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

[Reuben82]

Rebecca Elson's A Responsibility to Awe, written by an astronomer, works precisely because she is not translating for a lay audience. She already knows what she is looking at and the poems come from inside that knowledge

[ThreadNecro98]

The failure mode is almost always the same: science as metaphor for a human situation that could have been described without the science. If you can remove the quantum mechanics from the poem and it still says the same thing, the quantum mechanics was decorative

[Hollow Vulture]

Diane Ackerman is interesting as a case study. Clearly scientifically literate, clearly a skilled poet, but the combination sometimes produces a kind of wonder-tourism that flattens both disciplines

[Tracey]

The best contemporary science poetry tends to be written by people who have actually worked in science or are in ongoing conversation with scientists. The distance between understanding and aestheticising is shorter when you are inside the field

[BinaryMonk95]

I think prose poetry and lyric essay are often better forms for science engagement than the lyric because they can hold the discursiveness of scientific thought more naturally

[Enterprise]

Walt Whitman's catalogue poems, just listing things with appropriate wonder, turn out to be a better model for responding to scientific abundance than most explicitly science-themed work