Tag: science poetry

Sunday Science Poem: Why You Should Read Lucretius

We’re bringing the Sunday Poem out of hiatus and will hopefully, with some publisher cooperation, feature some remarkable poetry by contemporary poets who work with science metaphors.

However, before we return to present day poetry, let’s go back two thousand years and tackle the greatest of all science poems: Lucretius’ The Nature of Things.

Why should you read Lucretius? His poem is one of the great works of classical Latin poetry, one which influenced many subsequent Roman poets, notably Virgil. It has the added benefit of laying out Lucretius’ remarkable thinking about the invisible workings of nature. Reading this poem, you inhabit the ancient mind of a sharp observer who was trying to make sense of the macroscopic world by theorizing about motions of the microscopic one.

Lucretius was conscious of the requirements of good science writing. He was explicitly an advocate of the Mary Poppins method of helping the medicine go down with a spoon full of sugar. Lucretius packed his poem with illuminating metaphors and, like Darwin, was capable of making striking observations of everyday phenomena that most of us would take for granted. He used these observations to make inferences about the world we can’t see. As an advocate of the teachings of Epicurus, Lurcetius connects his observations and inferences to crucial ideas about how we should live our lives and think about ourselves.

The Classical scholar Richard Jenkyns makes this argument for reading Lucretius:

Of all the great poems of Europe – and it is indeed among the greatest – Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura (The Nature of Things) is perhaps the most improbable. Here is a poem without people in it, without any story; instead it offers a treatise on science and philosophy. The philosophy, moreover, is a strict materialism, which denies the existence of anything magical, mysterious, or transcendent. It does not sound like promising matter for poetry at all, let alone for a work of more than 7,000 line. Yet the result is a masterpiece. A key to appreciating this most unlikely success is to understand the nature of Lucretius’ beliefs and the circumstances in which he decided to expound them.

– Introduction to the 2007 Penguin edition, vii

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Why You Should Read Lucretius”

Sunday Science Poem: Chicago and the tensions of technological progress

I just got back from a weekend in Chicago, where, among other things, I stood on a three-inch thick glass ledge, suspended a quarter of a mile above Chicago’s streets. The Sears Tower* is a symbol of the optimistic view of technological progress that was still common in the mid-20th century – an era of outsized, iconic engineering projects. Chicago’s history reflects both this optimistic view, and more ambivalent attitudes towards technology and cities, captured in today’s Sunday Poem, Carl Sandburg’s 1904 “Chicago”.

To introduce this poem, I’ll pass the mic to William Cronon, who writes of what Chicago meant to the development of the American West:

“My contention is that no city played a more important role in shaping the landscape and economy of the midcontinent during the second half of the nineteenth century than Chicago… During the second half of the nineteenth century, the American landscape was transformed in ways that anticipated many of the environmental problems we face today: large-scale deforestation, threats of species extinction, unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, widespread destruction of habitat. It was during this period as well that much of the world we Americans now inhabit was created: the great cities that house so many of us, the remarkably fertile farmlands that feed us, the transportation linkages that tie our nation together, the market institutions that help define our relationships to each other, and the natural world that is our larger home.”1

Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Chicago and the tensions of technological progress”

Sunday Science Poem: Reality and The Snow Man

For this week’s poem, we’re coming back to Wallace Stevens, with one his most famous poems, “The Snow Man”. If you’ve read any Wallace Stevens, it’s probably this early poem.

John Serio writes that Stevens’ “most distinctive achievement” is this:

In an age of disbelief or, what might be worse, one of indifference to questions of belief, Stevens adds a metaphysical dimension. In doing so, he does not imply anything religious, yet goes beyond humanism. “The chief defect of humanism,” he writes, “is that it concerns human beings. Between humanism and something else, it might be possible to create an acceptable fiction.”… Poetry is supreme because it shifts our orientation from a traditional subject of belief, such as God, to its source – the creative, ever changing, infinitely renewable process of constructing a credible truth.1

The “renewable process of constructing a credible truth” sounds much like Thomas Kuhn’s description of the scientific process. Much of Stevens’ poetry tackles questions about how we construct our mental representations of reality. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Reality and The Snow Man”

Sunday Science Poem: Melville and Mechanized War

When you think about poetry and the Civil War, Herman Melville is probably not the first person who comes to mind. Yet, with some serious hindsight, Melville has turned out to be one of the major poets of the Civil War. As readers of Moby Dick, White-Jacket, and “the Bell Tower” know, Melville had a longstanding interest in technology, science, and the mechanization of society. This made Melville especially attuned the effects of technology on war, and on the role of soldiers in war.

This week’s Sunday Science Poem is “A Utilitarian View of the Monitor’s Fight.” The Monitor was the first Federal armored “ironclad” warship. On March 8, 1862, the Monitor and the Confederate Virginia (previously known as the Merrimac when it was a Federal ship) battled to a draw in the world’s first battle between armored warships – an ominous milestone that Melville explores in this poem. This was a battle of “no passion; all went by on crank, pivot, and screw, and calculations of caloric.” It was not a glorious fight of heroes, but a professional battle of technical “operatives.” Today, the operatives can control unmanned, mechanical weapons without even being present on the battlefield. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Melville and Mechanized War”

Sunday Science Poem: Mitochondrial Mothers

Despite my experiences of crushing boredom studying cell trafficking pathways in grad school, there was no way I was going to just walk past a book of poems titled Cell Traffic without stopping. In this delightful book, poet Heid E. Erdrich mixes themes of genetics, motherhood, ancestry, and Native American mythology to produce poetry that feels very relevant in a day when we can read information about our ancestry from the text of our DNA.

Today’s Sunday Poem is “Seven Mothers.” The title refers to the seven major, maternally inherited mitochondrial haplogroups popularized by Bryan Sykes in The Seven Daughters of Eve. Since Sykes’ book was published, we have developed a greater ability to use genetic variation in our nuclear DNA to trace our ancestry, and mitochondrial DNA now plays less of a role in our efforts to understand human ancestry than it once did. But it’s hard to beat the impact of mitochondrial maternal ancestry on our imaginations. Continue reading “Sunday Science Poem: Mitochondrial Mothers”