Poetry about Science in the UK

Our world has been transformed by technology so one would expect
cars, TVs and test-tube babies to appear in poetry. And as the
percentage of scientists in the population grows, the lives and
preoccupations of their profession feature more often in poems.

But the world we can't see directly has changed too. Relativity
and (even more so) Quantum Physics have shown us that we live in a
world beyond what common sense can cope with. And Mathematicians,
dealing with topics like (and here I quote at random from the first maths
journal at hand)
'Examples of tunnel number one knots which have the property 1+1=3' live in a stranger world still.

One might have thought that adventurous poets would have rushed into
these newly opened territories, but it seems to me that poets over the last
few centuries have withdrawn
from trying to tackle the big questions about the Nature of the Universe.
They tend not to deal with the moral complications that new technology
engenders, and it's rare to see a Blakean anti-materialist piece attacking
scientists. Instead, poets' attempts to write science poems fall into these
main categories

• Awe and Wonder - like children given a microscope for
  Christmas


• Effects on relationships - e-mail and the mobile phone


• Science Fiction Poetry - there's a book of StarTrek
  poetry


• Biographical pieces about famous scientists
  

These are topics that can easily be tackled by people who know little
about science. And yet, more poetry is written by scientists nowadays than in
any previous era. So why don't we have more poetry from the frontiers of science? On the international front, the internationally acclaimed
Czech poet Miroslav Holub was also a serious immunologist. It is perhaps
significant that he had doubts about twinning poetry and science. In "The Dimension of the Present Moment" (Faber and Faber, 1990) he wrote

• "At first glimpse one might suspect that literature would be closer to the sciences than other art forms, because sciences also use words and depend on syntax for expressing their findings and formulating ideas. ... [but] There is no common language and there is no common network of relations and references. Actually, modern painting has in some ways come closer to the new scientific notions and paradigms, precisely because a painter's vocabulary, colours, shapes and dimensions are not congruent to the scientist's vocabulary." (p.130)


• "In the use of words, poetry is the reverse of the sciences. Sciences bar all secondary factors associated with writing or speaking; ... poetry tries for as many possibilities as it can." (p.132)

In New Scientist (24 July 1999) Graham Farmelo (Science Museum, London)
wrote "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". So perhaps we should be wary of some recent
initiatives.

In the UK ex physics/maths professors appear in small magazines, and
Mario Petrucci, who's active in many areas of UK poetry, has a physics
Ph.D. London's Science Museum sometimes has a poet-in-residence. The
best known holder of that post is Lavinia Greenlaw. In 2000, she was awarded
a three-year fellowship by the National Endowment for Science, Technology
and the Arts. She said she'd use the £67,000 to "undertake formal study" in science, and journey "to places with extreme
perspectives - precarious and changing landscapes, or those which
experience the natural phenomena of eclipses and equinoxes".
For television, she has written a sequence of poems about the
meaning of numbers for an Equinox documentary. Her WWW site is
http://www.laviniagreenlaw.co.uk.
Also worth a look is LUPAS (Liverpool University Centre for Poetry and Science).

If you want to read science poems, 2 UK anthologies of note are

• "Poems of Science", eds J. Heath-Stubbs and P. Salman, Penguin, 1984.



• "A quark for Mister Mark", eds Maurice Roirdan, Jon Turney: Faber, 2000.

To finish, here's a list of UK poets with science-related degrees

• Michael Bartholomew-Biggs (was a computing professor)


• Tania Hershman (MSc, MPhil)


• Peter Howard (science degree)


• Joel Lane (MSc, Mphil)


• Valerie Laws (Maths/Theoretical physics)


• Kona MacPhee (computing degree)


• David Morley (post-degree)


• Stephen Payne (Professor of Human-Centric Systems)


• Mario Petrucci (Ph.D)


• Colin Will ('majored' in earth sciences and chemistry; a PhD in
  information science)