Science Poetry Or Scientific Poetry

Science poetry or scientific poetry is a specialized poetic genre that makes use of science as its subject. Written by scientists and nonscientists, science poets are generally avid readers and appreciators of science and "science matters." Science poetry may be found in anthologies, in collections, in science fiction magazines that sometimes include poetry, in other magazines and journals. Many science fiction magazines, including online magazines, such as Strange Horizons, often publish science fiction poetry, another form of science poetry. Of course science fiction poetry is a somewhat different genre. Online there is the Science Poetry Center for those interested in science poetry, and for those interested in science fiction poetry The

This continued into the twentieth century with such poets as Marianne Moore, T. S. Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost and Robert Hayden (e.g. "Full Moon"--"the brilliant challenger of rocket experts") not to mention many of the lesser known poets, who nevertheless maintain a poetic response to scientific matters. Says Ferris, "This is not to say that scientists should try to emulate poets, or that poets should turn proselytes for science....But they need each other, and the world needs both." Included in his anthology along with the best scientific prose/essays are the poets Walt Whitman ("When I Heard the Learn 'd Astronomer"), Gerard Manley Hopkins "("I am Like a Slip of Comet..."), Emily Dickinson ("Arcturus"), Robinson Jeffers ("Star-Swirls"), Richard Ryan ("Galaxy"), James Clerk Maxwell ("Molecular Evolution"), John Updike ("Cosmic Gall"), Diane Ackerman ("Space Shuttle") and others.

Certainly those writing scientific poetry like those writing science fiction need not praise all of science, but science nevertheless the subject matter, and there is often a greater relationship between poetry and science than either poets and/or scientists admit. Creativity and romance can be in both, as can the intellectual and the mathematical. Both can be aesthetic and logical. Or both can be nonaesthetic and nonlogical, depending on the type of science and the type

John Frederick Nims has written for example, "The Observatory Ode." ("The Universe: We 'd like to understand.") There are poems that rhyme, poems that don 't rhythme. There 's "concrete poetry" such as Annie Dillard 's "The Windy Planet" in which the poem in in the shape of a planet, from "pole" to "pole," an inventive poem. "Chaos Theory" even becomes the subject of poetry as in Wallace Stevens ' "The Connoisseur of Chaos."

And what of your science and/or scientific poem? Think of all the techniques of poetry and all the techniques of science. What point of view should you use? Third person? First person, a dramatic monologue? Does a star speak? Or the universe itself? Does a sound wave speak? Or a micrometer? Can you personify radio astronomy?

What are the main themes, the rhythms? What figures of speech, metaphors, similes, metaphor, can be derived from science. What is your attitude toward science and these scientific