Iambs & Isotopes
Five Women Poets Discuss Their Engagement with Science
Elizabeth Bradford, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, & Allison Adelle Hedge Coke | February 2023
Elizabeth Bradford, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke
The conversation that follows grew out of a panel, Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, that was presented at the virtual AWP Conference in March 2021. The panelists’ original remarks, along with additional poems, appeared in a book of the same title from Scarlet Tanager Books in November 2021. In the conversation below, the five panelists—Elizabeth Bradfield, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke—go beyond their presentations to probe the nature of science and poetry and examine what poetry brings to such issues as the ethics of science, science education, environmentalism, and cultural change.
Lucille Lang Day: There are many people who disbelieve or disregard the findings of science. This includes the climate-change deniers and the antivaxxers. There are also people who fear science because of its power to produce things such as atomic bombs and genetically modified organisms. In some cases, there is an historical basis for mistrust of science. For example, in the 1960s many people were turned off by science when newspapers reported that researchers had been injecting patients with cancer cells without their informed consent. What can poetry add to these conversations?
Elizabeth Bradfield: Over the years, the poems that have had a huge impact on me are the poems that explore or illuminate a moment of nearly irreconcilable contradiction. I think, for example, of Adrienne Rich’s “Power,” in which she writes of Marie Curie, “she died a famous woman denying / her wounds / denying / her wounds came from the same source as her power.” And I think of Ilya Kaminsky’s more recent poem from Deaf Republic, “We Lived Happily During the War,” which reads, in part: “I was / in my bed, around my bed America // was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house. // I took a chair outside and watched the sun.” The “I” of this poem is not necessarily the speaker, but it is not necessarily an “other” of the speaker, either. There’s a strange and compelling compassion and calling to accountability that is held in poetry like this. A compassion that breaks the us/them divides that block us from empathy and change, an accountability that does not deny humanity.
There are many instances of science being inhumane and of science being deeply empathetic. Sometimes, science has been used to support racist, classist, and sexist beliefs; at other times, science has provided information that has pushed against those same bigotries. Science is, at once, enmeshed in and hoping to rise above the social selves scientists bring with them to their studies.
As a queer writer, I find myself asking: Did the doctors and nurses who shunned early AIDS patients love their families, tend their gardens, or do “good works” in their communities? In all likelihood, at least some of them did. Have I myself participated in actions that harm the earth, choosing for a particular moment to forget that my air travel, my go-along-to-get-along acceptance of farmed salmon as lox when sharing a meal with dear friends? I have. How do I justify my before-absolutely-necessary technology upgrades, my new phone or computer which uses rare metals? How do those balance with the work done by these devices to connect people? To move toward a better, more aware future? I confess, I don’t know.
But I believe in poetry’s potential for honoring contradiction and asking for us to consider culpability. In a poem, we can stay with those discrepancies and inconsistencies in ways that reach beyond polemic and, by being lured into lingering, perhaps accept the wrongness and go forward with further-opened eyes. We can examine and question and reckon.
Day: I agree. Poetry itself is large; it contains multitudes—multitudes of voices and multitudes of ideas, including discrepant ones. No topic is too large or too small for poetry, and no aspect of human experience is forbidden. Poetry enlarges the possibilities of scientific discourse by admitting subjective and emotional responses and by eliminating any need for explaining away discrepancies. In poetry, the personal and the universal can merge. For example, this is how Craig Santos Perez begins “Age of Plastic,” the first poem in Habitat Threshold:
The doctor presses the plastic probe
against my pregnant wife’s belly.
Plastic leaches estrogenic and toxic chemicals.
Ultrasound waves pulse between plastic,
tissue, fluid, and bone until the embryo
echoes.
The poem alternates between the everyday occurrence of plastic in the poet’s life (“our daughter falls / asleep in a plastic crib”) and horrifying facts (“In the oceans, / one ton of plastic exists for every three tons / of fish”). This poem is about Perez’s life, but it is also about environmental problems created by plastic. Reading it, one cannot help but ask, “How did we become so dependent on plastic? What can we do to change this?” We are all guilty. Perez does not offer solutions, but perhaps some can be found as we become more acutely aware of the problem.
wonder
Poetry itself is large; it contains multitudes—multitudes of voices and multitudes of ideas, including discrepant ones. No topic is too large or too small for poetry, and no aspect of human experience is forbidden.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke: Thank you, Lucy. Perez offers such a surprising and splendid poetic, assembling:
Docupoetics
Ecopoetics
Gastropoetics
Geopoetics
Histories
Humanity (or sad lack thereof)
Humor
Identity
Indigeneity
Industrial complexities
Militarization
Pacific Islander realities
Poetics of legal documentation
Poetics of migration
Politics
Sonic-play
Spam carbon footprint
His multibook poetry series, from unincorporated territory, explores Indigenous Chamorro identity, culture, history, politics, environment, climate, and ecologies of the Pacific Island of Guam, a territory of the United States and calls upon us, demands us to act.
…writing a poem allows me to reconsider a moment and to challenge myself to understand it in different ways. More than a scientific paper, it allows me to wonder what I might have missed in the science.
Employing excellent use of silence and space, of functional white, Perez embodies the field of sound and image necessary to the work these poems are set to do. The page becomes landscape to a degree, or sea, filled perhaps with archipelago sensations of sensory interplay between line and void. The cultivation of diction in sonic wordplay, with distinct musicality, rhythm, and audible melody enhances and inspires repeatable voice, memorable lines, thus providing accessibility to audience, in this case without sacrifice of intelligence or meaning. Perez creates a concert of functional and brilliant verse prosody, building the body of the poem in forms and variations appearing in-sync with each avenue of entry entertaining investigation, indictment, and inspection of subject and issue while hastening audience need to engage with the work to stay in touch, in tune with the voice as the poetry presses us to enact and calls us to assist in shaping the world and our place within it while gaining immense respect for what Perez lays out. Love for family, for beauty of the wonder ful natural world is juxtaposed poignantly, humorously, and terrifically profound.
This intentional prosody of the ever-growing body of work is sheer genius. The work is here to deliver us from ourselves before we evaporate into the depravity of resourcing commerce that has crippled the environment—the land, seas, countries, cultures, and peoples. Each element within the work serves as integral spoke to complete wheel, steering us toward what engagement is required for humanity to fully imbibe. Like kalo (taro) is dissected into various portions to provide medicinal qualities to each coinciding part of the human body, the plant most relevant to Pacific overall health, this sincere leap of holistic poetic is changing the face of national and global poetry and will continue to do so. It is healing us in the tragic compartmentalized (feudalistic) focus of singular expertise (or craft skill) suffered in our field, and upon our planet, for far too long. Interesting how many people are in denial of what is happening to the planet. Distrusting evidence.
Alison Hawthorne Deming: A good deal of the mistrust in science has to do with a basic misunderstanding of how science works. It is not about immutable facts, but about the very mutable state of human knowledge. Some new knowledge that comes from science holds its ground. Earth revolves around the sun. Bacteria and viruses can cause disease. Oxygen is required to sustain human life. The atmosphere is a protective shield and life support system.
But some new knowledge topples under further questioning: no masks for the vaccinated. Oops. We learn that the vaccinated can have enough of the virus in their nasal passages to be a danger to others. Better mask up. It’s that “we learn” that is at the heart of science.
Science must be skeptical and question itself. It must be ready to reconsider what it has learned when new evidence emerges. Every bit of new knowledge presents new questions. And sometimes the new answers unsettle what was known before. But the method of testing that knowledge is based on verifiable evidence. Poetry, on the other hand, may remain unverifiable but “true” to the act of reconsidering.
It’s interesting that Liz and Lucy both emphasized the ethical questions that now challenge the authority of science. How does science obtain its evidence? Are its methods ethical? How is the new knowledge deployed by technology? Does it enhance or diminish life in the long run? Whose life? What other forms of knowledge would help us solve the enormous challenges before us? For example, as Robin Wall Kimmerer has so brilliantly detailed in Braiding Sweetgrass, what can science gain from interweaving its way of knowing with Traditional Indigenous Knowledge? As this sphere of ethical regard expands, poetry has a role in raising good questions and holding forth the contradictions in which we all dwell.
Bradfield: I think, in this amazing analysis, lies the question of “where does science have the opportunity to revise itself? What about the revision/reconsideration of ideas?” For me, reconsideration is the core of poetry … and of science: writing a poem allows me to reconsider a moment and to challenge myself to understand it in different ways. More than a scientific paper, it allows me to wonder what I might have missed in the science.
Day: Two things have come up that I consider very important and want to comment on: (1) the Indigenous perspective and Indigenous ways of knowing, and (2) the idea that science revises itself.
The Indigenous perspective is extremely relevant here. Indigenous cultures worldwide hold the Earth as sacred. In a speech that Chief Seattle gave in 1854, he said, “Every part of this country is sacred to my people. Every hillside, every valley, every plain and grove has been hallowed by some fond memory or some sad experience of my tribe. // Even the rocks which seem to lie dumb as they swelter in the sun along the silent seashore in solemn grandeur thrill with the memories of past events connected with the lives of my people.” This worldview melds religion and ecology, and it is reflected in both traditional and contemporary Indigenous poetry and prose.
If a society holds the Earth as sacred, it instinctively uses resources sustainably. In 2018, Pomo poet and writer E.K. Cooper thusly described traditional salmon fishing in “Where Have They Gone?”: “Native men would wait with spears and hooks, then wade into the creek to catch salmon for their families. Always with the knowledge to take a small amount, and leave enough for future salmon runs.” To the Pomo and other Indigenous peoples, clearcutting the forests, damming the rivers, or hunting the buffalo to extinction would have been unthinkable. They had and still have an implicit understanding of ecology and their own place in the world.
This is in sharp contrast to Western culture, whose major religions teach that the Earth and its creatures were created to serve people. In the Revised Standard Version, the first page of the Bible (Genesis, chapter 1, verses 27 to 28) says the following: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them … and God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth.’” Acceptance of this translation at face value leads to seeing the world as an endless supply of resources to be exploited: oil to drill, lumber to harvest, gold to mine, game to hunt, etc. The end result is capitalism, a system in which nature derives its worth from being turned into a product. Poetry can have a major role in promoting a contrasting and more ecologically sound and sustainable way of life, i.e., one of living in balance with the world and in keeping with Traditional Indigenous Knowledge.
I also want to say something about science revising itself. Yes, science is always gathering more information and revising its conclusions, but it isn’t just at the level of conclusions that revision takes place. Experiments must be revised, just like poems.
A scientist, like a poet, rarely gets it right the first time, and this leads me to the point that an experiment and a poem have many similarities. In order to make it work, both the scientist and the poet often have to shed an initial approach or preconception and start over in an entirely new way. Flexibility of thought is essential in both cases. Both the experiment and the poem go through many iterations in which variables must be adjusted, whether they be light and temperature or line breaks and vowel sounds. In both cases, the end product enables us to see something in a new way.
Deming: I’m not sure that poetry promotes a certain way of life—other than paying deep attention and creating new forms to embrace the privilege of living. Poetry speaks in images, which are the language of the senses. It moves by association, which is the language of consciousness. By returning one to sensory engagement with the more-than-human world, poetry can rebuild connective tissue between mind and nature for people whose daily lives have fallen into a more abstracted relationship with the wild. Poetry can discover new language for bringing together ways of knowing. It can question how we know what we know. It can confess our ignorance and failures and quest for healing. And it can work like a magpie to find the songs in science.
Hedge Coke: Arthur Sze’s The Glass Constellation: New and Collected Poems would be a terrific point in poetry collections to mention in this conversation. Science is revising itself throughout his creative impulse (as a poet who was immersed in science and still brings so much of what is exciting in science to the page in his poetry) and in challenging an audience to see in different ways through incredible use of language, terminology, image, and sound that is often rich in scientific and technical terminology. Sze’s unique signature forms—collections of intense couplets, drop lines, and cascades of multiple-line stanzas—prepare us to sample, test, experiment with elements immersed in surprising oppositional surroundings; to delight with unexpected and challenging mixes of the what if from the where the poem is and exists within, colliding or riding alongside the greater scheme of larger sequences suggesting existence, reason, theory, and the pacing intentionally strummed, as if some string-theory orchestration may develop at any second, or already has and we landed here in a haphazard realness. The experience is science. The poetic, a revision of science.
Science, I believe, does reinvent itself. In countless ways. It has a life, in essence. An organic nature. It changes, evolves, develops, takes on new forms—we move through it—and as poets, bring it to others in new forms, influencing the reader and live audience who are immersed within the poetic offered. How about Humphry Davy’s works, or “Aberration” by Hubble scientist Rebecca Elson? Both are mentioned in “Scientists and poets are more alike than you think,” an article by Sam Illingworth, a senior lecturer in science communication at Manchester. Also in his 2019 book, A Sonnet to Science: Scientists and Their Poetry.
[Science] has a life, in essence. An organic nature. It changes, evolves, develops, takes on new forms—we move through it—and as poets, bring it to others in new forms, influencing the reader and live audience who are immersed within the poetic offered.
Ann Fisher-Wirth: A recent article in The New England Journal of Medicine, “Virchow at 200 and Lown at 100,” discusses the ways in which physicians Rudolf Virchow and Bernard Lown viewed physicians as compelled to “fill the leadership void and fulfill their roles as advocates for the sick and the poor,” in a world of “vast inequality in the distribution of wealth, racial and socioeconomic inequities in health and health care, catastrophic global dangers, and astounding failures of leadership.” The article’s authors, Salvatore Mangione, MD, and Mark L. Tykocinski, MD, state in the context of the Covid crisis, “We believe that indifference in times of challenge and controversy is akin to complicity,” and that “an essential competency of medical trainees should be advocacy and activism.”
What does poetry have to do with this?
As the poet/doctor William Carlos Williams said long ago, the calling for the poet is the same as for the doctor: to diagnose and to heal. Not all poetry, of course, but an important body of poetry, seeks to examine “symptoms”—in the individual, in the social body—and thereby arrive at the sense of the un-ease, the “disease.” For instance, think of Titania’s speech to Oberon in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as not just about two quarreling fairies, but about eco-disaster:
… with thy brawls thou hast disturb’d our sport.
Therefore the winds, piping to us in vain,
As in revenge, have suck’d up from the sea
Contagious fogs; which falling in the land
Have every pelting river made so proud
That they have overborne their continents.
The ox hath therefore stretch’d his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted ere his youth attain’d a beard;
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock;
The nine-men’s-morris is fill’d up with mud,
And the quaint mazes in the wanton green
For lack of tread are undistinguishable.
The human mortals want their winter here:
No night is now with hymn or carol blest.
Therefore the moon, the governess of floods,
Pale in her anger, washes all the air,
That rheumatic diseases do abound:
And thorough this distemperature we see
The seasons alter: hoary-headed frosts
Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose;
And on old Hiems’ thin and icy crown,
An odorous chaplet of sweet summer buds
Is, as in mockery, set; the spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, now knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and original.
(Act II, scene 1)
And what has led to this disaster? As symbolized by the quarrel between the king and queen of fairies, the rupture in social harmony that has led to dis-ease in nature. What may heal this dis-ease? A recognition of suffering, and a return to love, harmony, natural magic?
Deming: I love the Shakespeare here. Ah, “the mazed world.” And in the passage the bizarre beauty of language in describing disaster: “… hoary-headed frosts / Far in the fresh lap of the crimson rose.” The language itself, a balm and embodiment of contradiction. My interests, as a poet, in science have been aesthetic. In that sense, I think poetry too generates new knowledge. Not the knowledge of facts but the knowledge of sensory experience and formal invention. I know the flooded bog about which I’ve just written a poem. I know the endangered monarch butterfly through the lenses of scientific research and my experience in the field. My poems about the monarchs share that knowledge in a manner which cannot be verified by being repeated by other researchers—as science requires. Rather it is an aesthetic knowledge—that sigh of recognition, that acknowledgment of beauty, that lament at the fragility of life and its diminishment at the human presence, that love of the more-than-human world.
I treasure science for the ways it brings me more deeply into perceiving the natural world in all its particularity, inventiveness, and interconnectedness. But it alone cannot enable me to know the world. I was struck by a recent article by the esteemed science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson in which he writes, “Aiming science is the work of the humanities and arts, politics and law.” I find that notion of “aiming” science such an interesting and appealing challenge for us.
Bradfield: Gaah! Yes! And this is where we find ourselves faced with the frustration of what is “science” and what is “poetry,” too. Are we talking medicine, anthropology, physics, astronomy, economics? All of these are “scientific” fields. Yet, as a poet, I respond to them … well, I was going to say differently. But that’s not true. As a poet, I want to take the presented “knowns” and allow time and space for the ineffable, the wondering, the emotional, the oddly known connections that feel vibrantly true in my body and memory but might not be accepted under rigorous review. I suppose, in the end, I see poetry as a counterbalance for science and my ultimate dream would be to have scientists have to read poems (good ones, ones fully aware of what they engage with) about their subjects so that they could shift their questions and their parameters.
Day: Yes! I share that dream of having scientists read poems about the subjects of their research. This means, of course, that some poets must study enough science to write the poems that can lead scientists to new perspectives on their work. Another good thing that results from this is that at the same time as the scientists are seeing their work in new ways via the poems, other readers of poetry will be learning about the science and thinking about it, too. In fact, some people who think they dislike science might be able to engage with it through poetry, and they might come to new emotional revelations as well as new factual understanding. Poetry can’t replace science textbooks, research articles, newspaper articles about recent discoveries, science exhibits at museums, etc., but that doesn’t mean it isn’t relevant. Some people might ask, “Isn’t it better to learn about science from an experiment or a textbook instead of from a poem.” To that, I would say that the poem is not instead of all the other ways to approach science but in addition to them.
Fisher-Wirth: My own journey to this topic—the interrelations between poetry and science—came late. I was raised a Christian Scientist; I did not study science, in the ordinary sense of the word, when I was young. That’s an understatement. At Pomona College, when forced to sign up for botany and conduct an experiment, I never got around to planting my radish seeds in order to find out whether they grew better to silence, Bach, or the Beatles; instead, I carried the seeds around in my pocket all semester. But reading Walden in college awakened in me a longing for the natural world, and both gardening with my children in California when they were small and, later, living on a farm in Virginia for several years increased my practical intimacy with nature. Shortly after moving to the University of Mississippi, I became involved with the nascent organization called ASLE (the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment), an involvement that both changed my teaching and led to my work to create an Interdisciplinary Minor in Environmental Studies. As coeditor with Laura-Gray Street of The Ecopoetry Anthology—which was published in 2013, and which is 625 pages of American nature poetry and ecopoetry from Whitman to the present—I continued to become aware of the tremendous range and diversity among writers for whom the other-than-human world is of pre-eminent importance, and who write about it with a scientific accuracy that reveals the natural world’s specificity, variety, and abundance. Before my retirement in summer 2022, I was Principal Investigator on an NEH Planning Grant, “Environmental Literacy and Engagement in Mississippi,” which involved close collaboration among humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences to redesign the Environmental Studies’ year-long introductory course sequence and develop a lot of outreach and internship opportunities for our students. Working with my colleagues in different departments, especially biology, taught me a great deal. So did teaching the mandatory gateway course Humanities and the Environment, and several other environmental literature courses, in which we studied writers such as Rachel Carson, Elizabeth Kolbert, David George Haskell, Drew Lanham, Richard Powers, Merlin Sheldrake, Janisse Ray, and the other members of the current conversation.
Hedge Coke: Thank you for mentioning Richard Powers here. Phenomenal. I first read him (The Echo Maker) while working with Sandhill cranes and recovering from a major car accident. His rendering of someone with brain trauma who finds themself in the epicenter of the annual migration in the major flyway was simply incredible.
Love, too, the Williams note on how a calling for poets is the same as a calling for doctors to diagnose and heal. Isn’t that so much of what readers, what the people generally need when coming to poetry? Poets translate existing issues and bring ways of seeing, speaking to the issue that begin the journey to healing. I teach narrative medicine in our school of medicine. This coincides with so much work in healing in general. Communication is the core root to get the proper diagnosis and to work effectively with it.
Coming back to this separation in society, otherwise. Science, in youth, wasn’t separate from other engagements for us. Still is not. Just offers other languages and approaches to contemplate, investigate, experiment, engage, like poetry. All cultures were using core elements of science when learning what sources were edible, medicinal. What made good ground to live on, elements to build with. Science is in everything. Paddling songs involve physics. Poems about paddling, rivering, or navigating in oceans have science within, as well.
Poetry is not separate from healing, from living within, or understanding the world. It functions to do so.
There is so much relationship here with poetry, particularly in understanding the world, the universe, and in any and all environmental considerations and witnessings. Integral pathways connecting all that is known/unknown with compelling and exact terminology, vernacular, with ways of speaking to what it is we wish to offer, to indulge within, to be active with, to realize. In Burn, the science of fire is as much the heart of the book as the vast devastation of increasing fire in our world. Yet, fire is also necessary for beginnings, the bristlecone, for instance. The stuff of life in the universe and on earth. Volcanic flow creates islands, land mass. It is this reckoning of the tenuous and dangerous, yet beautiful world we often find poetic inspiration with. Extinction and endangerment have propelled my work in the Calicentric book, Look at This Blue. We are in a world. We are within the world. We are of the world. We translate what of the world we are moved or challenged by. We seek to understand and motivate. Blood Run is entirely mathematical, physics, cosmogony, architecture, is built form in an environment intentionally facing astronomical events. The math and science of the place are demonstrated in the prosody of the work and challenged and drove me to do the work.
Once more, science is discovering what poetry and religion have long known: in some deep and real sense, we are one.
Thinking of the anthologies we’ve worked with, it seems all of the anthologies I’ve had the privilege to edit have been rich with these critical environmental engagements. Especially the Effigies Series, with Salt Publications, perhaps. Effigies III, for instance (edited with Brandy N?lani McDougall and Craig Santos Perez), is dedicated to Oceania, to queer Indigenous voices from the Pacific. The interrogation of the colonial world and offering of the brilliant natural and built world there, in the relative environments represented, is incredible.
Determining what is at stake in a localized situation often brings us to see the deeper aspects of significance global impact has upon both regional and planetary environments, and living beings; peoples.
There are scientists, physicians, who write poetry, read poetry, prescribe and order poetry. Galileo was a poet/lecturer. (His longest known poem is 301 lines, written in 1590, “Contro il portar la toga.”) His poetry challenged existing methods, much as his science did. The early American schools of poetry, including the Academics, often came from scientific backgrounds and intersections. Bishop’s letter to Darwin. Darwin noting his shared feelings with poets. I don’t see this as a new movement, necessarily, but as reunification and rejoining. The lit field suppresses unification, as well. Pinning the academics against the Beats (who came from academia) and similarly later with Slam. The cause of the work, the at-stake, being the method in which ways of thinking, being, realizing, unite, we can do so much more in bringing together the best of each to functionally move people while offering inroads to understanding versus dividing.
In many traditional cultures, science is never necessarily separate from artful ways of detailing. Whether it is art or poetry, science can be the principal force in both, and either can be ways of coming to understand, to detail, to learn, to experiment, to realize, too. We often come to poetry to understand our world, our environment.
Day: Environmental studies provides an exceptionally compelling example of what poetry can bring to the discussion and understanding of science. In her 2021 National Poetry Series–winning collection, Dear Specimen, W.J. Herbert writes about the extinction of species in the past and also in the future, in the aftermath of global warming. “Epilogue: To a Trilobite” catalogs the catastrophe:
blue whales starving for krill
stopped calving,
manatees ate poisoned
sea grass, polar bears
sank in the open sea.
Cities flooded. Crops failed.
Images such as these can motivate people to go out and learn more about the science of climate change than can be packed into a poem. These images can also motivate people to act now to help prevent the worst-case scenario for the planet.
The poems in Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California, the anthology I coedited with Ruth Nolan, are organized into eight sections corresponding to bioregions: Coast and Ocean; Coastal Redwoods; Hills and Canyons; Fields and Meadows; Desert; Rivers, Lakes, and Lagoons; Sierra Nevada and Cascades; and Cities, Towns, and Roads. By placing poems about particular bioregions side by side, we wanted to show the diverse species and interactions in ecosystems. We hope the poems work together to reveal both the beauty of California landscapes and the complexity of California ecology. There is a biology education agenda here as well as an aesthetic, poetic one.
Deming: I think these kinds of bioregional anthologies make wonderful contributions to bringing aesthetic experience into ecological awareness. John H. Falk of the Institute for Learning Innovation at Oregon State University has done interesting work on what he calls the “tectonic” change in how, when, where, and even why people learn in the 21st century. He finds that learning now is “continuous and on demand,” taking place online and in libraries, zoos, natural history museums, national parks. Access to the science education ecosystem that extends way beyond the classroom is a key issue for science literacy. Poetry has a rhizomatic connection to this ecosystem. More and more poets find inspiration in science and more scientists seek out the poetic voice as complement to their way of seeing. Case in point, Scientific American 2020 created the “Meter” column, curated by Dava Sobel, a poem appearing each month with elegant design features—a series in which I was fortunate to publish my poem “Letter to 2050.” And here too we see the growth of poetry and other art forms being introduced in the interpretive materials at zoos, natural history museums, and sites such as those in the NSF-funded Long-Term Ecological Research sites.
That William Carlos Williams idea quoted earlier meets its counterpoint in a quote from Anton Chekhov, another physician/poet. He wrote in his letters that “the task of the writer is not to solve the problem but to state the problem correctly.” So, by analogy, the task of the writer may be to accurately diagnose the illness, but not cure it. And here poetry has an advantage over science in that it incorporates inwardness, nuance, emotion, music, heart, and spirit—all elements of human consciousness banished from the scientific method. I’ll invite a scientist to strike down that claim, but in general I think it holds true.
Fisher-Wirth: Alison, I agree with you about the exciting possibilities of bioregional anthologies. I’m thinking of the field guides that have begun to appear—The Sonoran Desert: A Literary Field Guide, edited by Eric Magrane and Christopher Cokinos, with illustrations by Paul Mirocha; A Literary Field Guide to Southern Appalachia, edited by Laura-Gray Street and Rose McLarney with L. L. Gaddy as natural history editor; the forthcoming Cascadia Field Guide: Art, Ecology, Poetry, edited by Elizabeth Bradfield, CMarie Fuhrman, and Derek Sheffield; and one I have been working on with Catherine Pierce and our natural history editor Libby Hartfield, A Literary Field Guide to Mississippi (currently postponed). These are beautiful books, suitable for a wide audience of readers, combining original creative writing with science writing and original illustrations, all focusing on various species indigenous to their regions. We’d love to see a lot more of them.
Day: I’m delighted to see the name of John H. Falk appear here. His path and mine first crossed in the 1970s at UC Berkeley, where we both received a BA in biology, followed by an MA in zoology. He was one year ahead of me. We both went on to earn a PhD at Berkeley in an interdisciplinary program in science/mathematics education, which included professors from botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, mathematics, and computer science as well as education. John has had a stellar career in science education. Although I have published research papers in science education, served as the director of a small health museum for 17 years, and codirected a curriculum development project sponsored by the National Institutes of Health, I feel that my most important contributions to science education have been as a poet concerned with the links between poetry and science.
In this conversation, we have said a lot about the connections between poetry and biology, and I’d like to point out that the connections are equally strong between poetry and the physical sciences and mathematics, a topic touched on in some of Allison’s comments. Emily Rolfe Grosholz, a poet and philosopher of mathematics, has published a book entitled Great Circles: The Transits of Mathematics and Poetry. Here is the beginning of her poem “Song of the (Ancient) Physics Major,” which appears in Great Circles:
Impulse, the time integral of force,
Measures changes of momentum in
A system: our revels now are ended.
The displacement integral of force,
Called work (melted into air, into thin air),
Measures the system’s change of energy.
Also, I might add that in Eureka: A Prose Poem, Edgar Allan Poe predicted black holes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang long before scientists ever spoke of these things.
Fisher-Wirth: My two final thoughts—
In “Jubilate Agno,” the 18th-century British poet Christopher Smart writes, “God make gardeners better nomenclators”—a line that refers to the quest for art and precision in naming the ten thousand things of this world, and that has always reminded me of when my kids were young, and in our gardening projects, we began to learn the names of plants. There’s science in this line—and poetry.
And, to me, equally beautiful is the metaphor of Indra’s net—the vast, jeweled net into which all things are woven—and the realization that any slightest movement on the net ripples throughout creation. It is wonderful that recent work like Merlin Sheldrake’s book Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Lives, and Shape Our Futures shows how this interconnectivity and interdependency extend throughout the entire living world. Once more, science is discovering what poetry and religion have long known: in some deep and real sense, we are one.
Elizabeth Bradfield’s most recent books are Toward Antarctica and Theorem. Her work has been published in The Atlantic and Poetry, and her honors include the Audre Lorde Prize and a Stegner fellowship. Founder of Broadsided Press, she works as a naturalist/guide, and she teaches creative writing at Brandeis University.
Lucille Lang Day is the award-winning author of eleven poetry collections, including Birds of San Pancho and Other Poems of Place, two children’s books, and a memoir. A coeditor of two poetry anthologies, Fire and Rain: Ecopoetry of California and Red Indian Road West: Native American Poetry from California, she holds an MFA in poetry and a PhD in science/mathematics education.
Alison Hawthorne Deming’s new nonfiction book is A Woven World. Her other recent works include Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit and the poetry collection Stairway to Heaven. A recent Guggenheim Fellow, she is Regents Professor Emerita at the University of Arizona.
Ann Fisher-Wirth’s seventh book of poems is Paradise Is Jagged. She is coeditor of The Ecopoetry Anthology, a senior fellow of the Black Earth Institute, and the 2023 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Excellence in Literature and Poetry from the Mississippi Arts Commission. Professor Emerita of English, she also directed the Environmental Studies program at the University of Mississippi.
Allison Adelle Hedge Coke is the 2021 AWP George Garrett Awardee. Her books include Look at This Blue, Burn, Streaming, Blood Run, and Effigies III. Director of Sandhill CraneFest, she is Distinguished Professor at UC Riverside where she teaches in Creative Writing and the School of Medicine and directs the VA NCA Legacy Program Along the Chaparral and UCR Writers Week Festival.
