Blood and Guts: The Poetics of Science

Long before I wrote my first poem, science was my first love. As a kid, I enjoyed catching bugs, collecting rocks, and watching nature shows. When I got older, I was captivated by microscope slides, punnett squares, and molecules. Although I now oppose vivisection for ethical reasons, I see nothing aesthetically icky about dissecting earthworms, crayfish, and frogs. In my high school anatomy class, I was the one who helped the teacher demonstrate how to pry the entrails from a fetal pig. Some girls shrieked. One boy fainted. But I was in heaven.

What does a fetal pig have to do with writing poetry, you ask? For me, a great deal. My cure for writer's block has always been paging through a magazine at the doctor's office, on the lookout for scientific factoids. For example, one journal featured articles about carbon monoxide poisoning, the mating rituals of a preying mantis, and a man whose overconsumption of supplements turned his skin permanently blue. These details found their way into my writing in a variety of ways. I wrote a poem about unstable people who steal from others to feel complete, much like unstable CO molecules steal electrons. I created a speaker with the desire to bite off her husband's head, mantis-style. And in a series on chronic illness, I explored how the things that sustain and improve our health also have the potential to destroy it.

My love for science and my love for poetry are really one and the same. At its most basic level, science seeks to understand the nature of life by isolating, observing, and categorizing its basic components and determining their functions. Poetry does the same with language, a defining feature of our species. Whether we study cells and genes or words and sounds, we are exploring how our world is put together. Whether we analyze electrocardiograms or iambic pentameter, we are learning the patterns and rhythms of life.

For the poets (and other writers) out there, what role, if any, does science play in your writing? Does anatomy and physiology have a poetry all its own? Do you see the sciences and the humanities as diametrically opposed or just variations on a theme?

Speaking of themes and variations, my next post, and quite a few in the future, will be more commercial in nature but not to worry. My goal is to choose products to promote that relate to my personal musings, and this one fits the bill.

Welcome

My blog takes its name from a line in W.B. Yeats' "The Lake Isle of Innisfree":

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,	5
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;	10
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

The poem is "about" many things, but chief among them is the conflict between the speaker's desire to escape society, connect with nature, and live life on his own terms and his recognition that this process is only possible in his imagination. On the one hand, the poem's message is uplifting; even as we are trapped in an urban jungle of gray pavement, our minds are free to go elsewhere. On the other hand, Yeats reminds us that we carry the burdens of society with us even as we try to distance ourselves from it. We seek solace in the bee-loud glade, but quickly turn it into a construction site and confine the bees to an artificial hive.

This blog is my way of exploring these kinds of contradictions. I'm a poet whose work remains largely unpublished, a country girl living in the city, an animal lover who still eats meat from time to time, a teacher who grades student papers yet would prefer to see all grades abolished, a health-conscious individual who nevertheless suffers from chronic illness, and a socialist who, lacking summer employment, has delved into the world of pay per click, marketing surveys, paid reviews, and other trappings of Internet capitalism. I'll explore all of these topics here from time to time.