I begin this thread with the encouragement of a senior member of this forum, a member who shall go unnamed, however, in the event that anyone should wish to blame him for the results.

I feel that poetry is a little larger than fun and games, though there are certainly games in poetry and it is a lot of fun; but there were no other appropriate categories, so I put it in this one.

First, a couple of principles.

(1) This thread is not intended as argumentative, but contributive. Tastes and opinions vary, but it is not necessary to choose either poetry or science. In fact, I begin the thread precisely because I have loved both activities all my life, and believe that they each have a great deal to offer the thinking human.

(2) I suggest that none of us reproduce herein our own poetry or the poems of friends. Believe me, such restraint is as difficult for me as it is for you, since I am certain you would benefit enormously from exposure to the brilliance of my work. But since almost everyone wants an audience. that approach would lead rapidly to a disastrous cascade. In order to proceed beyond a certain elementary level in both poetry and science, one must learn to detach one’s ego from one’s work, to learn that one’s poetry is not one’s self, and is not one’s baby-child.

Nothing in this suggestion would prevent interested parties from exchanging poetry outside this discussion, of course.

Americans are the most frightened by two disciplines, mathematics and science. In a behavior that is almost certainly related, Americans also tend to think of imagination and reason as opposite qualities. I think of them as two basic abilities that help us to think, something in the way that opposable thumbs help us to grasp physical objects.

Poetry and mathematics are not opposites. To practice either at top form, one must practice. When I was an undergraduate, many years ago, I took a double major in math and English (there were no degrees in creative writing then). Punching Fortran programs into cards (it was that long ago) for those giant machines, I was beset by a dizzying double vision. The lines of code seemed to me to move in ways that were highly analogous to the lines of a poem. Even the loops seemed related, because one of the characteristics of a good poem is that every line has an effect on the others; frequently a line in a sonnet, say, will send the reader looping back to previous lines, or even previous poems.

But later, when, in a poetry workshop, I turned in a poem whose central metaphor was based on a scientific theory, I was given to understand in short order that science was cold and heartless, and art was the realm of either feeling or the irrational, depending on who was doing the talking.

I thought that was a stupid way of seeing things. I knew I wasn’t cold or heartless, and could not understand how something that seemed so beautiful to me could be considered cold and heartless.

Later I discovered that a similar if reciprocal error prevailed among many scientists. For them poetry was the realm of the fuzzy, the imprecise. It was a woo-woo enterprise for touchy-feely types who couldn’t handle facts or information.

I hate both prejudices. An appreciation of science and mathematics sharpens the poet’s talents—even his or her imagery—and an ability to read good poetry with understanding performs similar services for the scientist. Both science and poetry are human productions, after all. Is it surprising that both, at their best, have something to offer? That both are beautiful and satisfying?

I say at their best, and from now on, whenever I speak of either, that is what I will be referring to. I have had dull—yes, stupid—science and mathematics teachers, who taught mathematics as a rote performance of unexplained strictures. They nearly killed my love of the stuff. In the same way, there is plenty of bad poetry out there, even plenty of highly rewarded bad poetry. In my opinion, the last sixty years of so of poetry in America have been generally disastrous, conveying that poetry is a specialized endeavor far too snobbish and sophisticated for the general reader, even the intelligent general reader, and destroying the ears of multitudes.

Far worse, I think the last sixty years of so of poetry in America have been incredibly boring and its practitioners incredibly incompetent.

So in this thread I will not be discussing the hacks in either trade. Most of the misunderstandings between the disciplines are the result of lack of information. It is my hope this thread will help relieve that dearth of information.

Enough preface: There are countless observations to be made, countless correlations between science and poetry, there are countless ways in which one may yield insight into the other.

I will begin the thread by addressing the misconception I described above. It is the general uninformed opinion that science is the realm of the exact, and poetry is the realm of the fuzzy, the imprecise. Feelings, you know.

I contend that both disciplines (at their best, remember) depend on precision, but they achieve that precision in disparate ways.

Science attempts to be precise by reducing the ambiguity of its terms, which increases their abstractness. One arrives at the precision of poetry by means of the relationships of all the parts. Take for example the word “vanity.” It has not always meant, as it does for most people now, conceit (a word which also has not always meant self-congratulation, but once was simply a variant spelling of "concept"). It meant, in the KJV version of Ecclesiastes, and therefore in Elizabethan times, and in most writing until recently, a foolish endeavor, certain to come to nothing. Of course, that is the nature of self-congratulation, so one sees the derivation.

Suppose one has studied the language for many years, and having become aware of this root for the word, can no longer hear it in its merely contemporary sense. Such a writer could attempt to redefine it for everyone, insisting we all agree on a common meaning (as in science). In poetry, that approach is not likely to be effective. Instead, the poet will use the word in the sense that he or she undertands it, and trust that its context, the way that it interacts with all the other elements of the poem, will recreate the fuller force of the original. The usage is very precise, but it is not predefined. The intelligent and responsive reader will be able to sense the older and more profound meaning from the way the word is used.

I think of the metaphor of the hologram as opposed to the digital bit. The hologram depends on global storage, on relationships. The bit depends on unambiguity.

The precision of poetry (by which, I repeat, I always mean good poetry, not necessarily famous poetry) is a precision that arises from the whole. Good poets are not attempting to be fuzzy and imprecise. Exactly the opposite.

No doubt this summation is oversimplified, but as a wise person whose name I cannot remember once said, every model must be simpler than the thing it models, or it has no utility.

That's an interesting point-- I think this error is so often made on "both sides" of the science fence. Scientists often see their own art as exalted by its objectivity, seemingly placing it on the opposite end of the "subjective feeling" spectrum, despite the fact that almost all scientists do science because of the "charge" they get out of it. Similarly, poets often see science as debased by the coldness and heartlessness that is associated with this very same objectivity, yet they maintain that it is possible to tell good poetry from bad poetry, which would seem to require an almost scientifically objective metric. So we have scientists exalting their metrics and poets exulting in their meters, all the while seeing so much difference in form and missing so much similarity in substance. It seems a shame that your poem was passed over as an opportunity to expose this mistake.
This differing approach may stem from the fact that science is above all a search for unification, and poetry, it might be said, values diversification. Although it is also true that poets may be seeking a kind of unified response to certain verbal cues, to elicit a certain emotion, but they are not trying to reduce poetry but rather to expand it. That seems to motivate a different way of using words, to get more mileage out of the same alphabet used in science.
That seems to be thinking along similar lines, with greater imagery.
That's Occam's Razor in a nutshell, a key principle in science-- so it is interesting to reflect on how it is also applied in poetry.

Me searched & searched until I was dead
But found no poetry in this thread

__________________
PW -- Plant Whisperer

I too was one, who failed to find a decent pun.

(assonance is fair...I hope?)

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Round...everything is always round!

That's what scientists do all the time. It goes like:
- What's that word, "mass"?
- It's that number you need to make up momentum out of velocity.
- Momentum?
- Momentum. It is almost like velocity, but unlike velocity, it is conserved. And you can't really calculate anything without something that is conserved.
- Ok, ok, but what "mass" is?
- I told you the way it interacts with velocity. It should be enough.

__________________

Posted by me, actually. And what you are referring to is an interconnected set of specifically defined meanings. What I am referring to is something much more open-ended. In physics, to take your example, all have agreed to use the word mass (or the symbol m) in the same way. In poetry, there is no such agreement, and the reader is required to use inference. When you come to an equation in physics, you rightfully expect m to be used the same way by all physicists. There is no such certainty in poetry.

Dear Ken--

Thank you.

There is the fact that it is hard to get two poets to agree on what is good poetry and bad poetry, though each individual poet is very certain. Actually, I am making fun. There's quite a group of us who have fairly common judgments of most of the celebrated (and unread) contemporary poetry. In brief, we feel that poets have, in an attempt to become avant-garde, surrendered the things that matter most to readers, that is, as I put it, story and music. I suspect (and many of my compadres) that another powerful motive in this abandonment is the desire to get rid of any standards. If a poem depends on rhyme and meter, or indeed music of any sort, then it is fairly easy to tell how skillful the writer is. If it does not, if there is no way of gauging excellence of handling, then the claim can be made that poetry is "just" a matter of taste, and no one can really criticize anyone else.

I suspect a lot of lame writers are hiding behind that fogscreen.

My poem in that workshop I mentioned was not so much passed over as ridiculed as being wholly wrong in conception. It wasn't that great a poem, just a tossed-off rhyming simile. If it had been criticized for what it failed to do poetically, that would have been uncomfortable perhaps but justified. But what happened was that an entire subject was branded off-limits, and I have never been able to accept that attitude.

I like what you have to say about poetry seeking diversification and science seeking unification. Perhaps a thought I have often had about poetry applies: I like to say that the essence of language is naming. All our first words are concrete nouns. From there we progress to verbs and to semantical tags and to abstract concepts. (And if you have ever closely observed children coming into language, you may have noticed they show an overwhelming need to learn the names of things). Love exists, and we name it, but it cannot be measured, so it is an uncomfortable concept for some scientists. For some scientists, naming means measuring. For poets, it doesn't necessarily. There are for example some states of mind that we may experience only once in our entire lives. They cannot be compared, since they are unique. One may pretend that they did not happen, but they did. One may refuse to think about them or build a model which excludes them, but they happened. There is also the fact that some phenomena are too complex for a one-word name, but are real. Sometimes I think of a good poem--say Dylan Thomas's Fern Hill--as being the name of an experience. The experience cannot be summarized or shortened. Only the entire poem is sufficient to name it.

In my view, poetry is a way of celebrating existence, and science and scientific thought is a part of existence. Why shouldn't it be celebrated?

Incidentally, I think you are right about this thread. It probably belongs in another topic. I think it is fun, and poetry definitely involves games, but perhaps it is too strenuous for people who primarily want amusement. In a similar way, I love long-distance swimming, but many people think of it as boring and requiring too much effort.

Yep. Here's my take on it, from my letter to an editorial page:.

Couldn't agree more. What is it about humans that makes us feel we have to divide into "us" and "them," with them always being worse? Is this a holdover from whatever inherited activity it is that makes crows peck a white crow to death? Some driver for speciation? I've noticed that when any tribe's name for itself is translated into English, it turns out usually to mean something like "the people." Implication: Those others aren't real people.

In an age of specialists, the wise generalist is more valuable than ever--which is not to say accorded more money or acclaim.

I agree with both of you. It seems to all stem from a kind of "lifeboat" mentality-- we have to throw overboard everything but the bare essentials, for they are what we need to survive. Trouble is, people don't agree what the bare essentials are, and furthermore, should we not be striving to do more than survive anyway? It seems to me a workable definition of "civilization" could be all the things you can do when you care about more than just personal survival. So tossing out art on the grounds that it is not objectively verifiable, or tossing out science because it is so objective that is has no soul, is not only missing the whole point of both endeavors, it is missing the whole point of what civilization is all about. That is what motivated that science vs. religion thread, and look how hard it was for the rationalists to see that fairly straightforward point. What is so wrong with an embracing approach to human endeavor-- it's hard enough to get beyond just living out our lives with a minimum of personal tragedy and a maximum of pleasurable experiences, why do we have to make it even harder to explore that which is truly uplifting, in our zeal to clean out the lifeboat so completely?

Me too! It´s very obvious to me that science and art (poetry, music, painting, sculpture, etc) go back to the same roots.

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If everyone had even a basic grasp of scientific principles, this planet would be a better place (Phil Plait)

Die Lücke, die wir hinterlassen, ersetzt uns vollkommen [The gap we will leave behind will take our place entirely] (Carl Heinz Schroth)

1 + e^i*pi = 0

this poem (as quoted from the "supervillain" thread) is my little offering to the discussion
if you are expert on the multi facet word vanity you might object that only the misspelling is originally mine.......and you are right
now, i don't cite myself purely out of, well........vanity
but to show to you that you have been read and given a thought or two
also would i like to confirm you in your assertion that words must certainly matter in poetry
i would think that my personal understanding of poetry is limited to a sense for the magic of words and melody
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Qui ne voit pas la vanité du monde est bien vain lui-même. ((blaise pascal))

ehm, yes.......
you will have remarked how much the beauty of the little Pascal phrase hinges on the semanticaly quit empty "bien"
-----------------------------------------------
Le superflu, chose si nécessaire

holy sister!
must it not read "... been read and given a thought or two to" ?
(((i think i have inadvertantly managed to expose the limitations of your idiom.....
should English be........unfit for the Poetic Endevour?
maybe the French have an edge on you and are just right with their exception culturelle)))
-------------------------------------------------
Vive la République, vive la France!

not endevours, Poetry Slams, baby!

Let me chime in. It seems poetry is about
expressing feelings as perfectly as possible
with the clumsy words we have. And it takes a
while to learn this. All the old jokes about if
it does not rhyme it is weird stuff and I always
wanted to write prose one day apply here. At the
end of the film Walkabout, Roeg used some
famous Houseman lines. Bit of a cheek really
as they were certainly not inspired by the
Australian landscape. It was the first time I
had heard then so here they are (with some
qudos by association perhaps)...

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows
What are those blue remembered hills
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content
I see it shining plain
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

thanks hhE (i may call you like this ?) !
your little bite is epitome of the urban American stile...
i have a hard time not to morph into this thing whenever i do
some English writing

you too, jack butler, won't be able on the long to escape giving us some concrete examples of what you consider good poetry
i am looking forward to it
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Ten Thousand Light Years from Home

so the difference is that of scope? in physics, the scope is a theory, in poetry the scope is a poem. not much of a difference, if you'd ask me.

__________________

I'm fascinated by all facets of poetry, but in here primarily exploring the relationships between poetry and science. Nevertheless, among the hundreds of poems I consider really good, excluding Shakespeare, who is a country unto himself: To His Coy Mistress, half a dozen by Donne, a dozen or more by Dickinson--I'll just name poets, there are too many poems--Hopkins, Houseman, Hardy, Robinson, Robinson Jeffers, Frost, Wilbur, Dylan Thomas, and on and on. Yeats is one of my favorites. I offer here from memory (so some of the punctuation may be wrong) the masterful Sailing to Byzantium:

That is no country for old men: the young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees
(Those dying generations) at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas--
Fish, flesh, and fowl commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music, all neglect
Monuments of unaging intellect.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A
tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress--
Nor is there singing-school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence:
And therefore have I sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.

Sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul:
Consume my heart away; sick with desire,
And fastened to a dying animal,
It knows not what it is; and gather me
into the artifice of eternity.

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make,
Of hammered gold and gold enameling,
To keep a drowsy emperor awake,
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

It is my feeling you don't have a poem unless you carry it in memory. Otherwise, all you can do is refer to it.

Someone previous said they felt poetry was the use of words to express feelings powerfully or well--don't remember the exact phrasing. I agree, except that I do not feel poetry is limited to feelings, by which most people mean the non-intellectual side of life. I find that the most vigorous and memorable discussions occur in poetry, and that they are not limited to feelings. In the poem I just quoted by Yeats, there is an intense condensation of vision, a whole philosophical structure implied, the relationship of the physical to the intellectual. His identification of the eternal with the made, his complex use of Byzantium--these are an incrediby compressed statement of a whole outlook, and an example of what I mean by the information contained in context. With faithful attention to the poem, perhaps over years, it is possible to know exactly what he intends by the use of that city, an understanding which cannot be gotten from textbooks.

Incidentally, one of the things I love about poetry is how its force can translate across our usual divisions. So that it does not seem strange to me to find Housman in a movie about going walkabout, but instead appropriate.

One way I have put it is that in the very best poetry, a voice is heard.

A high school in Hull is named after the famous
Andrew Marvell who lived in those parts. Makes
me wonder if the young ladies get fed up hearing
the lines when fending off the young men. "Got
the £30,000 then...well go away!" It was used
at the beginning of the film "A Matter of Life
and Death" with David Niven and Kim Hunter. For
years I thought Andy Marvell was a modern Poet.

wwoww, that's still way beyond me.....and probably always will
it is sadly said that your mother tongue is your home land
it's a tight cage to escape.....even if you will it hard
also my mostly visual brain is only good for a
few memorable lines at best
so my natural role on this
thread is that of a....
...silent lurker




.

I take the poem as a parody of the usual line that young men hand out to young ladies--more or less the supreme example of that sort of bull, and witty and amusing as a result. There's a great poem by Archibald McLeish which you are probably familiar with called And You, Andrew Marvell. Haven't seen the film, but now I will look for it.

Dear SL--

Everybody gotta have a home though (yours appears to be in a very interesting place). If it wasn't for native language, none of us would have no language at all. I just love it that humans have language. I love mine because I know it, but there's others for sure.

For me, language is a freedom, not a cage. Never have imagined perceiving naked truth. Consider senses the way into the universe, not a barrier to the truth. Same way for me with language. Opens out. Can't cover infinity, but what can? Besides, I wouldn't live long enough to see it all.

i have been thoroughly misunderstood in two points ":"
concerning the cage thing it is entirely my fault
i should have been aware
thatwhithwhat little
you know of me
you couldn't do
the decoding
properly
..........

that you seem to be a-lienated by my
calling my mother tongue my home land
is utterly and outright astounding me



but coming back to my first point
let's suppose you had got me right
((what you did not and it is my fault))
and i had actually intended to state
that your mother tongue is a cage
would that be wrong altogether then?

i come from a thread where you demanded courtesy
as the first of the basic requirements for discussion
but did you really mean courtesy (?) think about its
conotational field or better roooooooooooooooots
by the standards of sycophantic courtlike behavior
your reply to me was roooooooooooot (or is it rude!)
and i should feel offended now................( what i don't)
polite would have doubtless been the better choice
of wording ((but it would be silly of course to hold you
to such a high standard all the time.....and it is clear to
me as a foreigner that your usage of your mother tongue
is quite impeccccable (have i been saying right now that i
could not peck at you even if i wanted to ?)))

Now.......i am going at the words for a reason
there is sooooooooo much
in those little shiny casings
stinking explosive pouder
on occasion............or even
foul ideology and stufff

as a german i know what i am talking about
and you will certainly have heard
about one Mr. Orwell once

yes the language can be a cage
and all the more tighter
the more you don't see
the wire and the barbs

but you have learned to fligh in your dreams
and may have learend to soar up high into the skigh
on your paper Wings of Words as Well
leaving us mere earthlings
waaaaaaaaaaay
doooooown
doooown
doown
down






beloow
tethered, shackeld and bound to the
.................................................. .......................................GROUND
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Thelettterkilleth, but the spirit giveth............................................ .............................LIFE

also an interesting home land that!
but here to honour the man and his country a courtesy quote:
"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below: Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

Meant respect and courtesy and statement of how I see things, not characterization of you. Was not offended by anything you said, nor alienated, merely responding. Said I thought it was a good thing that humans had language, without saying that one language was better than another or freer than another. Made no assumption about whether your thoughts "flew up to heaven," nor do I think you can make accurate assumptions about mine. My intention in this thread is not adversarial, as I said at the outset.

wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwufff
total meltdown of communication
and that whithout adversariality
on both sides of the fence hence
a perfect and ready example of
what can happen if one of the
parties involved is linguistically
stunted in the idiom of parlance
referring to me ((without saying))
so i better keep to the under woods
as i wisely had suggested from the get go
and that is precisely......................where i will get/ go
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"poetry slams, baby" (and sometimes the door) hhEb09'1

I can put a few words together but I know I am
not a good speaker generally. It takes training
to be good and I often think about the voice-over
industry and the few names who rake it in doing
such work. And other languages have their experts
no doubt. Which brings me to something. As an
ordinary guy with just English at my command, how
do other languages sound and what impression of
the people is given to me. As heard through
television (and a very few real encounters)
here are my feelings. 1) French sounds elegant
and musical. 2) German..no nonsense. 3) Italian..
fussy. 4) Russian..warm and human. 5) Oriental
languages..in a hurry. Very shallow impressions
I admit. But what impression is given by
English? I think someone tried to say it sounded
detailed but I may be mistaken. Hope no
international incident is caused here

(((i must keep true to my word, pete)))