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.

Free Wednesday Writing Workshop Series at the Truckee Library on the third Wednesday of July, August, and September - for all ages and abilities

 

I'm so excited to offer this series of free creative writing workshops at the Truckee Library this summer! Thanks to a grant from the Nevada County Arts Council and the Truckee Cultural District, this workshop series can offer a creative space for writers of all ages and experience levels to explore new approaches to being creative on the page. Come to as many workshops as you want. These workshops include prompts that can lead to any form of writing - poetry, fiction, memoir, even songwriting. Of course, light refreshments are included!

Each workshop is the third Wednesday of the month from 5:30 - 7 pm.

Our first workshop is July 17th and our theme is Music and Poetry. Write a new poem (or two). Ever thought of writing a song to go along with your poem? We'll consider rhythm and rhyme, melody and harmony, in poems and learn how writers can use music to drive the writing process. 

On August 21st we'll focus on Science and Poetry. Find ways to connect with science, nature, the cosmos, to write poems that evoke emotion for our shared experiences. Any science geeks out there?

Finally, September 18th, our theme is Journey and Story. In this workshop, we will discover new techniques to write about your own journey or a fictional one, a journey within or to another place.

The Truckee Library address is 10031 Levon Ave, Truckee, CA 96161. (530) 582-7846

https://www.nevadacountyca.gov/336/Truckee-Library

Want to participate in Truckee's project to develop our Art and Culture identity? Write a poem

 

As Truckee considers how to build on its identity as a Cultural and Historical District, I've found guidance in California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick's statewide poetry project. In his project, he asks all Californians to explore their relationship to place as a door into seeing themselves in new ways with the world around us. He invites us to write a poem that describes about the communities we live within. This project empowers the variety of voices in California through writing. 

In Lee Herrick’s words:

“Each of us has a unique experience and relationship with California. It is a place of bounty and innovation, opportunity and progress, as well as difficulty and violence, challenges and areas of need. Poetry can be a bridge to personal and societal change. It can show us new ways of seeing ourselves and the world around us. Poetry can illuminate and inspire. Poetry is a way of expressing and imagining the ideas inside of us. I believe there is poetry in everyone. I believe poetry is everywhere in this great state.

With this in mind, in partnership with the California Arts Council, I am pleased to launch a statewide poetry writing project, Our California. Our California invites all Californians to write a poem about their town, city, or "their" state. What do you love about it? What joys does it bring? What would you change about it? How could it be improved?

I hope you will consider joining the chorus of Californians writing about our state. Our California is open to all Californians: all ages, all poetry experience levels, documented or not, free or not. We want to hear your unique voice.”

The statewide project invites all Californians to write a poem about their state and share it on the Poet Laureate’s website. No matter the writer’s age, origin, gender, or background, all are invited to submit their work to the project. The goals of Our California are:

• To encourage Californians to write poetry, to think about their communities, and to realize that their voice is important.
• To inspire Californians to write poetry that uplifts all people through awareness of social justice or civic engagement.
• To elevate poetry writing as a way to explore one's creativity and relationship to place.
  

Here is how to participate:

Write a poem (any form, up to 50 lines) about your town, city, or state. Consider these prompts (or write something completely different!):

Prompt 1: Write a poem about your town, your city, or “your” California. What do you love about it? What joy do you find there? You may also include what you don't love about it and what you would change. What do you envision or hope for?

Prompt 2: Write a poem about a memory or experience rooted in your town, city, or state. What makes the experience unique to the location?

Tips from Lee:

1. Avoid clichés or aphorisms.

2. Use unique, specific details and imagery.

3. Be true to yourself and your ideas.

4. Have fun!

This project is inspired by LeeHerrick’s poem “My California.” 

My California by Lee Herrick

 

Here, an olive votive keeps the sunset lit,

the Korean twenty-somethings talk about hyphens,

 

graduate school and good pot. A group of four at a window

table in Carpinteria discuss the quality of wines in Napa Valley versus Lodi.

 

Here, in my California, the streets remember the Chicano

poet whose songs still bank off Fresno's beer soaked gutters

 

and almond trees in partial blossom. Here, in my California

we fish out long noodles from the pho with such accuracy

 

you'd know we'd done this before. In Fresno, the bullets

tire of themselves and begin to pray five times a day.

 

In Fresno, we hope for less of the police state and more of a state of grace.

In my California, you can watch the sun go down

 

like in your California, on the ledge of the pregnant

twenty-second century, the one with a bounty of peaches and grapes,

 

red onions and the good salsa, wine and chapchae.

Here, in my California, paperbacks are free,

 

farmer's markets are twenty four hours a day and

always packed, the trees and water have no nails in them,

 

the priests eat well, the homeless eat well.

Here, in my California, everywhere is Chinatown,

 

everywhere is K-Town, everywhere is Armeniatown,

everywhere a Little Italy. Less confederacy.

 

No internment in the Valley.

Better history texts for the juniors.

 

In my California, free sounds and free touch.

      Free questions, free answers.

Free songs from parents and poets, those hopeful bodies of light.

Lee Herrick, "My California" from Gardening Secrets of the Dead. Copyright © 2012 by Lee Herrick, published by WordTech Communications LLC.  Reprinted by permission of Lee Herrick.

 

 

Call for event proposals for the Tahoe Literary Festival: Deadline July 29, 2024

The Tahoe Literary Festival, happening for the first time this October 11 & 12, 2024, is for you.

Maybe you attended the Sierra Poetry Festival in Nevada City over these past 8 years. Maybe you enjoy a Wednesday evening in the summer listening to poetry at the Tahoe Backyard while sipping Bear Belly Brews. Maybe you browse the shelves at Word After Word in downtown Truckee on a weekly basis. Or you've participated in any of the other open mics, library workshops, Community of Writers Conferences in Olympic Valley (celebrating 50 years of summer workshops!) or Writers in the Woods readings. 

Maybe you have a writing group you meet with for inspiration? Maybe you publish your work? Maybe you write in private?

Do you love to read? Do you read to your children? Do you visit the library for books to listen to? Are you part of a book club that meets once a month to celebrate reading (and food) and the community and the empathy that literature evokes?

Literature, reading and writing, allow us to develop our compassion for people we don't know, for people we may not even be able to imagine. In an interview with Marilynne Robinson in The New York Review of Books, Nov. 19, 2015, Barack Obama said:

When I think about how I understand my role as citizen, setting aside being president, and the most important set of understandings that I bring to that position of citizen, the most important stuff I’ve learned I think I’ve learned from novels. It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays, but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with some[one] else even though they’re very different from you.

The Tahoe Literary Festival is a two day event happening in various wonderful venues in Tahoe City on October 11 and 12, 2024. Through author readings, workshops, panels, music, open mic, and other offerings, the festival will gather our talented local community of writers and readers to celebrate the theme of "spirit of place" through the art of language in its many forms.

Call for submissions: We are calling on  all writers, poets, songwriters, editors, and community groups to please submit your ideas for panels, workshops, book talks, readings, or masterclasses by July 29. The festival theme is "Spirit of Place."

The Tahoe Literary Festival is being presented by Tahoe Guide and The Seasoned Sage. Festival sponsors are Tahoe City Downtown Association, Wildbound PR, Tangled Roots Writing, Yoga Room Tahoe, Gatekeeper’s Museum, SNOW Museum and Tahoe Wine Collective. 

 

Festival events will be held at Yoga Room Tahoe, Gatekeeper’s Museum, SNOW Museum and Tahoe Wine Collective, with more venues to be announced.

 

All events will be offered for free to local high school and college students to attend, and several scholarships will be available. Festival tickets will be available soon. 

 

If you are interested in becoming a sponsor of the inaugural Tahoe Literary Festival, becoming a lodging partner, or participating as a moderator or presenter, please email Katherine Hill at kat@tahoelitfest.com or Priya Hutner at priya@tahoelitfest.com.

Mountain Words Literary Festival: Vastness of space - a panel of 4 scientists/journalists (female) discuss the concept of the uncanny, life, and how to get back to Earth

Imagine a dandelion seed, hanging in the air and floating across your vision, is like a ship made to transport a being of origin. 

Is there life out there? What does it look like? What is life?

We look for ourselves in space because we can't look for what we can't imagine.

The anthropological question is why are we making these leaps about possible extraterrestrial visitors? Do we want them to: save us with their experience, save us from ourselves, offer a higher power (the human need to seek a technological god?), or will their destruction erase human agency and fault? Why do we want to be visited? 

Think about how the Concept of the Uncanny - seeing something like us but just off - relates to the iconic alien image. When we see our self but cannot know if it is an alien or not, as in the classic movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

This science panel of 4 women scientists discusses what-ifs and imagined situations and possible ethic-challenging scenarios regarding nuclear power, extraterrestrial searches, astronomical origin stories, and travel to Mars.  As such, fiction they say can realistically present these science questions to the public through excellent novels such as The Sparrow, Arrival, and Contact. For example, Laura Krantz's podcast Wild Thing brings narrative into the communication of science through long-form stories. 

An aside: I notice in their conversations that, like myself, these women will test the public acceptance of their revolutionary concepts against the hypothetical "my dad" reasoner. 

I learn that without the Moon's historical influence on the Earth's development (gravity, tides, tectonic plates, light and darkness), the Earth would experience differently things such as rock strain, solar tides, destabalized tilt of access, and even subliming icecaps. In fact, history on Earth for humans can be divided into before and after the capture of the Apollo 8 Earthrise image. A gibbous shape, lumpy not round, of the earth. One of the big questions for space travelers is how will humans react psychologically once they cannot see Earth anymore?

• Laura Krantz is a journalist, editor and producer, in both radio and print, and co-founder of Foxtopus Ink. Her podcast, Wild Thing has received critical acclaim from Scientific American, Rolling Stone, and The Atlantic, which named it one of the best 50 podcasts in 2018 and 2020. 

• As a journalist, Rebecca Boyle has reported from particle accelerators, genetic sequencing labs, bat caves, the middle of a lake, the tops of mountains, and the retractable domes of some of Earth’s largest telescopes. Her first book, OUR MOON: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transformed the Planet, Guided Evolution, and Made Us Who We Are (Random House, 2024) is a new history of humanity’s relationship with the Moon, which Rebecca has not yet visited on assignment.

• As a Colorado-based science journalist, Sarah Scoles serves as a contributing editor at Scientific American and holds the position of senior contributor at Undark.

• Heather Swenson is an Aerospace Engineer with a multidisciplinary background in satellite operations, mission design, human factors, and trajectory analysis. Projects include reusable space transportation systems, lunar and interplanetary cubesat missions and human space flight systems including the Orion Program and lunar Human Landing System

These dynamic presenters are clear about their ultimate goal: to get us back to here, all one, all together, with all that we need, on Earth. This goal is pushed into the public by women scientists and women writers, and is a view not generally accepted by all scientists. Even as we can look to space for knowledge and resources and the unknown, we must realize that we are built to live here, we have everything we need to live here, and we need to preserve Earth.

Last question: what is the one subject that you would like to see more focused study of right now?

• space telescopes
• animal communication (see Lawrence Doyle in The Atlantic)
• matter and atoms can't yet be replicated with our equations!
• dark matter and energy - WTF?