I’ve been sort of disappointed that there weren’t more submissions — or at least published submissions — for this topic. But then, when I’ve thought about it myself, I’ve found it difficult to identify any concept that really is uniquely on this topic. Of all the submissions, Dave’s about breaking glass fell the cleanest for me in both categories, science and poetry. Even the bits quoted here by these two authors are not that clearly on topic for me, when I read them alone, without the commentary.

Maybe I’m weird. I was raised by an artist who became a writer and a scientist who became a lawyer. Both also stayed what they had started out as, of course, and both were also musical, one more intuitively, one more formally trained. For me, even though I can confidently make statements such as “I’m good at languages but bad at math,” math and language, science and art have always been integrated, one whole thing, inseparable, each essentially about the other at its fundament. When I paint the human body, thinking always about placement of ligaments and distribution of veins and capillaries, blues and pinks, I paint biology. When I photograph plants, with serrated leaves and whorled leaves, oblate and pinnate, I photograph botany. When I draw a building, all angles and support and proportion, I draw geometry and physics. They all run into each other. And I use chemistry to explore different ways of recording bits of them. And though I want each work to be unique, part of the process is discovering techniques — which use science — for being able to create whatever effect I want, over and over again, at will — just recombined.

I just don’t see poetry and science as separate, but I also don’t really think this is unusual. Rebecca Goldstein’s book Strange Attractors, about a mathematician whose specialty is the mathematics of soap bubbles, also describes how discovering the existence of this subject entrances another character, a poet whose mathematician husband says he never told her about such things because then she’d want to be a mathematician, too. A friend who studied biology at Oxford, with particular focus on the eye and how we see, both the physical and chemical mechanisms that allow it and the psychology of it, used to have long conversations with me about how science is art is science is art… Other friends and I have joked, “What happens to a scientist how can’t do arithmetic? S/he becomes an artist.” (Again, it’s a joke. Lots of artists can do arithmetic just fine.)

I don’t think most people can separate science out of life; it is all about life, as is poetry, as is every art. Therefore, it’s very interesting to see what you finally ended up choosing for this subject, which sets up the premise that science as poetry is somehow special, and then to read about people who are able to consciously draw lines between specific poetic expressions and specific areas of science, at least while they’re writing.

Cheers, all!

I believe that the essential distinction between art and science is this: the goal of science is, ultimately, to create results that can be repeated over and over again, theoretically an infinite number of times; two plus two always equals four, an atom of sodium and an atom of chlorine always (under the right conditions) combine to make salt.

Whereas the goal of art is, ultimately, to create results that are essentially unique. Once a poem has been written, or a painting has been painted, writing the same poem or painting the same painting over again isn’t the point. Art is going ahead and saying something else.

The poet I think of immediately relating poetry and science together is the 20th century Czech poet Miroslav Holub, who (besides being a poet) was also a pathologist and immunologist. Throughout his life he wrote and published poetry and also scientific writings. His poetry is richly flavored by his scientific vocabulary and his generally scientific perspective: what other poet would write not one but two love poems containing the word “platypus”?