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Notes or not?
When you’re a poet who writes about science, you’re in a constant tug-of-war with yourself. Should this poem have a footnote?
Say you have been charmed by a phrase like “optical molasses.” You like the sound of it, you like the idea of atoms being cooled down until they’re essentially one atom. This is clearly something you can use as a metaphor. But . . .
On the one hand, you can’t assume all your readers will be scientists. (Query, what percentage of scientists read poetry?) On the other, you can assume that most of your non-science readers won’t have a clue what you’re getting at, even if they go off and look it up on Wikipedia.
When you give a reading, you can provide the audience with an introductory sentence to orient them. But most of the time your poem is shipped off alone on its silent page. You can’t always be there to hold its hand.
Science has been a source of metaphor for me for as long as I have been publishing poetry, and all that time I’ve struggled with how much needs to be explained within the poem and how much knowledge can be assumed. After all, any poem—science-related or not—calls on a huge body of knowledge that gives it context. However, it’s more of an issue with poems that use imagery from recent science that simply hasn’t had a chance to become part of that widely shared base.
Yet science delivers “optical molasses” to your door and, as a poet, you want to share this fascinating new combination of words and ideas with others.
Poems never carry their own bags, entirely. They are part of an ongoing translation project, a dialogue of ideas—including scientific ones. When John Donne wrote “At the round world’s imagined corners . . . ,” he was reflecting the intense scientific debate of his time over whether or not the sun stood the center of the solar system.
After a while, a concept like that becomes ordinary and familiar, part of the image bank that any writer can draw on. Part of the challenge lies in guessing what ideas might actually become part of that image bank.
Sometimes you guess right. In my first book, I used the concept of the black hole as a metaphor, and I added a footnote. When I wrote that particular poem in the early 1980s, black holes were barely out of the conceptual box. Now, of course, we use the phrase in popular culture all the time. Readers don’t need to be oriented the same way. So that particular footnote becomes a little, disposable peg that can be dispensed with, and you didn’t need to build a lot of information into the poem itself.
Of course, as time goes by, your poems will likely need notes again. My college textbook of Donne’s poetry had notes for almost every line, because many of the allusions (scientific and otherwise) that he could expect his audience to be familiar with are now esoteric. Time dumps so much out of our shared suitcase, and ideas that fascinate me now—like the multiverse—will quite possibly disappear from the popular imagination as thoroughly as Ptolemy’s calculation of epicycles has.
This will happen to all poets, whether we write about cosmology or baseball. We want our poems to exist at that edge where things aren’t quite familiar. So we have to go a bit further, we have to risk a bet on what images will resonate a few years down the road.
Otherwise we’re stuck with well-trodden metaphors. Dawn may eternally young and inspiring for poets and it doesn’t need a footnote. But you can’t write all your poems about sunrise if you can’t occasionally bring in a heliocentric solar system.
For now, I knuckle under and put notes at the back of the book. (Ten pages of them in my latest collection, Standard Candles! Good grief, Alice, isn’t that a bit over the top?) I’d rather not have you baffled, and I don’t want to send you out of my book altogether. I might never get you back from the internet.
Comments from other contributors to the Poetics of Science online discussion:
L. Shapley Bassen: I got lost in editing something for publication and hadn’t been to the Poetics of Science conversation for a few days . . . so glad I returned to this one! “Science has been a source of metaphor for me for as long as I have been publishing poetry, and all that time I’ve struggled with how much needs to be explained within the poem and how much knowledge can be assumed. After all, any poem—science-related or not—calls on a huge body of knowledge that gives it context. However, it’s more of an issue with poems that use imagery from recent science that simply hasn’t had a chance to become part of that widely shared base . . . Poems never carry their own bags, entirely. They are part of an ongoing translation project, a dialogue of ideas—including scientific ones. When John Donne wrote ‘At the round world’s imagined corners . . . ,’ he was reflecting the intense scientific debate of his time over whether or not the sun stood the center of the solar system.” Worth it just for this last note about the Donne poem! Now I know I MUST read Standard Candles asap! I’ve had the same experience with writing . . . re: how much to reasonably expect from readers . . . since I was once [flatteringly!] mistaken for a physicist . . . I tend to put my notes under the poem’s or story’s title, quotation/citation from source . . .
Natalie Mesnard: Alice, I was so glad to read your post because I struggle with the same problem. As I’ve been moved to write poems inspired by science, it’s only gotten worse.
In a creative writing course I’d call “optical molasses” a Google moment: a leaping-off point where you decide whether or not to pause and look something up online. With students I always say, “Google moments are okay if your reader feels motivated to do the search.” But that only scratches the surface. As poets do we value that kind of looping-off? Will our reader ever return from the black hole of Wikipedia? For my part, I like reading poems with footnotes, because learning from something that’s also beautiful is a great privilege. But I resist putting footnotes in my own work, fearing I’ll come across as tiresome, pedantic, overly-intellectual. Some of the best footnotes are the verbal explanations preceding poems we hear at poetry readings, when writers describe their attraction to a concept with the tremendous passion that inspired the work. But on the page, we have to construct a different kind of authority.
I like the idea of a poetry collection that contains within it many loops of knowledge, questions, visits to a footnotes page or the internet, and conversations with other readers (I’m inspired now to read Standard Candles). All poetry collections aren’t this way, of course. Some are perfect songs I listen to on afternoons when I’m alone and in bed, slipping into that dream-like state of half-sleep. But I think poetry in the spirit of scientific inquiry would engage that feeling of looping, a confrontation with infinite depths. The stakes on choosing one molecule, one species, one image, one idea, are high when we go and find out ourselves how many of those things there are.
Alice Major: I’m glad I’m not alone! I think the footnotes question is related to a broader one of orienting a reader to what’s going on. Humans are wired to try and interpret the meaning of a string of words. It’s immensely frustrating when you can’t make any sense of a sentence, whether it’s in a poem or a scientific paper.
(Possible topic for discussion—could/should scientists use poets and other creative writers to help make their writing more available to a broader audience?)
Karen Luper: I’m glad, too, that you brought this up, as I continue to struggle with it myself. What I’m coming to, for my particular work and my particular taste, is notes and references at the end. I find that I love reading these notes in the work of others, especially poets, and that interrupting the flow, tone or rhythm of the work—within the body of the work—is an interruption that is more distracting and destructive than I can tolerate . . .
Joshua Roebke: I love the phrases “standard candles” and “optical molasses.” But as someone with a background in physics and a career in writing, I have a dual appreciation for them. Seeing the phrases outside their natural habitat renews their euphony for me. And reading them in a work of poetry forces me to consider, for the first time, the meanings of the individual words, which I usually elide. If poetry resides at the edge of the familiar, then the use of such phrases is certainly poetry to me. My mind speeds through the loops of knowledge, even without the footnotes. Knowing the scientific meaning of the terms, evokes other questions for a reader such as myself. But I can see the problem of inline footnotes, too. Poetry evinces personal questions, but a footnote imposes a singular understanding. So keeping the footnotes at the end allows the poem to reveal its questions to a reader while ceding the choice to know some of the answers. Maybe footnotes are a bit pedantic, but layers of knowledge are helpful.
Science can certainly offer itself as metaphors and inspiration for poetry. And, Alice, I definitely think that poets and creative writers can help scientists communicate better to a broader audience, in turn. Even reading poetry and literary fiction helps me to think about what I want to say about science, and how to say it.