Poetry Inspired by Science - What Works and What Does Not

[ScarletWrench]

There is a long tradition of poetry that engages with scientific ideas, from Lucretius through to contemporary work about cosmology, evolution and now quantum mechanics. The results vary enormously. Some of it illuminates both the science and the poetry. A lot of it is simply a poem with scientific vocabulary grafted onto it.

What makes the difference? Is it the poet's genuine understanding of the science, the willingness to sit with uncertainty rather than resolve it into metaphor, the refusal to make the science merely decorative?

Share examples of science poetry that you think works, and if you want, examples that you think fail and why.

[EventHorizon Crossing]

Lavinia Greenlaw's work on physics and light is one of the better examples because she does not try to explain the science, she inhabits the strangeness of it. The uncertainty is the subject not the vehicle