Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery

Poetry and Science:
Writing Our Way to Discovery

Edited by Lucille Lang Day

By bringing science into poetry, we open the possibility of discovering new forms and philosophies of poetry, new perspectives on our relationship to the Earth and our place in the universe, and even new scientific insights. In Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, five women poets—Elizabeth Bradfield, Lucille Lang Day, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke—discuss the many possibilities for discovery that arise from the union of poetry and science.

Preface

My enthusiasm for poetry and science began early: my first heroes were Emily Dickinson, whose poem “Success is counted sweetest” appeared in my fifth-grade reader, and Madame Curie, whose biography I read when I was seventeen. As a young adult, I revered Sylvia Plath and Rachel Carson equally, and I did not perceive any contradiction in believing in the power of both poetry and science, nor did I think of science as a field more congenial to the male psyche than the female one.

Since then, I’ve learned that all human cultures have poetry, and that Enheduanna, the first known author to sign her work, was a poet. This was in about 2300 BCE. The origins of modern science don’t appear in the human record, though, until almost 2,000 years later, in the fifth century BCE in Greece. It seems significant to me that poetry came before science. Perhaps this means that poetry comes more easily than science to the human brain and can therefore be used as a vehicle to help us understand science.

But that’s not all: as I continued reading about poetry and science, I learned that poets can make intuitive leaps, or pre-discoveries, that are later confirmed by science. Edgar Allan Poe predicted black holes, the expanding universe, and the Big Bang long before scientists thought of these things. He was also the first person to figure out that the sky is dark at night because the universe is finite. He did not write scientific papers about any of these things: he described them in Eureka: A Prose Poem, which was first published in 1848. Walt Whitman also made a pre-discovery. Going against the scientific teachings of his time, he argued that mind depends upon flesh. Gertrude Stein not only found a new way to write poetry but simultaneously showed that the brain’s neural structures for grammar are independent of the meaning of words. She was way ahead of the linguists!

The history of poetry and science confirms my initial, intuitive conviction that these are not totally separate endeavors. This excites me greatly, and in Poetry and Science: Writing Our Way to Discovery, I wanted to bring together four of my favorite poets who use science extensively in their work: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Ann Fisher-Wirth, Elizabeth Bradfield, and Allison Adelle Hedge Coke. It is no coincidence that they are women, as women have often wrested science from its own biases (historically white, straight, and male) to dynamic complications. I hope you will enjoy their thoughts on poetry, science, and discovery as much as I do. It was an honor to collaborate with them on this book.

Lucille Lang Day
Oakland, California, July 2021