The Two Cultures

I'm no scientist, but sometimes I've been able to combine my interests in poetry and computing. I supervised a student in a project about Analysing Sound Patterns. I think it's healthy for people to be interested in both the cultures. In general though, I'm rather dubious about the attempts at fusion. And I'm not the only one -

• "There's no better evidence for the relevance of Snow's chasm between the two than the nature of the attempts by literary intellectuals to bridge it ... In general, if, as we have seen, all attempts to bridge the gulf between Snow's two poles have failed ... do we need to bridge the gulf in the first place? After all - to put it in the most simplistic terms - art and science are performing very different functions" (Roger Caldwell, "PN Review", 2009)
• "there may be something like a scientific approach incorporated into something which may still be poetry, but not vice versa" (Miroslav Holub)
• "Be sceptical of any science-art initiative and you are liable to find yourself marked down as a narrow-minded reactionary. If a new work of art is based on a theme related to science, most critics will give it an easy ride... It seems that this flavour of political correctness encourages intellectual laziness, allowing shallow and sentimental nonsense about the relationship to pass for serious thought" (Graham Farmelo, "New Scientist", 1999)

See my Poetry about Science in the UK and Science and the Arts articles for details.

"Tears in the fence" No.58 (Winter 2013/14) has an interesting 2 page editorial about science and poetry. Here are some quotes with my comments in italics

• "C.P.Snow's famous Two Cultures split from the sixties appears to be diminishing as more poets are seeing the metaphorical connection, as an expansive tool, between the two"
  I think Snow's main point was that the people he mixed with considered it ok to be clueless about science but would look down on anyone who failed to recognise a famous Shakespeare quote. The popularity of Science programs on TV (even University Challenge has non-trivial science questions nowadays) combined with the devalued status of modern poetry in the UK has helped change the balance of respectability of the two cultures.
  The status at universities has changed too. Compared to science degrees, Lit/poetry degree courses are cheap to run, but student numbers are declining. Creative writing courses (also cheap to run) are on the increase though.
• "One of the aims is to make the language of scientific sub-cultures more accessible rather than technical and exclusive"
  I thought text-books did that. Besides, there may be legitimate reasons why scientific language might be hard to understand. I'd have thought that poets (especially experimental poets) had far more of an image problem regarding cliquey obscurantism.
• "Postgraduate poets at Southampton University participated in multidisciplinary work with scientists, which saw them engage with the structure of turbulence, bioethanol applications, microbial soil ecology, binding proteins to surfaces using quantum mechanics"
  Quantum Mechanics? Sounds impressive. I wonder what the nature of the engagement was. Is a photographer taking photos of test-tubes engaging with chemistry? Is a word-salad of physics terms much to do with Physics? I believe Jo Shapcott started an OU Science degree - that's the start of engagement. Ethnic minorities might get a bit grumpy about WASP poets getting paid to write poems about their ethnic experience. Scientists probably respect authority too much to challenge the right of "acknowledged poets" to write about science, or to criticize the results. See the Jacket article on required expertise for further discussion
• "There is a strong sense that space can and should be created for poetry and scientific experiment to come together, both in and outside of the lab. A great deal of the ground work for creating such a space has been achieved by poets, thinkers and performance artists, such as Marina Abramovic, John Cage, Charles Olson"
  Science experiments and Art experiments usually work in very different ways, not least of which being the objective evaluation of outcomes. Few scientist do "blue-sky research". If they're "just experimenting" they don't publish their results, though they may learn from the experience.
• "The connection between poetry and science surely stems from their combined interest in things, organic relationships and how things connect and impinge on life. There is a continual drive to observe and discover, which is shared by both communities, and could be introduced at school"
  Observing and discovering is done by cooks, gardeners, miners, babies, etc. Do all poets show powers of observation (see the poem below)? Nowadays, do any poets discover? We no longer turn to poets or literature for insights. "[Criticism] might contribute in a modest way to our very survival" (Terry Eagleton, 1981). "Like thatching or clog dancing, literary criticism seems to be something of a dying art" (Terry Eagleton, 2007)
• "Poets should be questioning, investigating the processes, procedures and couriers of knowledge in an attempt to illuminate benefits, losses, and unknown connections as well as offering lateral, non-mechanistic and visionary ways forwards"
  I guess some poets like to think of themselves as "visionary", as going "forwards". It's not clear to me that poets are well placed to question and investigate processes and procedures though. In what sense do poets engage with knowledge? Poets may yearn for cultural accreditation, but creative writing courses struggled even to get University accreditation.

The editorial also mentions James Wilkes' Bracketing the World: Reading Poetry through Neuroscience from "The White Review".

Later in the magazine is "The Forces" by Dorothy Lehane, who's involved with Litmus, a grant-aided project linking poetry and science. It's a poem in 5 sections, each headed by a formula. Here's the start of section 4.

F g = Gm1m2/r2 [gravity] made up by science; same evolution, same dinosaurs, same helix cheeky tryptic, de facto damn, tsk gravity, blame recreational sex, Galileo Galilei is a pal of tall order, we are talking torsion, postulations, telekinesis, who has been invited to our pool party, masquerade only, call gravity clotted, if a clot is a mass and if a mass falls, warfarin combats that, seafaring combats echo …. thanks then for gravity, if you think about urine floating, certainly the repose is thanks.

p.s. Hannah Wood's GCSE Science Experiment to Test the Durability of a Chemical Bond between Romeo and Juliet is fun.

Some photos from home

Salvaged from the loft - my old chemistry set, with copper sulphate dried in the beaker.

An old stage-prop from a life long ago (though I didn't create the prop or appear on stage). Another path not taken.

The computer I learnt programming on. The "32" is short for "32K". Maybe I should see if it still works.

A sign on my local library's door. My poetry pamphlet's called "Moving Parts".

600 write-ups

I've just posted my 600th write-up on my LitRefs Reviews blog. As I explain in a rationale, they're not usually reviews as such. Some of them - e.g. The Atmospheric Railway - are only a sentence or two. Others - e.g. The Best British Poetry 2011 - go on for ages. The top 5 most popular entries are (for differing reasons, I suspect)

• Birth of the Owl Butterflies
• School of Forgery
• Stuart: A life backwards
• The Forward book of poetry, 2013
• How to live safely in a science fictional universe

Some photos from work

I'm wondering how to use this notice from a cardboard box. Stick it secretly on a poet's back?

A door that's a few metres from my office. I think I get the message.

Another notice from my workplace.

My current office.

2 labs that I've never visited.

3 newish UK story sites

• The storyplayer - audio stories
• National short story week - happening now!
• Shortstops - info about UK short story mags and authors, etc

Curate's Egg poems

Marking a multiple choice quiz, should you penalise wrong answers? It's a ploy that deters guessers - it keeps them honest, stops them bluffing or taking too many chances.

If a stanza of a poem doesn't do anything, do you just skip over it or do you penalize it? Perhaps it's there for other readers, not you. But suppose it affects your enjoyment of the rest of the poem? Maybe it's crass, sexist, derivative, etc. Would you ignore it then? Suppose instead of a bad or pointless stanza it's a questionable line, or word, or line-break?

Obviously, it depends. But on what? The proportion of the whole that's affected; the nature of the flaw. But also it depends on the type of work being read, the reader, and why they're reading. Some poets (Selima Hill?) tend to write uneven pieces. Others (Heaney?) don't. The perceived unevenness may be because the work is multi-style or polyphonic, the reader not equally at home with the various styles/voices. Some people (especially if they're judging) will judge a poem by its worst line. Others won't mind panning for gold, seeking rare and beautiful wonders. My impression is that

• Non-narrative, discontinuous poems are more likely to be read with a pick'n'mix approach
• If a line of a poem is much better than the rest, it's sometimes said to "be worth the admission fee alone", the rest of the poem excused

I don't see why readers should be more lenient with non-narrative pieces, and though I can understand why a good goal might justify going to an otherwise ordinary game, a poem's not a live event - it can be edited.

The reader's strategy can in time affect the poet's writing. If readers are going to ignore the bits they don't get, the poet's more likely to add more stanzas or more obscurity - after all, there's nothing to lose. I think the current fashion amongst frequent poetry readers is more indulgent than it was a decade or so ago. Perhaps the increasingly competent and voluminous output of creative writing students makes readers crave for something "a bit different".

Some poems contain a 2-D constellation of quotable fragments. What should fill the gaps between them? Dead wood or padding? Options include

• Nothing - compacted fragment and nothing else
• White space (to "let the images breath"; to provide space for fields to be generated between the poles)
• Absorbent text that attempts to magnify/refract the effect of the powerful fragments
• Text that attempts to provide continuity between the fragments (which may either amplify the fragments or mask their effect)
• Text that's part of a different thread.

Sometimes when a reader and I disagree over a poem, I've asked them about certain phrases only to find that the reader's ignored them rather than try (and fail) to incorporate them into their interpretation. I don't see any problem with a poem containing self-contradictions, but if the reader edits those contradictions away, something's surely wrong somewhere.

Sometimes a reader (for personal/professional reasons) wants to like the poetry. Obscure poetry gives such readers more scope to do this - nothing needs to be explained and anything in it might be vital to the poem as a whole, so nothing can safely be deleted. Once some time has been invested in a text, it's rather hard to dismiss it, though some readers may give up, using variations of the "there are only so many hours in the day" argument

• "If the poet's not going to bother editing their work, I don't have time to do the editing for them"
• "I don't trust the poet. If there are so many phrases that make little sense to me, maybe the effect of the other words is delusionary, luck, a mirage. Maybe the poet's trying to bluff me"

I'm not against "hopeful monsters" as such though I'm less tolerant of padding (in the form of words or space) than many other readers are. Surplus words and line-breaks can make me wary of the other words and line-breaks that at first sight seemed effective. I begin to lose trust in the poet. Before long, the implicit reader-poet contract isn't worth the paper it's written on, so I start reading another book instead.

Cornering a poetry market

There are advantages in becoming nationally (or regionally) known for writing poetry about a particular topics -

• the media will know who to contact
• commissions might come your way
• you may be asked to edit an anthology or a magazine special issue
• you might run a poetry festival session or a poetry school course
• a non-poetry conference on the topic might ask you to run a session/workshop to provide "something different"

The topic shouldn't be too general ("bereavement", for example) or too esoteric. Some topics (medicine, therapy) have enough tie-ins with poetry to keep several poets busy. Here are some examples -

• Ian McMillan has Football.
• David Morley has Romani.
• Maybe Lavinia Greenlaw and Mario Petrucci first come to mind when people want a quote about Science and Poetry.
• Simon Armitage and pop music?
• Michael Bartholomew-Biggs and Maths
• Matthew Stewart and wine?
• Jon Stone and Manga?

I work in a science setting, but Science and Poetry don't work well together for me, so when a few years ago I was asked about helping with a radio show on the topic, I suggested that they get in touch with Greenlaw. I've assembled a pamphlet on word-play (anagrams, acrostics) and poetry, though I read in the latest Rialto that Abigail Parry's finishing a Ph.D on word-play and poetry, out-trumping me.

So I'll plod as I am, comforted by the thought that there's less risk of being typecast.