Blogs / Discoblog

When the British bumped Shepherd’s Pie off the school dinner menu* a decade ago, it heralded a wave of terror over the mysterious rise of mad cow disease (aka bovine spongiform encephalopathy) a cattle ailment caused by rogue proteins called prions that ate holes in the cows’ brains and later killed them. In March 1996, these fears proved justified when it was revealed that ten young people had been diagnosed with variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, (vCJD) a novel form of the sponge-brained disease likely transmitted to humans via infected beef. Since then, 158 people have died of vCJD in the United Kingdom, and a handful elsewhere. Four-and-a-half million cattle were slaughtered in Britain, 200,000 of which showed the typical tremors of the disease. But whoever heard their side of the story? In The Mad Cow Talks Back, poet Jo Shapcott gives the stolid, stoic beast a chance to state its case.

The Mad Cow Talks Back
By Jo Shapcott

I’m not mad. It just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I’m a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It’s risky when
you’re good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there’s the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it’s glorious
because it’s always when you’re travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain’s like
the hive: constant little murmers from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.

Note: Jo Shapcott is a British poet who teaches Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, London. Her books of poetry include Electroplating the Baby (1988) whose title poem explains the chemical process of embalming an infant, Phrase Book (1992) and My Life Asleep (1998). As Shapcott explains on her web site, the term "mad cow," signals an explicit feminist message, as the phrase is also a standard male chauvinist insult. The Mad Cow Talks Back appears in Shapcott’s collection Her Book: Poems 1988-1998; it is reprinted here with kind permission of Faber & Faber.

*Personally, I can only say good riddance: I only have to smell this mashed-potato-and-minced-beef mess to be instantly transported back to the clatter of my primary school’s dining hall, where it was served regularly and alternately with equally unappetizing platefuls of gloppy, gristle-filled goulash. Banish the memory! Now, try this recipe for vegan Shepherd’s Pie.

The season is winter, but the weather is autumnal and unusually warm. At the green market in New York City’s Union Square, apples of all varieties are piled up and plied in slices on passersby. In Australia, researchers at CSIRO, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation, have located the gene that turns apples red. (The ruddy fruit’s colorful hue is due to anthocyanins, plant compounds that also act as antioxidants.) So it seems a good moment to consider a poem about a pomme, specifically:

The Apple
By James Crowden

The apple is a saucey little item,
Daughter of blossom, sits neatly in the palm,
Exquisite in its pert roundness
And asking to be admired and handled.

Look for instance at the much forgotten stalk
The secret timing of its fall from grace
The gravity of the situation, the earthly grasp
Or else the apple of your eye cradled in the sun,

Plucked in perfection from the tree of life,
The rosie skin that takes a shine,
Protects the inner flesh, firm and crisp and even,
Till young mouths are brought into play,

And teeth sunk into sweet sharpness,
The hint of summer lost in autumn,
Each subtle fragrance stored within the mind,
A host of memories, the DNA of myth, the pips,

Eve’s gift, a timely signal carried down the ages,
Sanctuary in miniature, sliced through,
The source of secret divination yields a fertile mind,
The inner core, now discarded, thrown away,

Rises up again, a shadey orchard meeting place
For slender youth, the tree itself
A secret assignation with the golden bough,
A song bird within a garden walled

Note: James Crowden is a poet and writer living in Somerset, England. He has worked as a shepherd, sheep shearer, cider maker and forester. His books include Blood, Earth & Medicine: A Year in the Life of a Casual Agricultural Labourer (The Parrett Press, 1991) and Cider: The Forgotten Miracle (Cyder Press Two, 1999) in which The Apple first appeared. In 1999 he was named poet laureate of Apple Day, an annual celebration of apples and orchards organized by the British environmental group Common Ground and held every year on October 21st. The Apple is reprinted here with kind permission of the poet.

In his anthology Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry, (Random House, 2003) the former United States poet laureate Billy Collins quotes a schoolgirl who writes, “Whenever I read a modern poem, it’s like my brother has his foot on the back of my neck in the swimming pool.” Inspired “to remove poetry far from such scenes of torment,” Collins created a web site called Poetry 180: A Poem A Day for American High Schools. In a recent interview with the Savannah Morning News, he says, “I looked for poems with a human voice, so that I could hear someone talking to me . . . I tended to overlook poems by someone committing an act of literature. I like poems with a sense of humor, irony and lightness. Poems worth reading more than once, but that you get on the first bounce.”

Collins’ poem “Earthling,” which first appeared in The Apple that Astonished Paris, (University of Arkansas Press, 1988) seems to fit that description admirably, as well as being fuel for the current fascination with the planets of our solar system. It is reproduced here with kind permission of the poet.

Earthling
By Billy Collins

You have probably come across
those scales in planetariums
that tell you how much you
would weigh on other planets.

You have noticed the fat ones
lingering on the Mars scale
and the emaciated slowing up
the line for Neptune

As a creature of average weight,
I fail to see the attraction.

Imagine squatting in the wasteland
of Pluto, all five tons of you,
or wandering around Mercury
wondering what to do next with your ounce.

How much better to step onto
the simple bathroom scale,
a happy earthling feeling
the familiar ropes of gravity,

157 pounds standing soaking wet
a respectful distance from the sun.

Note: Billy Collins was appointed poet laureate of the United States in 2001 and held the post until 2003. He is the author of several books of poetry, including The Trouble with Poetry (2005); Nine Horses (2002); and Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poems (2001). Speaking of Earthling, he tells DISCOVER that, “Hunters look for upland birds, fishermen search for salmon, poets are on the lookout for metaphors.Those scales used to be the sole reason I would look forward to the class trip to the planetarium.One morning, I saw that a metaphoric possibility lay within. They provided a way to talk about the contentment that earthlings might be grateful for once they considered the impossibility of life on our other planets.”

I was about six years old when I first saw a living pig. It was at the Brent Show, an autumn festival that annually brought the joys of the countryside to my neighborhood in north-west London, turning a local park into a muddy swamp as the crowds trampled the grass in the rain. (It always rained.) The pig was penned in a row with an array of other farm animals, and it fascinated me: it was large, grey and lumpen and lay unstirring in mucky puddle. I now think it must have been very bored. Though sorely maligned as slovenly, slothful and greedy, pigs are in fact highly intelligent and resourceful foragers, and, as Galway Kinnell reminds us in Saint Francis And The Sow, are also creatures of great beauty. The poem is reprinted here with kind permission of the poet, who can be heard reading it at Imagine Nature, a collection compiled by the American Museum of Natural History.

Saint Francis And The Sow
By Galway Kinnell

The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing beneath
them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.

Note: Galway Kinnell is the author of 11 volumes of poetry, including Strong Is Your Hold (2006); A New Selected Poems (2001) (a finalist for the National Book Award); Imperfect Thirst (1996); The Book of Nightmares (1973), and a children’s book, How the Alligator Missed Breakfast (1982.) Social justice, animals and nature form strong themes in his work. “If you could keep going deeper and deeper,” he has said, “‘you’d finally not be a person … you’d be a blade of grass or ultimately perhaps a stone. And if a stone could read poetry would speak for it.”

For another lovely prose ode to a pig, see The Good Good Pig: The Extraordinary Life of Christopher Hogwood, (Ballantine Books, 2006) by Sy Montgomery, whose musings on animals, including tarantulas and sperm whales, have appeared in her many features and reviews for DISCOVER.

“Poetry and science form the basis of my experience,” wrote the Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub (1923-1998.) Probably the only poet who could lay claim to developing a strain of nude mice, Holub studied to be a doctor after the second World War, supporting himself as an editor of a science magazine, Vesmír (The Universe). He published 150 scientific papers and a monograph, “Immunology of Nude Mice,” as well as 14 books of poetry and five books of essays.

Holub’s poem “Brief Reflection on Cats Growing in Trees,” perhaps a sly reflection on the unknown universe beyond our own narrow world, appears in the collection Poems Before & After and is reproduced here with kind permission of Bloodaxe Books. It is, in my opinion, a perfect illustration of the scientific method (as well as a good example of why scientists so frequently disagree about the outcome of an experiment.)

Brief Reflection on Cats Growing in Trees
By Miroslav Holub

When moles still had their annual general meetings
and when they still had better eyesight it befell
that they expressed a wish to discover what was above.

So they elected a commission to ascertain what was above.
The commission dispatched a sharp-sighted fleet-footed
mole. He, having left his native mother earth,
caught sight of a tree with a bird on it.

Thus a theory was put forward that up above
birds grew on trees. However,
some moles thought this was
too simple. So they dispatched another
mole to ascertain if birds did grow on trees.

By then it was evening and on the tree
some cats were mewing. Mewing cats,
the second mole announced, grew on the tree.
Thus an alternative theory emerged about cats.

The two conflicting theories bothered an elderly
neurotic member of the commission. And he
climbed up to see for himself.
By then it was night and all was pitch-black.

Both schools are mistaken, the venerable mole declared.
Birds and cats are optical illusions produced
by the refraction of light. In fact, things above

Were the same as below, only the clay was less dense and
the upper roots of the trees were whispering something,
but only a little.

And that was that.

Ever since the moles have remained below ground:
they do not set up commissions
or presuppose the existence of cats.

Or if so only a little.

(From Poems Before & After, translated by Ian and Jarmila Milner, Ewald Osers, George Theiner, David Young, Dana Habova, Rebekah Bloyd & Miroslav Holub (Bloodaxe Books, 2006.)

Poems Before & After is available for $29.95 from Amazon.co.uk.

Note: For more about Miroslav Holub’s life and poetry, see The Complete Review. A fine collection of his essays, Shedding Life: Disease, Politics, and Other Human Conditions was published by Milkweed Editions in 1997. Reviewing the book in The New York Times, Richard Schweder wrote that the essays revealed Holub to be “a wraith of reason deriding all Dark Age flights of fancy,” who was “above and against Marxism, parapsychology, Zen, yoga, animal rights advocates, alternative medicine, Hindu gods, J.R.R. Tolkien, postgraduate mystics, California philosophers and anyone or anything either premodern or postmodern.”

Albert Einstein has served as a muse for writers, musicians, film-makers, sculptors and scientists.* He has also inspired poets such as Miroslav Holub and David Clewell, whose poem, “Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms,” first appeared in the Summer 2006 issue of The Georgia Review. It is bloggily reprinted here with kind permission from the poet, although, as Clewell tells Discover, “I actually work on a typewriter, with real striking keys and honest, off-the-roller paper!”

Albert Einstein Held Me in His Arms
By David Clewell

although my parents didn’t know it at the time.
And if I knew anything, even on some vaguely molecular level,
I surely wasn’t talking. No one was the wiser, except
for Einstein, of course, taken with my small charms.
He was crazy about how I couldn’t stop smiling,
drooling in my carriage on a Sunday afternoon in Princeton—
the town my mother loved just driving to and getting out and
losing herself in, absolutely smitten. And my pedestrian father
was crazy about my mother, so even if that meant
another goddamn trip to Highfalutinsville, New Jersey,
he’d be there without fail, forever along for the ride.

The way I finally heard it, Einstein was on his knees
in a sweatshirt, rumpled chinos, and sneakers, pulling weeds—
Merely being himself, my father would say later, utterly impressed.
Einstein had that down to a science at 112 Mercer, the unassuming
white frame house where he cultivated flowers, where he played violin
precisely in sync with his favorite recordings late into the night.
Where he famously met with Bertrand Russell, Kurt Gödel, and
Wolfgang Pauli
for philosophic forays into the schnapps, then inevitably higher mathematics.
But on that one historic Sunday in the spring of my first year,
Einstein himself welcomed the unrenowned likes of my mother and father.
This twentieth-century giant picked me up with some easy peekaboo
small talk
in the last of the afternoon’s fading light until, eventually, genius
or no genius, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I made a tiny grab
for his wildly theoretical hair. And that was pretty much the end
of our ad hoc civilization that flourished for ten Princeton minutes.

When Einstein died only six weeks later,
every newspaper ran his picture, and all at once my father
couldn’t believe it: Wasn’t that the gardener who couldn’t get enough
of the baby? It says right here he’s Einstein,
the guy who revolutionized our thinking about time and space!
And what was that supposed to mean to him, exactly? My father
wasn’t Einstein, but he’d thought about them plenty, too,
deciding in his lifetime he wasn’t about to get enough of either one.

For years my parents never said a word about that day, as if
to remember it out loud would have been somehow unseemly—
a kind of bragging they never much went in for—rather than a celebration
of wonderful dumb-luck Sunday driving, like every happy accident
in the history of science or in those classic, unlikely stories
we can’t help going back to for their mythic staying power. So now let me
put it this way: Albert Einstein held me in his arms before he died.

Sooner or later we’re all trying to explain our particle selves
in light of our own cockeyed theories of relativity.
Someone in my family—my mother or my father, maybe me—
had to embellish at least some of the truth that comes, finally,
here at the end:
my mother’s horrified
that I’ve yanked poor Einstein’s hair, and she resigns herself,
sighing, It’s time to go. To prove there are no hard feelings,
he says something Einsteinian, like Yes, but what is time?—
which my father misunderstands as a question he can actually answer
at that very minute, so he says, 5:00. And before I know it,
because I am far too young to realize much of anything,
everyone’s in a sudden hurry back into their uncertain futures,
as if this whole thing never quite honestly happened, and in no time
it’s fifty years later, and I’m the one still alive, all that’s left
of the story, telling myself: Yes, it did. No, it didn’t. No, it did.

Note: David Clewell teaches writing and literature at Webster University in St. Louis and is the author of six collections of poems, most recently The Low End of Higher Things (University of Wisconsin Press, 2003). The 2001 American poet laureate Billy Collins writes of Clewell that he “is an exuberant, inexhaustible poet and an insider on such diverse American arcana as forgotten Hollywood actors, flying saucers, CIA shenanigans, comic books, cereal favors, beatnik kitsch, and jazz. His unstoppable narrative energy and his multi-layered curiosity are almost enough to drive this poet out to the far right side of the page.”

*For a semi-complete round-up of books, plays, songs, movies and exhibits about Albert Einstein, take a look at the reviews section of Discover’s September 2004 special Einstein issue.

Insects seem to be a popular topic for poets. William Wordsworth, William Blake, Robert Burns, Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath were all inspired by the antics of various of crawlers and creepers. Joining this crew was John Berryman (1914-1972) whose poem “They Have,” appeared in his collection “Homage to Mistress Bradstreet” (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1956). I am grateful to my late cousin, the poet and critic Philip Hobsbaum, for sending me this poem by email in 2002.

They Have

A thing O say a sixteenth of an inch
long, with whiskers
& wings it doesn’t use, & many legs,
has all this while been wandering in a tiny space
on the black wood table by my burning chair.
I see it has a feeler of some length
it puts out before it.
That must be how it was following the circuit
of the bottom of my wine-glass, vertical: Macon:
I thought
it smelt & wanted some but couldn’t get hold.
But here’s another thing, on my paper, a fluff
of legs, and I blow: my brothers and sisters go away.
But here he’s back, & got between the pad
& padback, where I save him and
shift him to my blue shirt, where he is.
The other little one’s gone somewhere else.
They have things easy.

Note: John Berryman’s collection Homage to Mistress Bradstreet won him widespread acclaim as a boldly innovative poet when it was published in 1956. It was soon followed by 77 Dream Songs (1964) which was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. Berryman committed suicide in 1972 by jumping off a bridge in Minneapolis.

Of Mistress Bradstreet, (1612-1672) Philip Hobsbaum wrote, “America’s first woman poet. She wasn’t very good, but, bearing children and seeing them die in primitive Massachusetts, with wolves and bears and competing Indians, it is a wonder she got any writing done at all.”

I love poetry. I love science. So what better way to combine my two loves than by starting Science Poem of the Week?

Herewith DiscoBlog’s first science poem, in celebration of autumn rains and the approaching winter:

Earth’s Embroidery

By Solomon Ibn Gabirol

With the ink of its showers and rains
With the quill of its lightning, with the
Hand of its clouds, winter wrote a letter
Upon the garden, in purple and blue
No artist could conceive the like of that.
And this is why the earth, grown
Jealous of the sky, embroidered stars in
The folds of the flower beds.

Note: Solomon Ibn Gabirol was a Spanish poet, philosopher and moralist who has been called “the Jewish Plato.” He was born in Málaga in about 1021 and died in about 1058 in Valencia. His works include “‘Ana?,” a 400-verse Hebrew grammar arranged as an alphabetical acrostic, and “The Improvement of the Moral Qualities,” a treatise in which Gabirol codified a system of ethics independent of religious belief or dogma. For more of his poetry, see The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse, edited and translated by T. Carmi (Penguin, 1981.)