Launching Winter 2017

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Introduction

Reason has moons, but moons not hers,
Lie mirrored on her sea,
Confounding her astronomers,
But O' delighting me.

The quote belongs to Walter de la Mere, from his introduction to Martin Johnson's 1944 book, 'Art and Scientific Thought'.  To me it reflects both the duality of science and poetry in their fascination with the precise and universal, the strangeness of the familiar (the mirroring moon). Yet also the difference in how they approach their truths (a confounding delight).

There are many modern books, talks and articles about science and poetry; from the famous 1950s Rede lecture-arguments of C.P Snow and F.R. Leavis and Robert Crawford's 'Contemporary Science and Contemporary Poetry', to an article in New Scientist this January on  poetry and neuroscience 'the power of verse'.

There aren't however resources that look in detail at how many, different poets confront the particular formal challenge of taking a scientific concept through to a very human experience, or guidance for those working at this edge. There's rarely an easily intelligable introduction to that particular piece of science either, let alone in relation to the poem.

That, in short, is what this blog is about.

My criteria are simple. The poems must (in my humble scientific opinion), deal with science in an informed yet inventive way - that tension between the familiar and the strange . How does the poem engage with science?  What is the science about? How does the poem work? What skills and techniques are being used? What does the engagement with science bring to the experience of the poem? All areas of science, from astrophysics to zoology, are game for investigation. 

The forthcoming blog articles that will grow into an online poetry-science anthology of 52 works of art, can't possibly be exhaustive, or contain work from all those who are working at the coal-face of science and poetry. But what it hopefully can do is bring you excellent new poems, tips, and interesting, intelligible science. 

My aim is perhaps best summed-up by answering physicist Richard P. Feynman's question:

'What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?'

The best poets can do both.
This blog celebrates them, in their methane-mouthed state.

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