks commented that it was difficult to choose, and I agree.

I'd really love to hear from the poets about how they wove science into their poems, how they used and meant it to explain their ideas. And, was it hard? Easy?

I enjoyed the challenge. Thanks to all of you who participated - there are some very nice poems here, and I hope they get posted.

My own Honorouble Mention, if I may take the prerogative, is Metaphorics, by Magnetron. I really enjoyed it and loved the ironic "slap" at the end.

slap slap slap

I'm not sure I really used much science in mine. Is metaphorics even a word? I know isotopulate isn't.

As for relationships, I chose to go with the relationship between poets and the masses, between scientists and the masses, and between poets and physicists who can be eerily similar as much as they can be polar opposites.

And here were my votes:

1] #7

2] #11

3] #9

I have been thinking of science metaphors in poetry for a while with respect to my own work, poetic and otherwise.

I used topology as a fairly obvious metaphor for two people meeting and falling in love. My poem was initially named The Topology of Love, but I changed the name to be less obvious about it. Topology is a branch of mathematics (I don't mean to sound condescending, just don't expect everyone to know), but it has applications in many other areas of science, including and perhaps especially in the biology of DNA. The two strands of DNA are wound around each other in a helix, and when circular DNA is replicated, the two replicated molecules are obligatorily linked to each other. All cells encode enzymes to separate such links (humans have at least five). Plus interlinking of DNA occurs in many other occasions within cells.

I knew when I wrote it that "red hot lust" was not the right phrase; "knotted" also confused some people, but if you consider the ability of being able to break a chain on one side without regard to what happens on the other side (think of a long necklace, for example), knotting is a possible and realistic outcome. So knotting is correct but not transparent to those not familiar with topology, and for that reason I should not have used it. Below is a slightly amended version. I am thinking of submitting it (or some version of it) as an illustrated poem, to help with the imagery.


The Topology of Love

Fate, or was it Brownian motion, brought us together,
two rings complete but separate,
rolling in their own spheres.

The rings were broken and rejoined,
linking us into a superheated chain,
woven by yearning.

Too soon the links turned into a Möbius strip,
lust leading to love leading to pain
and back again, all one smooth surface.

Fate plays us like a hula hoop
round her waist, hips gyrating, laughing
until, exhausted, she will let the hoop fall.

I hold my breath till then.

Here's how I attempted to use science:

"Amaranthine Love" was loosely based on Einstein. The term "Event Horizon" is used to describe the point at which something is inexorably drawn into a Black Hole, which I used as a metaphor for falling in love (!). I didn't want to stick too closely to it, so as to imply that by falling in love I would be crushed into an infinitesimal little dot, so the third mini-stanza is a disclaimer of sorts (poetic license) with a pun on "conception." The final stanza is more Einstein, with a double entendre for the curved universe. At the end I swing to the opposite end of the spectrum, from general relativity to folklore with the Navajo rug. For some reason, I associate infinity with perfection -- both concepts are absolutes, I suppose. But this poem is a bit of a grab bag of Einstein-related stuff, not all the scientific, really.

"The Amorous Molecule," on the other hand, is an attempt at being very rigorous with a DNA theme. I googled furiously to learn things about DNA which could be used as double entendres. For example, the parameters for base pairs, the building blocks of DNA, are given the names "slide", "rise", "tilt", "roll", and "twist", all of which struck me as sort of sexy. The two strands in the double helix are aligned in a manner called antiparallel, which immediately brought the 69 position to my dirty mind. Believe it or not, the offset pairing of the two strands in the double helix create what are called a "major groove" and a "minor groove".

Of course, the overriding metaphor here is to liken two lovers to the complementary strands in the DNA double helix, "intimately intertwined." And an additional feature, on which I am a bit shaky -- if I screw this up, I am hoping that a friendly science nerd will rush to set the record straight -- is that if there is damage to the DNA, or shall we say, the love relationship, the one strand acts like a back up copy (a "template") for the other, so that the relationship may be repaired. Love conquers all.

Black13 said:

I liked number 10, how the sprawling, long-winded lines end with something totally mundane: a paycheck. There's a deep truth in this. All this ivory-tower intellectualism boils down to rent, otherwise it's just sprawling, long-winded noise.

Click to expand...

I'm glad you liked it.

legerdemer said:

My own Honorouble Mention, if I may take the prerogative, is Metaphorics, by Magnetron. I really enjoyed it and loved the ironic "slap" at the end.

Click to expand...

Towards the end I gave Creationism somewhat of a back handed compliment as well, though it was subtle. Perhaps too subtle.

Congratulations to EllenMore and all who took time to submit, and thanks to Legerdemer for organizing the challenge.

I had fun discovering the science (thank you Google) behind how our minds work for my entry, Let Me Be Your Memory. But before I post it I'd love any suggestions on how I might improve it. One of the commenters said the poem was "bumpy," in places. I'd love to know where so I can make it a smoother read.

Just a few of the things I struggled with when writing it were:

In the third stanza, I wanted the fourth line to be: and you forget you were my bride but I was worried about repeating the and from the third line.

In the fifth stanza, I waffled back and forth between but a mind becomes a broken net and the actual fourth line.

And in the final stanza, I originally had the third line reading if one last thought comes to be, but decided I didn't like the repetition of the word be in the final line.

Poetry isn't my first language, so any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Let Me Be Your Memory

Let me be your memory
remembering times when we
walked together hand in hand
strolling through a life unplanned

Until that day in the rain
when a vessel in your brain
broke apart and fell away
to begin an odd ballet

Where doctors dance round your bed
while neurons fail in your head
and synapses waltz aside
you forget you were my bride

At the edge of emotion
could there be any notion
where the hippocampi lie
distant between you and I

Kandel won a Nobel prize
maybe he could analyze
why a heart cannot forget
but minds become broken nets

Sleep while I wait by your side
all my tears finally cried
if one last thought comes to thee
let me be your memory

Seanathon said:

I had fun discovering the science (thank you Google) behind how our minds work for my entry, Let Me Be Your Memory. But before I post it I'd love any suggestions on how I might improve it. One of the commenters said the poem was "bumpy," in places. I'd love to know where so I can make it a smoother read.

Click to expand...

I'm the one that called it "bumpy". I would like you know, however, that one of my two votes went to your poem.

Most of your lines have four metric feet, i.e. four "pulses" consisting of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Some of your lines are iambic, beginning with unstressed syllables, but most are trochaic, beginning with stressed syllables. As far as I am concerned, these are interchangeable, they sound very similar. A classical poet, however, would try to be consistent. The "bumpiness" of which I speak comes from the presence of lines that don't have four alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. This line in particular:

remembering times when we
I get 3 stresses here --
reMEMbering TIMES when WE

This line is problematic:

At the edge of emotion
It can be scanned as having 4 stresses --
AT the EDGE OF eMOtion

...but that's awkward, because in normal speech one would probably not stress "of", and because there are two stressed syllables without an intervening unstressed syllable (EDGE OF). It would be more natural to scan it like this:

at the EDGE of eMOtion

...which gives only 2 feet.


This line:

while neurons fail in your head

...could be tweaked just a little. The most natural way to scan it gives you only 3 stresses:

while NEUrons FAIL in your HEAD

You can get 4 stresses thusly, but it's uncomfortable:

while NEUrons FAIL IN your HEAD

...you could make it a smooth iambic line by changing to "within":

while NEUrons FAIL withIN your HEAD.



Those are the main "bumpy" lines. Most of rest of the poem is non-bumpy trochaic tetrameter, as in

LET me BE your MEMoRY.

Seanathon said:

Poetry isn't my first language, so any feedback is greatly appreciated!

Let Me Be Your Memory

Let me be your memory
remembering times when we
walked together hand in hand
strolling through a life unplanned

Until that day in the rain
when a vessel in your brain
broke apart and fell away
to begin an odd ballet

Where doctors dance round your bed
while neurons fail in your head
and synapses waltz aside
you forget you were my bride

At the edge of emotion
could there be any notion
where the hippocampi lie
distant between you and I

Kandel won a Nobel prize
maybe he could analyze
why a heart cannot forget
but minds become broken nets

Sleep while I wait by your side
all my tears finally cried
if one last thought comes to thee
let me be your memory

Click to expand...

Yours was my top pick precisely because it was raw and unpolished, which gave it a more honest and fragile quality. The science wasn't poured on too thick, giving it more earthbound depth regarding a sensitive issue.

legerdemer said:

I'd really love to hear from the poets about how they wove science into their poems, how they used and meant it to explain their ideas. And, was it hard? Easy?

Click to expand...

I wanted originally to use some idea from Game Theory as the basis for the poem, possibly the Prisoner's Dilemma, which seems an especially rich and apt metaphor for many personal sexual relationships. When I discovered that topic was turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, I turned to another idea in social economics, that of Jevons' Paradox: "when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." It was relatively easy to write the poem as I wrote it to conform to the paradox, that is, that as those in a sexual relationship become more "efficient" with each other (through practice, knowledge of each other's desires and preferences, etc.), the effect (at least temporarily) is not to decrease the rate of consumption but to increase it exponentially. Unfortunately, there is a corollary to this paradox (let me whimsically term it "More's Corollary") that increase of desire and consummation of a sexual relationship will itself lead to a decline in consumption over time.

In other words, Passion is Brief.

I enjoyed the challenge, legerdemer, and look forward to future ones.

To Seanathon:

AlwaysHungry said:

I'm the one that called it "bumpy". I would like you know, however, that one of my two votes went to your poem.

Most of your lines have four metric feet, i.e. four "pulses" consisting of alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. Some of your lines are iambic, beginning with unstressed syllables, but most are trochaic, beginning with stressed syllables. As far as I am concerned, these are interchangeable, they sound very similar. A classical poet, however, would try to be consistent. The "bumpiness" of which I speak comes from the presence of lines that don't have four alternating stressed and unstressed syllables. This line in particular:

remembering times when we
I get 3 stresses here --
reMEMbering TIMES when WE

This line is problematic:

At the edge of emotion
It can be scanned as having 4 stresses --
AT the EDGE OF eMOtion

...but that's awkward, because in normal speech one would probably not stress "of", and because there are two stressed syllables without an intervening unstressed syllable (EDGE OF). It would be more natural to scan it like this:

at the EDGE of eMOtion

...which gives only 2 feet.


This line:

while neurons fail in your head

...could be tweaked just a little. The most natural way to scan it gives you only 3 stresses:

while NEUrons FAIL in your HEAD

You can get 4 stresses thusly, but it's uncomfortable:

while NEUrons FAIL IN your HEAD

...you could make it a smooth iambic line by changing to "within":

while NEUrons FAIL withIN your HEAD.


Those are the main "bumpy" lines. Most of rest of the poem is non-bumpy trochaic tetrameter, as in

LET me BE your MEMoRY.

Click to expand...

Seanathon,

I also enjoyed your poem a lot. I thought about AH's suggestions and wondered whether you might like the following version of your lines:

"while NEUrons FALter IN your HEAD"

And perhaps:

"at the far edge of emotion" which would echo the "distant" in the last line of that stanza

or maybe:

"at the raw edge of emotion" or "at the ragged edge of emotion"

Both raw and ragged would convey the precariousness and difficulty of the situation.

Your poem was extremely moving. Thank you for submitting it.

You're always helpful, AlwaysHungry, and the detailed feedback is hugely appreciated. Thanks too for your input Magnetron and Mer!

But how do you figure out where the stresses are in different words? Do you use one of those old books my mom used to have? I think they were called dictionaries?

legerdemer said:

Congratulations, all!

First place (4 votes)
Theoretical by EllenMore

Second place tie (3 votes)
Piezoelectric by Tzara
How to Explain Magnetism by Todski28

Third place tie (2 votes)
Some Say Love by Butters
Let Me Be Your Memory by Seanathon
The Amorous Molecule by AlwaysHungry


A number of folks commented that it was difficult to choose, and I agree.

I'd really love to hear from the poets about how they wove science into their poems, how they used and meant it to explain their ideas. And, was it hard? Easy?

I enjoyed the challenge. Thanks to all of you who participated - there are some very nice poems here, and I hope they get posted.

My own Honorouble Mention, if I may take the prerogative, is Metaphorics, by Magnetron. I really enjoyed it and loved the ironic "slap" at the end.

Click to expand...

A couple of things im sorry for missing the voting as it would have put Tzara ahead of me in the rankings here which is weehere his piece belongs in my opinion,

Thanks to Legerdemer for putting out the challenge its a pity i didnt uqve more time there were two more pieces I was flirting with but well time expired. Maybe we should still use the main thread in the same way the other continuous threada are used and place all "science" themed poems in there?

Thank you to all who voted and participated.

EllenMore said:

I wanted originally to use some idea from Game Theory as the basis for the poem, possibly the Prisoner's Dilemma, which seems an especially rich and apt metaphor for many personal sexual relationships. When I discovered that topic was turning out to be more difficult than I had anticipated, I turned to another idea in social economics, that of Jevons' Paradox: "when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises because of increasing demand." It was relatively easy to write the poem as I wrote it to conform to the paradox, that is, that as those in a sexual relationship become more "efficient" with each other (through practice, knowledge of each other's desires and preferences, etc.), the effect (at least temporarily) is not to decrease the rate of consumption but to increase it exponentially. Unfortunately, there is a corollary to this paradox (let me whimsically term it "More's Corollary") that increase of desire and consummation of a sexual relationship will itself lead to a decline in consumption over time.

In other words, Passion is Brief.

I enjoyed the challenge, legerdemer, and look forward to future ones.

Click to expand...

So cynical!

At least you write good poetry

legerdemer said:

Congratulations, all!

First place (4 votes)
Theoretical by EllenMore

Second place tie (3 votes)
Piezoelectric by Tzara
How to Explain Magnetism by Todski28

Third place tie (2 votes)
Some Say Love by Butters
Let Me Be Your Memory by Seanathon
The Amorous Molecule by AlwaysHungry

Click to expand...

congrats, ellen moore! although i voted elsewise, your poem still had plenty of merit -and choosing was hard. plenty i enjoyed but had to vote for the two that struck me most as poems in their own right as well as following the brief's outline.

my votes went to seanathon's Let Me Be Your Memory and tzara's Piezoelectric, with tzara's being my favourite

s's was delicate, touching... that phrase 'an odd ballet' really resonated as an image-clincher. even with its issues (thee/a few other tiny things), its imagery and sense of love carried it on beyond its end line.

tzara's piece was well-balanced, seasoned just right with sprinkles of science, and overall felt just right - as if it had undergone some refining to polish it up into a crystal perfect for transmitting its message.

thankyou, everyone who entered and/or commented, and thankyou, Mer, for running this challenge

todski28 said:

A couple of things im sorry for missing the voting as it would have put Tzara ahead of me in the rankings here which is weehere his piece belongs in my opinion,

Thanks to Legerdemer for putting out the challenge its a pity i didnt uqve more time there were two more pieces I was flirting with but well time expired. Maybe we should still use the main thread in the same way the other continuous threads are used and place all "science" themed poems in there?

Thank you to all who voted and participated.

Click to expand...

Indeed, I'd enjoy keeping the thread going. I had another that I was working on, and I also ran out of time. I should have known better - September is/was a bear that will become a bitch in early October, but things will get saner after mid-October for me.

As the author of "Something Like Schrödinger's Cat," I have to admit quantum mechanics is not my strong point, but after I read Mer's poem "Heisenberg's Principle," I stumbled across the paradox by Danish physicist Erwin Schrödinger suggesting theoretically a cat exposed to a lethal dose of radioactivity could be alive and dead at the same time.

It occurred to me that was how some describe orgasm.

Always Hungry made thought provoking comments about it earlier in this thread, some of which I plan to incorporate into an edited version at a future time.

legerdemer said:

Congratulations, all!

First place (4 votes)
Theoretical by EllenMore

Second place tie (3 votes)
Piezoelectric by Tzara
How to Explain Magnetism by Todski28

Third place tie (2 votes)
Some Say Love by Butters
Let Me Be Your Memory by Seanathon
The Amorous Molecule by AlwaysHungry

Click to expand...

Congrats to all, and thanks to legerdemer for organizing this. I apologize for my late response but I was away on a canoe trip and then catch-up.

I was responsible for (1) Hawking Dreams and (16) Stars.

Hawking Dreams was written over the last year, likely in response to that movie and/or the book H is for Hawk which I've yet to read (it is in my partner's pile - a gift from me and I will get to it only after she's done). Essentially it is an homage to Stephen and a mediation on the frailness of our corporeal form and how intellect can go beyond mortality.

Stars came about trying to expand on the first line "Tonight you light my stars" and then goes on to some of the science - the footnotes were supposed to be hyperlinks but didn't work in this format. I liked the idea of using hyperlinks al la Wikipedia in a poem and again played with centering but this time don't think it worked. The last verse refers tangentially to the fact that the night is dark only because the universe is expanding and a long ago science fiction story on this them.

Piscator said:

I was responsible for (1) Hawking Dreams and (16) Stars.

Click to expand...

Hawking Dreams was one of my favorites of the challenge. Nice work.

H is for Hawk is in my pile too (It is a big pile).