[Michael Cantor]

I made model airplanes as a boy, like John, but mostly I did it because you were supposed to build models when you were eleven years old. We had a Boy Scout Hobby Night when I was eleven (I got into the Scouts early because I was tall and passed for thirteen, and nobody knew that emotionally I was about nine), and I wasn't allowed to demonstrate my real hobby (reading at least a book a day) so I did the effing model airplane thing. Balsa wood and tissue paper and dope, just as John said. And to boost the power, my father gave me a massively thick rubber band from his office to replace the smaller one that came with the model kit. I finished the stupid thing about an hour before the show (even then, a procrastinator), rushed to my little booth at the show, and when the crowd came to my booth (fortunately, my parents had enough sense not to bother with that stuff, but it seemed that half of the rest of the population of the Bronx was there), I muttered something about model planes , and turned the propellor to stretch the rubber band and show how it spinned, and turned, it, and turned it....and this huge rubber band, mounted inside the fragile body, was anchored to the nose and tail of the plane, and I was tightening it and tightening it....and eventually the awful thing just imploded, in a shower of tissue paper and shreds of balsa and little rubber wheels and shit, and the crowd was hilarious, and I cry all over again when I think about it.

I went back to reading my books. And, eventually, I was reasonably successful in an engineering/science environment because I always assumed that things wouldn't work the way they were supposed to.

[John Whitworth]

Ah Michael, with me it was quite the opposite. I was supposed to read and be clever (this was Scotland remember) and the model railway and the aeroplanes were a secret vice. The only other chap I knew who made aeroplanes (better than mine) was the sharer in my other secret vice. I transfixed his foot with a dart and punched his head (i can't remember in what context).

I never FLEW the planes. Like yours, Michael, they might have broken. The thing about poems (which I NEVER wrote at school; I wasnt completely crazy) is that they are indestructible machines.

I didn't do science either. Science was for geeks, though we didn't have the word. I did maths (what you call math strangely). Give me a quadratic equation and I'll solve it. Or I used to be able to. Aren't they the ones with TWO separate solutions, both of which are distinct and right? Maybe all science is like that?

[Bill Carpenter]

Yes, Martin E. What our scientific and technological civilization has achieved is truly astounding in more areas than we can coun, but I don't think we need to be contemptuous of the scientists of other civilizations and cultures. Better to deepen our understanding of them. For example, reading Bede's The Reckoning of Time will give you a completely different view of the so-called Dark Ages.

I like Michael's remark that his success an an engineer was based in part on the belief/suspicion/fear that things wouldn't work. A great addition to the theme of awe and curosity.

[Matt Q]

Hi Martin,

Originally Posted by Martin Rocek

Rick,
So what is the verdict--are eye glasses--genuine or not? Hearing aids?

I take Rick to be talking about taking off the glasses of science when looking at nature and so seeing it afresh, uninterpreted, uninscribed and possibly as more wondrous. So I don't see how that would preclude wearing real glasses. As he says, he's tending to hyperbole, so I don't think he means the creative glasses of science, more the received glasses of science. Maybe it's about seeing a world unexplained and hence unreduced.

I'll leave you with a verse from a Billy Bragg song, it doesn't quite fit my point, not least because it references technology more than science, but I like it too much not to:

I saw two shooting stars last night,
I wished on them, but they were only satellites,
it's wrong to wish on space hardware,
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd care.

best,

-Matt

[John Whitworth]

Ah Bill, here's another thing Chesterton said.

A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man - the matter awaits demonstration - but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wants to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle.

I think that is the best thing I have read for many weeks. Do you like it too? Can he really be so bad?

A beetle view of things!

[Chris O'Carroll]

All of us have probably preached (and practiced, if we know what’s good for us) the doctrine of concrete imagery -- fill your poems with descriptions of things that can be perceived with the five senses. But it would be idiotic to say that things we can’t see, hear, touch, taste, or smell aren’t real or aren’t essential. Poetry is often all about the abstract and the intangible -- love, truth, justice, mortality, etc. The point isn’t that those things don’t exist or don’t matter; the point is that poems about intangible realities will work better if they’re anchored in the details of day-to-day physical experience.

And speaking of things it would be idiotic to say, is science really characterized by a “staggering sense of entitlement regarding its role as the arbiter of truth”?

Our senses convince us that the Earth beneath our feet is standing still while the Sun rises in the east, moves across the sky, and sets in the west. Someone who tells us tales of a god’s flaming chariot, then instructs us to bow to priestly authority and make lavish offerings at the temple -- that guy is running an entitled arbiter of truth scam. But a scientist who works out the details of the planet’s rotation and orbit has an altogether different agenda, one based on honest inquiry and rational efforts to extend our perceptions beyond what the unaided senses can achieve. The mythology might be more appealing to a certain strain of dumbed-down empiricism that equates the limitations of our senses with the limits of the real or the essential. But the science seems to me not only truer, but more magical as well. It enlarges the imagination. It helps to make us more engaged with, more in awe of, more at home in, the universe.

Poets don’t typically try to enforce our version of truth in a theocratic style. But we do make assertions, about the rising sun and other matters, that are more akin to the claims of faith than to the claims of science and reason, in the sense that they are unprovable, except to the extent that they prove themselves upon our pulses -- “The dawn comes up like thunder.”

Poetry and science are paths that have intersected and diverged and even run concurrently in interesting ways over the centuries.

Poets with various Romantic tendencies have often taken the position that art has access to insights beyond those of science. Shelley isn’t literally claiming that ornithologists are mistaken to classify the skylark as a bird, but his spectacular interweaving of sensory and ethereal imagery invites us to experience the blithe spirit’s song in a way that transcends anything a scientist might have to say about courtship displays and territorial defense.

Whitman likewise proposes that scientific knowledge, even if it’s not untrue, is inferior to the poet’s sensual, intuitive apprehension of the natural world:

When I heard the learn’d astronomer,
When the proofs, the figures, were ranged in columns before me,
When I was shown the charts and diagrams, to add, divide, and measure them,
When I sitting heard the astronomer where he lectured with much applause in the lecture-room,
How soon unaccountable I became tired and sick,
Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself,
In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,
Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

(It’s worth noting that the human observer’s senses can tell him that the night air is moist, but he’s relying on something else to inform him that it’s mystical.)

Cummings adopts much the same attitude when he writes in “you shall above all things be glad and young”:

I’d rather learn from one bird how to sing
than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

On the other hand, science and technology can provide an appealing grab bag of tropes and inspirations, as when Keats alludes in “Chapman’s Homer” to the discovery of Uranus, the first planet to swim into humanity’s ken since ancient times, or when Thomas writes of “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” or when Ginsberg celebrates “angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,” or when (insert your own thousand examples here).

Science is itself a creative enterprise, and its findings can nourish other modes of creativity. We can’t see or hear roots deep underground extracting nourishment from the soil, but we can know on the basis of scientific evidence that they do so, and we can extract all manner of metaphoric nourishment from that knowledge. Richard Wilbur has spoken about the importance of getting the science right in a nature poem, and his work is certainly enriched by his commitment to grounded, factual accuracy about the things of this world to which love calls us.

Dickinson, another remarkable nature poet, offers this witty, subversive endorsement of scientific inquiry:

“Faith” is a fine invention
For Gentlemen who see!
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency!

Obviously, there’s vastly more to be said on this topic. Science and poetry are equally revelatory (and, I think, equally thrilling) ways of exploring life, the universe, and everything. Having a flair for one of them is no excuse for being stupidly dismissive of the other. A chemist or physicist or biologist who thinks that poetry is worthless is missing a lot. So is a poet who, in Martin’s words, indulges in “complete misrepresentation of what science is about, and lack of understanding of the creative impulse behind science.”

[Martin Elster]

I like your post, Chris. Coincidentally, I was going to post that Whitman poem myself, but you beat me to it! Here’s an interesting article about science in Robert Frost’s poetry.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/article/178794

Here’s another great page with a nice list of astronomy poetry. One of the poems is, to be sure, “When I Heard the Learned Astronomer.” Another is “Canis Major” by Robert Frost:

Canis Major

The great Overdog,

That heavenly beast

With a star in one eye,

Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright

All the way to the west,

And never once drops

On his forefeet to rest.

I'm a poor underdog,

But to-night I will bark

With the great Overdog

That romps through the dark.

Robert Frost, 1928

Jupiter and Ten

Mrs. Chub was rich and portly,
Mrs. Chub was very grand,
Mrs. Chub was always reckoned
A lady in the land.

You shall see her marble mansion
In a very stately square, --
Mr. C. knows what it cost him,
But that's neither here nor there.

Mrs. Chub was so sagacious,
Such a patron of the arts,
And she gave such foreign orders,
That she won all foreign hearts.

Mrs. Chub was always talking,
When she went away from home,
Of a prodigious painting
Which had just arrived from Rome.

"Such a treasure," she insisted,
"One might never see again!"
"What's the subject?" we inquired.
"It is Jupiter and Ten!"

"Ten what?" we blandly asked her,
For the knowledge we did lack.
"Ah! that I cannot tell you,
But the name is on the back.

"There it stands in printed letters.
Come tomorrow, gentlemen,
Come and see our spending painting,
Our fine Jupiter and Ten."

When Mrs. Chub departed,
Our brains we all did rack,--
She could not be mistaken,
For the name was on the back.

So we begged a great Professor
To lay aside his pen,
And give some information
Touching "Jupiter and Ten."

And we pondered well the subject,
And our Lemprière we turned,
To discover what the Ten were;
But we could not, though we burned!

But when we saw the picture,--
Oh, Mrs. Chub! Oh, fie! Oh!
We perused the printed label,
And 'twas Jupiter and Io!

by James T. Fields (1817-1881)

http://www.baltastro.org/AstroPoetry.html

[Peter Chipman]

Are we really supposed to believe that the "Jupiter and Io" in the poem are the planet and its moon, respectively, rather than the mythological characters?

Seems unlikely to me.

[Martin Elster]

That’s a good question, Peter. Who would have painted the planet Jupiter and its moon, Io? In fact, there’s no way the artist could have seen any detail on the volcanic Io, since it’s so small (though larger than Earth’s moon) and so incredibly far away. Even a telescope can’t catch details, let alone the naked eye!

So the poem seems pretty silly in that regard. But funny, nevertheless!

[Martin Elster]

Originally Posted by Bill Carpenter

Yes, Martin E. What our scientific and technological civilization has achieved is truly astounding in more areas than we can coun, but I don't think we need to be contemptuous of the scientists of other civilizations and cultures. Better to deepen our understanding of them. For example, reading Bede's The Reckoning of Time will give you a completely different view of the so-called Dark Ages.

I just read the Wikipedia entry on Bede’s The Reckoning of Time. It sounds fascinating. I don’t have the money right now to actually buy the book, but I enjoyed reading the chapter summaries.

I, too, liked Michael’s reasoning about why he was successful in engineering/science.