write science poetry

Science poetry or scientific poetry is a specialized poetic genre that makes use of science as a theme. Written by scientists and non-scientists alike, science poets are generally avid readers and appreciaters of science and “stuff science.” Science 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 Center for Science Poetry for those interested in science poetry, and for those interested in science fiction poetry, the Science Fiction Poetry Association. Plus, there’s the Science Fiction Poetry Handbook and the Ultimate Guide to Science Fiction Poetry, all online. Strange Horizons has published the science fiction poetry of Joanne Merriam, Gary Lehmann, and Mike Allen.

As for science poetry, science or scientific poets like science fiction poets can also publish collections of poetry in almost any stylistic format. Science or science poets, like other poets, must know the “art and craft” of poetry, and science or science poetry comes in all poetic forms: free verse, blank verse, metrical, rhymed, unrhymed , abstract and concrete, ballad, dramatic, narrative, lyrical monologue, etc. All poetic devices are also in use, from alliteration to apostrophe, pun, irony and understatement, to every poetic diction, figures of speech and rhythm, etc. Even metaphysical scientific poetry is possible. In his anthology, The World Treasure of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics, editor Timothy Ferris aptly includes a section entitled “The Poetry of Science.” Says Ferris in the introduction to this section: “Science (or the ‘natural philosophy’ from which science evolved) 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 “criticized” science and/or a combination of both. This continued into the 20th century with poets such as Marianne Moore, TS Eliot, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, and Robert Hayden (eg, “Full Moon,” “the brilliant challenger of the rocket experts”), not to mention many of the lesser known poets. , who nevertheless maintains a poetic response to scientific questions. Says Ferris: “This is not to say that scientists should try to emulate poets, or that poets should proselytize science… But they need each other, and the world needs both.” Included in his anthology along with the best scientific prose/essays are 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 who write science poetry like those who write science fiction need not praise all of science, but science is nonetheless the subject, and there is often a greater relationship between poetry and science than poets admit. 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 can be non-aesthetic and non-logical, depending on the type of science and the type of poetry.

Science poetry deals with scientific measurements, scientific symbols, time and space, biology, chemistry, physics, astronomy, earth sciences/geology, meteorology, environmental sciences, computing and engineering/technical sciences. You can also take your theme from the scientists themselves, from Brahmagypta to Einstein, from Galileo to Annie Cannon. You can speak to specific types of scientists in general like Goethe’s “True Enough: For the Physicist” in the Ferris anthology. (The later poets mentioned are also from this anthology.)

Scientific poetry can make use of many or any forms, from lyric to narrative, sonnet, dramatic monologue, free verse, light verse, haiku and villanelle, from poetry for children or adults or both, for the scientist 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 have no rhythm. 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. “Chaos theory” even becomes the subject of poetry as in Wallace Stevens’s “The Connoisseur of Chaos.”

And your science and/or scientific poem? Think of all the techniques of poetry and all the techniques of science. Which 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 figures of speech, metaphors, similes, metaphors, can be derived from science. What is your attitude towards science and these scientific matters?

Read. Check. To think. Correct. Check again. Will you write about evolution, about the atom, about magnetism? Of how many, of the galaxies, of the speed of sound, of the speed of light? Of Kepler’s laws? Will you write about the history of science? Science 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, the arcturus, the star-sirls, the galaxies, molecular evolution, atomic architecture, “planck time” to allude to other poetic titles.

What does poetry say to science?

What does science say to poetry?