What can science bring to a poem? Three prompts from the Truckee Library workshop series

 

When I asked the workshop participants last Wednesday evening what are some words that come to mind when they hear the word science, they came up with words like observation and questions. With the word poetry, they associated emotions and meditation. Some words were listed under both poetry and science, such as truth and mystery. 

In some ways, science and poetry draw from the same well of experience and place and curiosity. A deep and focused level of observation is involved in noticing the world around the writer, and in manifesting sensory detail of this world in a poem. What can science bring to a poem? I think it can bring a grounded acknowledgement of the connectedness between ourselves and the natural world. What can a poem bring to science? A poem creates another medium of experience that can link the emotions with the how and the why.

Two excerpts from Zayani Bhatt, The NewStatesman:

“Adding an idea from one place to an idea from somewhere else to make something that perfectly sums up the thing itself,” says Dodd. “It’s about seeing patterns in the world and translating them into something others can engage with. The best scientist and poets can do that.

“Both [poetry and science] too depend on metaphor, as the manner by which thought is explained to the lay reader and as a way of confirmation: if something like this can exist in the world, then surely this itself can too? …much of Charles Darwin’s thought was shaped by poetry - he travelled to South America to carry out research on what was to become the Origin of Species, with the poet John Milton.” – Zayani Bhatt

Consider how this poem by Thomas Lux transparently describes his thought process. He does not write from the full knowledge of an ichthyologist or a biologist. He brings into the poem his own understanding of where he stands in relation to the environment and world of the electric fish, and through his exploration of the consequences of this interesting detail of the fishes' lives, he reveals even more about the life and experience of the observer, the speaker in the poem.  He brings into the poem meaningful elements of the speaker. He also juxtaposes the scientific language with the personal.

Ode to the Electric Fish that Eat Only the Tails of Other Electric Fish,

By Thomas Lux

 

which regenerate their tails

and also eat only the tails of other electric eels,

presumably smaller, who, in turn, eat ... 

Without consulting an ichthyologist — eels

are fish — I defer to biology’s genius.

I know little of their numbers

and habitat, other than they are river dwellers.

Guess which river. I have only a note,

a note taken in reading

or fever — I can’t tell, from my handwriting, which. All

I know is it seems

sensible, sustainable: no fish dies,

nobody ever gets so hungry he bites off more

than a tail; the sting, the trauma

keeps the bitten fish lean and alert.

The need to hide while regrowing a tail teaches guile.

They’ll eat smaller tails for a while.

These eels, these eels themselves are odes!

 

Three Prompts:

1.     Choose one poem about science and begin by describing how this poem is being scientific. How could you use this similar method in your own poem?

 
2.     Choose a poem’s approach to considering science – a list, a naming, a playful riff on language and sound, a comparison or metaphor, a personification, a close observation – and model after it in you own poem. One way to begin is to choose a simple object/subject and begin with close observation and description. As you write, become more and more specific.

 
3.     “if something like this can exist in the world, then surely this itself can too?” Choose something that you feel is unbelievable or impossible or unknowable to you. Then choose something very familiar and established and known to you. Begin by describing what is known. How is it not at all like what you can’t know? How is it possibly in some facet or criteria like that unknowable thing?

 

New generative 6 week writing workshop series begins Sep 9

 

New Fall 2024 Monday Night Creative Writing Workshop Series

6 sessions in this series

A fun and generative workshop especially for journalers and writers of poetry, fiction, short story, novel, and screen writing. Do you wish you wrote more? Want to feel a sense of community when you write? Want to start a book or finish a book?

In-person and on zoom - sign up for the 6 wk series

Sept. 9 - Oct. 14

6:30-8 pm Monday nights

 $180

 

This creative series is the most popular and longest-running workshop I offer.  Craft, technique, and prompts for writing of all forms. A kick in the butt for your writing life! Waiting for inspiration is also called procrastination.  So don't wait - connect with a community and improve your fiction project and writing practice. Mondays from 6:30 to 8 pm. This series will fill up fast as I keep the size of the group intimate. Sign up by email to tangledrootswriting@gmail.com or call 530-386-3901.

Three Tips to Creating a Sense of Music in "a string of printed words"

 

What do you hear when you look deeply into this photograph of a lake I hiked to in Colorado last summer? What do you hear when you read a poem to yourself, or out loud? 

 
“I do know when a string of printed words busts my little dam and the tears spill over and I sponge them up with my T-shirt. I couldn’t give you that formula before it happens, it just hits me like a bat to the face. That’s a sweet, hot, amazing, embarrassing moment.” – Neko Case 

 
Do you want to write lines and sentences that have that power for your reader, that overwhelm the senses of the reader? 

 
Let's focus on sound for now. What are the elements in writing language on the page that help a poet create music in the line, the sentence, the poem? How do you manage meter, rhythm, rhyme/echo, cadence, syllables, stressed and unstressed syllables, syntax and enjambment and runon sentences, punctuation or lack of it?

 
“The sonic effect of every poem, whether we call it formal or free, traditional or innovative, depends on a concerted relationship between stressed and unstressed syllables, between syllables that may or may not echo one another: these effects are the material result of the poet’s manipulation of the medium. In order to describe or produce a poem’s tone, a poet can’t think profitably about tone; a poet must think about the linguistic elements that produce a poem’s tone, most prominently rhythm and echo, just as a painter who wants to achieve a certain quality of light must think more precisely about the nature of paint”- James Longenbach

 
Read this poem by Ross Gay out loud to yourself or a friend, and hear the playfulness and joy dramatized by the music of the language:

A Poem in which I Try to Express My Glee at the Music My Friend Has Given Me
By Ross Gay
                              —for Patrick Rosal
Because I must not
get up to throw down in a café in the Midwest,
I hold something like a clownfaced herd
of bareback and winged elephants
stomping in my chest,
I hold a thousand
kites in a field loosed from their tethers
at once, I feel
my skeleton losing track
somewhat of the science I’ve made of tamp,
feel it rising up shriek and groove,
rising up a river guzzling a monsoon,
not to mention the butterflies
of the loins, the hummingbirds
of the loins, the thousand
dromedaries of the loins, oh body
of sunburst, body
of larkspur and honeysuckle and honeysuccor
bloom, body of treetop holler,
oh lightspeed body
of gasp and systole, the mandible’s ramble,
the clavicle swoon, the spine’s
trillion teeth oh, drift
of hip oh, trill of ribs,
oh synaptic clamor and juggernaut
swell oh gutracket
blastoff and sugartongue
syntax oh throb and pulse and rivulet
swing and glottal thing
and kick-start heart and heel-toe heart
ooh ooh ooh a bullfight
where the bull might
take flight and win!

 
Below is another example of a poet trying out various sounds available in the syntax of a short sentence (They taste good to her) and the different implications or tones the sentence can enact in the poem. The poet is using enjambed lines, rhythm with stressed syllables, short lines, a minimum of punctuation, and sound echoes:

 
To a Poor Old Woman 

 
By William Carlos Williams

 
munching a plum on   
the street a paper bag
of them in her hand
 
They taste good to her
They taste good   
to her. They taste
good to her
 
You can see it by
the way she gives herself
to the one half
sucked out in her hand
 
Comforted
a solace of ripe plums
seeming to fill the air
They taste good to her

 
How can you write a line that adds to the music of the language? Syntax, enjambment, and where the line breaks helps the reader understand how to sound out the rhythm and cadence and stresses in the poem. Echo also adds to this musical quality, how a line or poem is “heard”. This can be called the sonic quality of a poem.

 
Syntax is the order of the words in the sentence. Rhythm is created by which syllables are stressed and which are unstressed in your line and sentence. As you write with line breaks, you are asking yourself how you want to manage the stresses on the syllables, how you want to use rhymes (echoes of sound in the poem), how you want to indicate rhythm (a cadence) to your sentences in the poem.

 
I’ve taken these examples above from an article by James Longenbach titled The Music of Poetry. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/92652/the-music-of-poetry
 

Three Tips for creating music in your writing:

 
1.     As you write and re-enter your writing, and possibly revise, consider playing with many different ways of ordering your poem. You can write with a different syntax. You can enjamb your sentences so that a sentence runs right into the next in the middle of a line. You can cut all punctuation to see how that affects the pace of your poem. You can add echoes of a sound to your poem. 

 
2.     Marie Howe has said that she will sometimes write her draft poem in stanzas of four lines and work on creating end rhymes. Then she will re-order everything so that the rhymes occur within the lines instead of at the end of the lines. In this way she has added internal sound repetitions and avoided an overly obvious sing song effect. She will increase the sonic quality of her language in this way. 

 
3.     You can also try changing which words are stressed in your sentences. How would you do this? Maybe you play with what is stressed by changing the line breaks, or the order of words in a sentence, or you use rhyme differently. All these elements of your writing are tools that you can employ to build the music in the text on the page.