Science Poem of the Week (8)

Josie Glausiusz — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (7)

Josie Glausiusz — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (6)

Josie Glausiusz — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 16:00:00 +0000

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

Science Poem of the Week (5)

Josie Glausiusz — Mon, 20 Nov 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (4)

Josie Glausiusz — Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:00:00 +0000

“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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (3)

Josie Glausiusz — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (2)

Josie Glausiusz — Fri, 27 Oct 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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 ...

Science Poem of the Week (1)

Josie Glausiusz — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 22:00:00 +0000

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.)

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Science Poem of the Week (8)

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Science Poem of the Week (1)