Scientific poetry or scientific poetry is a specialized poetic genre that makes use of science as its subject. Written by scientists and non-scientists, scientific poets are generally avid readers and appreciators of science and “science matters.” Scientific poetry can be found in anthologies, in collections, in science fiction magazines that sometimes include poetry, in other magazines and newspapers. 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 is the Science Poetry Center for those interested in science poetry and for those interested in science fiction poetry The Science Fiction Poetry Association. Additionally, there is a Science Fiction Poetry Handbook and the Ultimate Science Fiction Poetry Guide, all available online. Strange Horizons has published the science fiction poetry of Joanne Merriam, Gary Lehmann, and Mike Allen.
As for science poetry, science or science poets like science fiction poets can also publish collections of poetry in almost any stylistic format. Science or scientific poets, like other poets, must know the “art and craft” of poetry, and science or scientific poetry appears in all poetic forms: free verse, blank verse, metric, rhymed, no rhyme, abstract and concrete, ballad, dramatic monologue, narrative, lyrical, etc. All poetic devices are also used, from alliteration to apostrophe, pun, irony and understatement, to every poetic diction, rhetorical and rhythmic figures, etc. Even metaphysical scientific poetry is possible. In his anthology, The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, editor Timothy Ferris aptly includes a section entitled “The Poetry of Science.” Ferris says in the introduction to this section: “Science (or the ‘natural philosophy’ from which science developed) has long provided poets with raw material, inspiring some to praise scientific ideas and others to react against them. “
Greats like Milton, Blake, Wordsworth, Goethe praised or “vilified” science and / or a combination of both. This continued into the 20th century with poets like Marianne Moore, TS Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost and Robert Hayden (eg “Full Moon” – “the brilliant challenger of rocket experts”) not to mention many of the poets. less known, who, however, maintain a poetic answer to scientific questions. Ferris says, “This is not to say that scientists should try to emulate poets, or that poets should become proselytes to science … But they need each other, and the world needs both.” Included in his anthology along with the best scientific essays / prose are poets Walt Whitman (“When I heard the astronomer learned”), Gerard Manley Hopkins (“I’m like a comet slip …”), 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 who write science poetry like those who write science fiction need not praise all science, but science nevertheless is the main theme, and there is often a relationship between poetry and science greater than what the scientists admit. poets and / or scientists. Creativity and romance can be in both, as can the intellectual and the mathematical. Both can be aesthetic and logical. Or both may be non-aesthetic and non-logical, depending on the type of science and the type of poetry.
Scientific poetry takes you subject to scientific measurements, scientific symbols, time and space, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth science / geology, meteorology, environmental science, computer science, engineering / technical science. You can also take your theme from the scientists themselves, from Brahmagypta to Einstein, from Galileo to Annie Cannon. He can refer to specific types of scientists in general as Goethe “True enough: for the physicist” in Ferris’s anthology. (The subsequent poets mentioned are also from this anthology.)
Scientific poetry can make use of many forms, from lyric to narrative, sonnet, dramatic monologue, free verse, light verse, haiku and villanelle, from poetry for children or adults or both, to the scientific for the non-scientist or both. John Frederick Nims has written, for example, “The Ode of the Observatory.” (“The Universe: We would like to understand”). There are poems that rhyme, poems that do not rhyme. There is “concrete poetry” like “The Windy Planet” by Annie Dillard, in which the poem is in the shape of a planet, from “pole” to “pole”, an inventive poem. The “theory of chaos” even becomes the subject of poetry, as in “The Knower of Chaos” by Wallace Stevens.
And your science and / or scientific poem? Think of all the techniques of poetry and all the techniques of science. What point of view should I 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 rhetorical figures, metaphors, similes, metaphors, can be derived from science. What is your attitude towards science and these scientific matters?
Read. Check. Think. Correct. Check again. Will you write about evolution, the atom, magnetism? Of the quanta, of the galaxies, of the speed of sound, of the speed of light? From Kepler’s laws? Will you write about the history of science? Scientific news?
Read all the science you can.
Read all the poetry you can.
You are a poet.
You’re a scientist.
What do you have to say about the astronomer, the comet, Arcturus, the eddies of stars, the galaxies, the molecular evolution, the atomic architecture, the “planck time” to refer to other poetic titles?
What does poetry say to science?
What does science say to poetry?