Earlier this month I spent some time at the University of Washington’s Marine Station in Friday Harbor. The occasion was the UW’s fourth annual Poetry and Science Symposium; a terrific account of the weekend’s activities can be found here. The symposium is an offshoot of a decade’s worth of classes and experiments that Richard Kenney has been leading at the Marine Station. No living poet (and, I assume, no non-living poet) thinks harder or more penetratingly about the pressures that science can exert on poetry, and vice versa. Here’s an excerpt from a Q & A that Kenney did with Poetry several years ago (but please do yourself a favor and read the whole thing, and click on the linked poems, too):
I cheer physics (speaking of twentieth-century physics, not screws and inclined planes) much as I cheer Chartres, especially the stained glass. I accept that my mind was designed for cracking nuts in the Old Stone Age, not quantum or cosmological paradoxes at inhuman scales. This is our creation story, weird and beautiful. I believe in quarks and the Big Bang and all the rest of it, on Sunday. Still, I sometimes remember that there have been other stories, extravagant, childish, or charmingly wrong in retrospect, and I think of the cockroaches in my circuit breaker box, and their chances of understanding the final paradigm there, and I feel like the dreamer who suspects he’s dreaming. When I read Stephen Hawking, current incarnation of the Pythian Oracle, making fun of the shaman who suggests it’s Turtles All the Way Down, and then offering his own best suggestion that it’s Particles All the Way Down—then I re-read “The Blind Men and the Elephant.”
Though I helped to run an earlier version of the symposium in the mid-late 2000s, I actually know very little about science. (I’m in danger of being a different kind of blind man. To quote Marco Rubio: “I’m not a scientist, man.” Though I wish I were.) So when I was asked to say something several weeks ago about the intersections between poetic and scientific practice, I fell back on a relatively obvious point of contact: looking.
William Blake once reported that he could “look at a knot in a piece of wood till I am frightened at it.” Ezra Pound was fond of retelling the anecdote of Agassiz and the fish, a retelling I’ve written about previously on this blog. (Pound begins: “The proper METHOD for studying poetry and good letters is the method of contemporary biologists, that is careful first-hand examination of the matter, and continual COMPARISON of one ‘slide’ or specimen with another.” Jumping ahead: “At the end of three weeks the fish was in an advanced state of decomposition, but the student knew something about it.”) Bishop looked hard at her own tremendous, sullen-faced fish; Bishop’s sandpiper (“a student of Blake”) inspected the sand, finding “no detail too small” (cf. Blake’s “Auguries of Innocence”: “To see a World in a Grain of Sand / And a Heaven in a Wild Flower”). “Watch it closely,” Bishop advises in “The Monument.” That’s the method of many poets and almost all scientists.
Thinking about Blake and Blake’s descendants, I’m reminded of the poet-engraver’s objections in the margins of Sir Joshua Reynolds’ Discourses: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot. To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit. General Knowledges are those Knowledges that Idiots possess.”
I’ve been reading E. B. White with my older daughter recently. We started with Charlotte’s Web; we’re now halfway through The Trumpet of the Swan. Much of what I know about the makeup of pig slop, the egg sacs of spiders, and the calls of trumpeter swans comes from White’s descriptions—descriptions that rely on a lifetime of close observation, of attention to particularizing details. White looked; my daughter and I see.
Tomorrow: Looking again.
