How Contemporary Poets Use Science Today

 Jennifer K Dick proposes 5 categories for the ways in which contemporary poets are using science today :

(this list is a sketch of only a fewexamples which I am sharing here as an invitation to others to think about this and other ways poets now or poets you know or you as poets are using science in your work. This list was compiled in 2017, so has not been updated)

1) Asmetaphor or exploration of language to name with precision

a.      Stratification/use of combiningwords, images, metaphors & scientific concepts with colloquial/everydaylanguage—all the books in this handout fit here, too, but these are additionalones that really rely on this technique:

Archipelago, Arthur Sze

In Memory of My Theories, Rod Smith

Reproduction of Profiles, Rosmarie Waldrop

Norma Cole’s works— especially Spinozain Her Youth, but also Metamorphopsia

            Etym(bi)ology (Omnidawn, 2002) by LizWaldner

            Perhaps the origin ofthis is derived from Gertrude Stein’s explorations. As Kimo Reder explained in The arc of our ark: Bio-poetics over the DNA rainbow, http://jacket2.org/commentary/arc-our-ark « Gertrude Stein’s experiments in grammar, using a non-ritual repetition topressure units of language out of their assumed, denotative meaning, bombardeda word’s semantic nucleus and rendered it capable of new syntactic mutations.Similarly, bio-poetics play on the protean complexity of subvisible microbesand their dizzying variety of ontological admixtures. In one such work, “ewe”as sheep plays on “you” as pronoun and palindromically gestures toward ourbestial past and post-species future at once. »

b.     Nature/body metaphor; biology andmicrobiology and the science (i.e. uses of litmus paper, etc) as metaphor or asan answer to “Oh yes, we have words for all this” (Dorothy Lehane, Ephémeris,22) is prevalent in works by numerous authors, including—

Ephemeris, Dorothy Lehane(editor of Litmus magazine, UK)

Dummy Fire, Sarah Vap

Tender Girl, Lisa Samuels (above all explored through a biological transformation)

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil: “I wanted towrite a novel but I wrote this [Hold up charcoal in fist.] I wrote the organsweets—the bread-rich parts of the body before it’s opened then devoured. Iwrote the middle of the body to its end.” (19)

And on a lesser level, in combination with questions about language andthe world as iis/describable, explorable:

Facts For Visitors, Srikanth Reddy

Bravura Cool, Jane Lewty

Gender City and Anti M by Lisa Samuels

 

2) tospeak about illness—either literally or metaphorically (for example, where manbecomes the virus which is an infection/plaque upon the earth)

a.      Body/illness (&death)—

Tory Dent, HIV, Mon Amour

Schizophrene Bhanu Kapil

            Pneumatic Antiphonal, Sylvia Legris

Post-stroke, Juliet Cook

Also An Essay in Asterisks byJena Osama, but her other works may be stronger examples to look at.

Ban en Banlieue by Bhanu Kapil:  Politics and the injured/sickened body: violenceagainst the body that stems from a political event, enters the body, itsbiology, transforms it: “The roar of the race riot dims. Ban is crumpled like atulip: there. A wetness, that is, with limbs. There are subtle movements:ventral and dorsal (muscular) twitches. This is the sensorimotor sequence. Thisis voltage: the body routed through its sounds: groans, murmurs, shouts.” (48)—inher end-notes, she thanks Sarah Roder for conversations on cranial-sacralbodywork which led to Bhanu’s twitching descriptions (see p 87 of the book)

Technical terms and unpacking them for schizophrene: “For years now, I’ve beenthinking about schizophrenia and disgust. How the capacity of a schizophrenicto recognize disgust in another person’s face, the person looking at them, isactually the thing that is workable. You can train the schizophrenic torecognize other facial expressions based on their ability to recognize thatone. Anhedonia, for example, the negative symptom of schizophrenia, is ‘theabyss between sentences,’ as Gaill Scott writes. Decontextualized.” (58)

b.     Man as infection ofworld :

The Xenotext book 1, Christian Bök

Juliana Spahr Transformation

Brenda Iijima, Around Sea

 

3) To explore nature/biology & human interactions

a.      In ecopoetic works: (too many to list, but here is a random taste of some I like)

Brenda Iijima, esp Around Sea & her most recent book onanimals

Gale Nelson, Ceteris Paribus

Gale Scott’s poems and writings on Schizophrenia

Tender Girl, Lisa Samuels

            The Xenotext book 1, Christian Bök (& the ongoing project)

Juliana Spahr’s The Transformation,using biology and in particular the plant “themaracujá vine” : passiflora use and discovery by a Dr in 1569 in Hawaii toparallel the experiences of the immigrant arriving on that island & issuesof infection— questions of understanding what they were on a political and racelevel (related to biological origin differences) mixes with politics andextinction level event fears (flus, but then this becomes a 9/11 book in whichshe develops the issues already present in her poetry collection This Connection of Everyone With Lungs and thus explores the issue of what is carried onthe air and breathed into the body, even from afar.)

3 books by Thalia Field, all at New Directions: Bird Lovers, Backyard; Point& Line ; Incarnate: StoryMaterial

Schizophrene, Bhanu Kapil

Ban en Banlieue, Bhanu Kapil: “Adornosubstituted people for animals; I feel cautious and sad reading his words inthe middle of the night, studying the body for Ban. /// Why?// To ‘reduce theliving body.’ [E. Groz].///To reach the point at which: ‘life rubs up againstmatter, its inner core.’ And thus to analyze nudity in a text, as friction, thesacrifice gone wrong: but also: the normalizing contact with membranes of allkinds—plant, brush, nettles, ivy, asphalt, skin. What is the function of anon-genital nudity in a work of narrative? How can the body perform somethingin a new way—something that belongs neither to the scene nor to history? Notefrom the labyrinth: 2.b.”(59)

b.     EXTINCTION OF SPECIES:  (and of humans as well)

Thalia Field, Bird Lovers,Backyard

Juliana Spahr, The Transformation

                TheXenotext book 1, Christian Bök. DLuman explains in his book review: “One of the hinges of the textis a 52-part section that translates a part of Virgil’s Georgicsentitled “Colony Collapse Disorder” which makes an allegory out of Virgil’smetaphor of armies to bees, drawing a parallel to the fragile state of beepopulations in our real, extra-textual world—a kind of damage that we, asbiological beings, have enacted on other biological beings largely through theproduct of systems of action brought into being by our own will in language. Itis a conflict that, no matter how developed our concepts of meaning andsignification become, condemns genetic structures to die; no amount of languagecan resurrect species subject to the forces of extinction or answer thequestion, as Bök’s translation asks, // [h]ow do we expiate our sins havingsacrificed every beast upon every altar?” (in Found Poetry Review, Douglas Luman, http://www.foundpoetryreview.com/blog/book-review-the-xenotext-book-1/ )

 

c.      Cyborg identity—the body (biological),the hybrid body and the mechanical body: A.I.

Bhanu Kapil Incubation : ASpace for Monsters

Jacques Sivan: Notre Mission (Al Dante/Presses du Réel, 2018)

Edging, Michelle Noteboomas well as her chapbook « The Chia Letters »

 

4) Work which is in the service of science—for a better understanding ofscience :

            The Xenotext book 1, Christian Bök

            Pneumatic Antiphonal, Sylvia Legris

            Allthe books by Amy Catanzano

            Darwin: A Life in Poems, Ruth Padel

            Mad Science in Imperial City, ShanxingWang

            Ina way, all of the works by Mari-Lou Rowley

Juliana Spahr : This Connection of Everyone With Lungs& Transformation

            The Character, Jena Osman & herhypertext work: The Periodic Table

 

5) As « biosemiotic » explorationof the world: 

Most of  these books also tend topose numerous questions about the nature of the self through a sort ofbiosemiotic exploration of the world. The philosophical question « who amI » / “who are we” ? encounters potential responses or metamorphosesinto an alternative query : « What are we » ?

Mari-Lou Rowley is actively implicated in this kind of exploration. Shewrote on her blog that she was « struckby […] thebiosemiotic tango of all living things in and within the dynamic flux ofchanging environments.” And she goes on to explain that “As an eco-science poetwho has tumbled, quite gleefully, into the field of biosemiotics the questionsthat compel me are: What is the nature of poetic and/or creative emergence?What is the zygote and epigenisis of a poem or work of art? How does the poetread and interact with her environment, or semiosphere, in order to translateemotions, memories, sounds, smells, disconnected images, into the phonemes,syllables, words, lines and stanzas of a poems that resonates with thereader/listener. By what mechanisms does a poem or artwork evoke emotional orphysiological response? Both Tammy and I believe in the concepts behindbiosemiotics. Of course molecules, organisms and animals (human and non-human)communicate in and with the environment. We hear them. We are constantly on thelookout for signs.

The genesis of art, poetry andbiological process involves multiple pathways and signals—which involves bothan element of chance and of choice. (Transforium– notes on process; Posted on November 23,2012 by Mari-Lou Rowley)

            Ina reversal which poses the questions who and what are we—are we biology or man,we can add the experiment and the project The Xenotext by Christian Bök.In The Xenotext, July 5, 2011, http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/xenotext, Allison Carruth wrote: “The Xenotext Experiment aims to create a procedurefor the reciprocal, meaningful translation of poetry into DNA and DNA intopoetry. // In his 2008 description of the project, Bök writes "Not simplya code that governs both the development of an organism and the maintenance ofits function, the genome can now become a vector for modes of artisticinnovation and cultural expression.” A future of ecological collapse underliesthis techno-lyrical project. Bök goes on to cite cybernetic theorist Pak Wong'sview that the use of DNA to encode messages in the highly resilient and adaptivecells of bacteria could serve to store cultural heritages “against planetarydisaster.” How and who would later decode those messages—first written inAmerican Standard English and then translated into a DNA sequence, in Bök’sproject—is a question we should certainly raise.

[…] Akin to bioartist Eduardo Kac, Bök claims that the genomeis today a foundation "for heretofore unimagined modes of artisticinnovation and cultural expression.” In turn, he suggests, “poetry standspoised to become the conduit for life science research.”