Several things dovetailed in my mind.

This blog was created for “Science Poetics,” a Chiron Studies course offered at Portland State University in spring 2013. It is a place for the class to post and respond to excerpts, quotes, articles, and poems relevant to the course. We hope that in making this blog, a discussion might take place in a community wider than our course alone can provide. Both scientist and poet attempt to understand and describe their perceptions of the world around them, and in this they share a sense of curiosity and wonder. We aim to examine relationships between science and poetry. We will consider questions such as: How does scientific discovery influence poetry? How does poetry explore science? How do each of these identities find humanity and veracity in their different approaches to understanding ‘truths’?

[sciencepoetics]

[neuroflora]

http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2013/04/29/sojourn-em-up-walden-a-game/#more-151189

“The distribution of flora and fauna you encounter isn’t actually realistic, but rather placed in accordance to how much Thoreau mentions it in Walden. In other words, the game tries to capture something far more elusive than reality. It presents you with the forest you might imagine on reading the book.”

It’s fascinating that we live in an age when one could play a video game adaptation of Walden. But this does do something neat: in approaching the daunting task of recreating Walden with new media, Tracy Fullerton and her team present Thoreau’s version of Walden Pond. The things he felt significant enough to write about. The environment through the lens of his writing. It helps that the game includes excerpts from Walden throughout.

If nothing else, I am terribly curious about this game.

[sciencepoetics]

About all the turns of the scaping from the break and flooding of the wave to run out again I have not yet satisfied myself. The shores are swimming and the eyes have before them a region of milky surf but it is hard for them to unpack the huddling and gnarls of the water and law out the shapes and the sequence of the running: I catch however the looped or forked wisp made by every pebble the backwater runs over - if it were clear and smooth there would be a network from their overlapping, such as can in fact be seen on smooth sand after the tide is out -; then I saw it run browner, the foam dwindling and twitched into long chains of suds, while the strength of the backdraught shrugged the stones together and clocked them one against another... It is pretty to see the dance and swagging of the light green tongues or ripples of waves in a place locked between rocks

Hopkins, Gerard Manley. "From Note-Books, Journal, Etc." Poems and Prose of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Ed. W. H. Gardner. Harmondworth, Middlesex, England: Penguin, 1985. 126-7.

[sciencepoetics]

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

[neuroflora]

The greater one’s science, the deeper the sense of mystery

Vladamir Nabokov (via neuroflora)

[nighthill]

If you’re in Portland, I’m doing a presentation and workshop on hypertext poetry, and we’ll make a hypertext poem together. Absolutely no computer skills required, we’re doing it all by hand.

Be prepared to hear me ramble about John Keats and Werner Heisenberg in the same breath.

Poetry, Uncertainty, and New Media: The Hypertext Poem PSU South Park Blocks (1875 SW Park) Monday, May 13th, 2013 3:30-5:00pm

[sciencepoetics]

As Richard Feynman put it, “Our imagination is stretched to the utmost, not, as in fiction, to imagine things which are not really there, but just to comprehend those things which are there.” It’s a brute fact of psychology that the human mind cannot comprehend the double-digit dimensions of string theory, or the possibility of parallel universes. Our mind evolved in a simplified world, where matter is certain, time flows forward and there are only three dimensions. When we venture beyond these innate intuitions, we are forced to resort to metaphor. This is the irony of modern physics: It seeks reality in its most fundamental form, and yet we are utterly incapable of comprehending these fundaments beyond the math we use to represent them. The only way to know the universe is through analogy.

[sciencepoetics]

From the moment when it is subjected to a methodical examination, when, by means yet to be determined, we succeed in recording the contents of dreams in their entirety (and that presupposes a discipline of memory spanning generations; but let us nonetheless begin by noting the most salient facts), when its graph will expand with unparalleled volume and regularity, we may hope that the mysteries which really are not will give way to the great Mystery. I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality, if one may so speak. It is in quest of this surreality that I am going, certain not to find it but too unmindful of my death not to calculate to some slight degree the joys of its possession.

Andre Breton

[sciencepoetics]

We are still living under the reign of logic: this, of course, is what I have been driving at. But in this day and age logical methods are applicable only to solving problems of secondary interest. The absolute rationalism that is still in vogue allows us to consider only facts relating directly to our experience. Logical ends, on the contrary, escape us. It is pointless to add that experience itself has found itself increasingly circumscribed. It paces back and forth in a cage from which it is more and more difficult to make it emerge. It too leans for support on what is most immediately expedient, and it is protected by the sentinels of common sense. Under the pretense of civilization and progress, we have managed to banish from the mind everything that may rightly or wrongly be termed superstition, or fancy; forbidden is any kind of search for truth which is not in conformance with accepted practices. It was, apparently, by pure chance that a part of our mental world which we pretended not to be concerned with any longer -- and, in my opinion by far the most important part -- has been brought back to light. For this we must give thanks to the discoveries of Sigmund Freud. On the basis of these discoveries a current of opinion is finally forming by means of which the human explorer will be able to carry his investigation much further, authorized as he will henceforth be not to confine himself solely to the most summary realities. The imagination is perhaps on the point of reasserting itself, of reclaiming its rights. If the depths of our mind contain within it strange forces capable of augmenting those on the surface, or of waging a victorious battle against them, there is every reason to seize them -- first to seize them, then, if need be, to submit them to the control of our reason.

Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism

[sciencepoetics]

If in a cluster of grapes there are no two alike, why do you want me to describe this grape by the other, by all the others, why do you want me to make a palatable grape? Our brains are dulled by the incurable mania of wanting to make the unknown known, classifiable. The desire for analysis wins out over the sentiments.** (Barrès, Proust.) The result is statements of undue length whose persuasive power is attributable solely to their strangeness and which impress the reader only by the abstract quality of their vocabulary, which moreover is ill-defined.

Andre Breton, Manifesto of Surrealism

[sciencepoetics]

Scientists are the fact-checkers for metaphors.

D.A. Powell

[sciencepoetics]

Andre Breton, a notable poet in the Surrealist movement, was heavily influenced by the works of Sigmund Freud. He was concerned with subconscious or irrational thought (or, automatic thought) rather than thought filtered through reason.

Where Dada responded to the horrors and nonsense of a society in which World War I could occur, Surrealists tried to find value in our thoughts less prone to societal constraints: dreams, association, selection of words from other texts, automatic writing.

[wheatpasted-deactivated20210127]

from A Mask in Motion by Lyn Hejinian

[sciencepoetics]

For my final project in Science Poetics, I want to develop an html lyric essay using Twine. This essay will approach the concept of uncertainty as both a physical and philosophical thing. I choose html as a medium because it allows the reader to choose their path through the text, rather than following something more linear. I think this medium demonstrates the subject matter well; the reader does not know how their experience of the essay is different from someone else's, and in fact does not necessarily experience the entire essay.

I plan to include quotes from poets and scientists that relate to the idea of uncertainty, but this project will mainly be a personal poetic work. In relating uncertainty and quantum mechanics to my own human experience, I hope to make these concepts more accessible and understandable. I want to explore the beauty and meaning that can be applied to quantum mechanics. I want to find harmony between my personal experiences and the scientific way of understanding and describing our physical surroundings.

There are many sources I can use for this, and I will take more of a scattered path than a focused one. I feel this fits well with hypertext. To circle around the essence of what I'm trying to say, rather than say it simply and directly (and losing the meaning of something that is taking me years in grappling with). I would like to read more about Werner Heisenberg, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Richard Feynman, as each of these scientists had some very fascinating philosophical viewpoints regarding quantum mechanics.

I also want to pull in poets, particularly John Keats and Emily Dickinson, who write of the shakiness about calling something "Truth."

Last year, I journaled extensively when my life was pulled out from beneath me. Being a poet obsessed with the sciences, I wrote a great deal about uncertainty in my personal experience as well as in quantum mechanics. I worried about it, obessed over it, let it consume me. I came out of this with a 44 page manuscript of erasure poems, and no clear plan for what to do with them. I think I know now where they're going. Here's the second draft.

[neuroflora]

Visit Original Link

[sciencepoetics]

Each tone, each color, has a different vibration.

Kate Greenstreet

From POG Sound, Reading at Hotel Congress, Copper Banquet Room, November 4, 2009.

[marcmanley-deactivated20140213]

It would be possible to describe everything scientifically, but it would make no sense; it would be without meaning, as if you described a Beethoven symphony as a variation of wave pressure.

Albert Einstein (Attributed to Einstein by Frau Born. Paraphrased words as given in Ronald William Clark, Einstein (1984), 243.) (via marcmanley)

[sciencepoetics]

from A Mask of Motion by Lyn Hejinian.