TEDx Poetry and Science

Poetry and Science

Slowing theTwo Cultures Continental Drift

Premises• American contemporary poetry is in a

crisis of intellectual relevance, more critical than a crisis of popularity.

• Too few poets write at The Intersection of subjective experience and science.

• Poets and poetry are increasingly marginalized at the far edge of the humanities

Why It Matters• Metaphor and analogy drawn from

science and technology are a powerful source of inspiration

• Poets – and poems – should be part of conversations about the role humans play in creating and living in a technology-enabled society

Two Cultures @ 50+

“Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

A Survey of Poets

We will survey selected poets (and a few critics) who labored at The Intersection

William Blake on NewtonBlake's opposition to the Enlightenment was deeply rooted. He wrote in his annotations to the Laocoon "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death."[4] Newton's theory of optics was especially offensive to Blake, who made a clear distinction between the vision of the "vegetative eye" and spiritual vision. The deistic view of God as a distant creator who played no role in daily affairs was anathema to Blake, who regularly experienced spiritual visions. He opposes his "four-fold vision" to the "single vision" of Newton, whose "natural religion" of scientific materialism he characterized as sterile. Newton was incorporated into Blake's infernal trinity along with the philosophers Francis Bacon and John Locke.[5] Wikipedia

Heaven, Hell, Both or ?

Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell:Now the sneaking serpent walksIn mild humility,And the just man rages in the wildsWhere lions roam.

“Incompatible”

“The aim of science is to make difficult things understandable in a simpler way; the aim of poetry is to state simple things in an incomprehensible way. The two are incompatible.” –Paul Dirac, physicist

Jorge Luis Borges: Poetry and Epistemology". . Borges style combines, and sometimes wisely jams, usually incompatible genres. A deep philosopher of poetry and poet of philosophy, Borges presents each of his writings as an ontological riddle.“ – U of Pittsburgh Borges Center

Related: S. M. Wilkins, "The infinitely iterated labyrinth: Conceivability and Higher-Order knowledge," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 1, no. 03, pp. 509-516, 2015. [Online]. Available: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2015.15

Aldous Huxley:Literature and Science (1963)

““From purification of language on the level of structural anatomy we pass to purification on what may be called the cellular and molecular levels of the paragraph, sentence and phrase. Here, for example, is Dickinson writing in “A Light Exists in Spring” about one of Nature’s mysterious apocalypses and the sense of desolation that follows a moment of vision:

A color stands abroad On solitary hills That science cannot overtaken, But human nature feels.

Czeslaw Milosz

“Epiphany is an unveiling of reality. . . Epiphany interrupts the everyday flow of time and enters as one privileged moment when we intuitively grasp a deeper, more essential reality hidden in things or persons. A poem-epiphany tells about one moment-event and this imposes a certain form.”

Loren Eiseley

. . . Perhaps it is thus in the end that the deadWithdraw to the bitter sources of the Holy LandAnd find comfort in sharp nails, harsh wood and a crownThorn-woven for penitence. I make the analogy dubiously wondering why mankind and the desert share this ultimate passion for thorns unless flesh is always a thing to be raked.

- From: “The Cacti Are Neutral”

Stanislaw Lem Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,Where dyads tred the fairy fields of Venn,Their indices bedecked from one to _n_,Commingled in an endless Markov chain!

Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,And every vector dreams of matrices.Hark to the gentle gradient of the breezeIt whispers of a more ergodic zone.

From “Cyberiad” in tr.

Frederick TurnerThe Abundant TreeI wake at anchor in this bird-flocked cove.It’s sixty years since I was given to seeDawn on Ascension Island turn to milk,Rose, lemon, pastel, all that fresh-made sea.Did Darwin feel that ancient human chillOf strange delight, after so many shores?–Or rediscover what the genes all knewAlready, in their many metaphorsOf multibranching cactus, portulaca,In lineages of iguana, seal,Great tortoise, finch, and sea lion barking there,Each species-vision vying to be real?What in the vision of that nine-year-oldThat I was then, survived to catch me now?What essence was it in the branched nerve-cellsCould live and breed so long, and if so, how?

Metaphor and Analogy“Art and poetry were seen, not as products of reason, but as ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.’ The result of [the] Romantic view was the alienation of the artist and poet from mainstream society” (p. 192).

Their choice: An “Experientialist Synthesis” in which subjectivity and objectivity are not our only choices.

Metaphor is imaginative rationality.

Seven Exercises for Tomorrow’s Intersectionists

1. Seven stunning visualizations from science 2. Seven forecasts about “the posthuman” 3. Seven hyperplanes where technology forces

objective and subjective to confront one another4. Seven poetic theses science later undermined5. Seven technology-enabled modalities for poetry6. Seven implications for learning and applying the

craft of writing poetry7. Seven weather events that could bridge the two

cultures

Mark UnderwoodMark Underwood is CEO of Krypton Brothers LLC, a consultancy specializing in Big Data security, rapid intranet exploitation, digital forensics, software quality, ontologies and domain-specific frameworks. He is an advocate for patient-managed health information. Founder or co-founder of five technology startups, he co-designed one of the earliest ambulatory care health information systems (IATROS). Underwood is the founder of PoetryandScience.org, TwoCultures.net and PoetryandTechnology. He writes poetry and performs as a multimedia (music / poetry) artist as DarkViolin. His book chapter on intranets appears in Harnessing Social Media as a Knowledge Management Tool, published in July 2016.

ContactMark [email protected] Birchwood Ave Port Washington NY 11050516.234.0076