Poetry of Science

     One of the interesting regular online postings is a new science poem EVERY FRIDAY -- offered by Sam Illingworth via an email subscription or in his  Poetry of Science blog.  Recently I have found and valued Illingworth's interview late in 2020 with poet Donald Beagle, author of the poetry collection, Driving into the Dreamtime (Library Partners Press, 2020).

     One of Beagle's publications involved editing a poetry collection by James Radcliffe Squires (1917-1993) -- a collection in which many of the poems are informed by science.  Here is a sample from Squires' collection Where the Compass Spins -- now presented in Radcliffe Squires: Selected Poems; edited by Donald Beagle).

          “…We are one motion and we see
          Another. Then we overtake two flying birds
          And at the crisis of the wan parabola
          Assume their speed. Thus motion dies…”

The lines above are from Squires' poem “The Subway Bridge, Charles Station to Kendall.”  This same poem concludes by touching upon the Einsteinian concept of the gravitational bending of light: “Faring with the straightness that curves. The line / Of brightness bending as it nears the sun.”    When you have an available hour, visit and enjoy the whole of Illingworth's 2020 posting about Donald Beagle's poetry.

Celebrate Hypatia

     Consilience is an online journal (edited by Sam Illingworth) that explores "the spaces where the sciences and the arts meet" -- and in the recent Issue 12 I have found a very special poem by British science writer Isabel Thomas that celebrates the pioneering math-woman, Hypatia of Alexandria (died 415 AD), one of the first women whose study and teaching of mathematics, astronomy and philosophy has been documented.  I offer several stanzas of "Rimae Hypatia" -- followed by a link to the complete poem.  

     Rimae Hypatia       by Isabel Thomas

                   The Rimae Hypatia is a lunar fissure named for Hypatia.

          In the greatest library of the ancient world
          Hypatia 
          turned her mind to 
          algebra, astronomy, geometry,
          examining the world from different angles.    

The Poetry of Science

     Poet and teacher Sam Illingworth does much to celebrate the links between poetry and the sciences.  He is the founder of Consilience, an online journal that links poetry and artwork with science.  And he has a blog, The Poetry of Science, in which each week he presents a poem based on a new science idea that he has recently learned.  Here are the opening lines of a poem posted in August, 2021:

from     Artificial Weather    by Sam Illingworth

          Buoyant skies linger overhead,
          bulging at the seams
          with surging intent;
          capricious threats
          that fall indiscriminately
          against the statistical fortitude  
          of our modelled routines.     . . . read more here . . .

Here is a link to earlier mentions of Illingworth's work in this blog.

Poetry Enriches Science -- a growing point of view!

     Recently I found and enjoyed the article "Scientists Take On Poetry," an article by Katherine Wright in Physics  --  a free, online magazine from the American Physical Society.  After the following lead-in:

Stuck with how to present your latest scientific project? Try a poem.

Wright's article tells of numerous scientists who have been poets and offers visual poetry by Stephany Mazon and Manjula Silva.  The article quotes Sam Illingworth, a poet and geoscientist at the University of Australia, "Poetry is a great tool for interrogating and questioning the world."  Illingworth heads the Editorial Team of an online journal, Consilience -- a newish journal that describes itself as "the online poetry journal exploring the spaces where the sciences and the arts meet."  The current issue has the theme "uncertainty" and offers 19 poems; one of these is "Heisenberg's uncertainty principle" by Alicia Sometimes -- and it begins with these words:

       The reality we can put into words is never reality itself

       we cannot measure
       the position (x) and the momentum (p)
       of a particle with absolute precision
         . . .

This link leads to the rest of Sometimes' poem and to others offered in Consilience.

Using poetry to open dialogues with science . . .

     Recently I have obtained a copy of Sam Illingworth's book, A Sonnet to Science:  scientists and their poetry (Manchester University Press, 2019)  -- a collection of essays-with-poems that features these six scientist-poets:  Humphrey Davy, Ada Lovelace, James Clerk Maxwell, Ronald Ross, Miroslav Holub, and Rebecca Elson.  
       A dust-jacket blurb describes the author:  
            Sam Illingworth is a Senior Lecturer in Science Communication, where his work involves
                   using poetry to develop dialogues between scientists and non-scientists, 
                   especially amongst traditionally under-served and under-represented communities. 
             Illingworth also is a poet -- with a poem-a-week-blog available at this link.
From Rebecca Elson (1960-1999), an astronomer and poet whose life was cut short by cancer, we have these math-linked lines (written in 1998 and on page 168 of A Sonnet to Science):

     Is there any language, logic
     Any algebra where death is not
     The tragedy it seems