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lauraanne_gilmanLizard brain's awake. Vacation's over. Yay?
Cleaning up some files, and I found this essay. It was written more than a year ago, on request, and then the project was sidelined. But I kinda like it, rough and unedited as it is, so I'm going to share it here under the reasonable assumption that the project isn't ever going to get off the sidelines (and if it does, I'll probably want to rewrite this at that point, anyway)
Finding the Words Between the Stars: The Link between Poetry and Science
I’m not a poet. Not officially, anyway. I’m a prose writer who occasionally delves into poetry as a way to express things that don’t fit into fiction or non-fiction categories.
A year or so ago, inspired by a conversation I had with a friend, I wrote a series of haiku called “source material,” and sold it to this anthology. Then Madame Editor asked me to write this essay to accompany the haiku, about what led me to write ‘source material’ in the first place.
I’m not the best person to ask to deconstruct my work and intentions: I tend to think that should be left to scholars ten years after I’m dead. But I’ll give it a try.
SF poetry is an extraordinarily popular combination, and the ancient Japanese form of poetry known as haiku is second only to sonnets for usage. In fact, the haiku has become so popular that an Internet search on “Science” and “haiku” will lead you to websites dedicated to SciFiku – the haiku of science fiction.
So we know that people who like SF like to write poetry, and, presumably, people who like SF also like to read it. But that doesn’t explain the original question Julie asked – why?
Poetry and science, on the surface, seem to have nothing in common. One, after all, is about impressions, using words to create pictures in your brain. The other is about explaining what is going on around us, forming theories about the way the world, and people, work.
The question is – which description fits which form?
Huh? You’re asking yourself. What IS she going on about? Science and poetry? How can you confuse the two?
The strict form of the haiku – seventeen syllables, in three lines – makes many people assume that the material it deals with are also simple. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Haiku – in fact, almost all poetry – is about expressing the profound realization of something in the simplest of images.
Right, you’re saying. And science isn’t simple.
No, it’s not. Science – be it biology, astronomy, physics or any other discipline -- is a complex, experiment-driven, hypothesis-ridden form that expresses the profound realization of something in, well, deeply complex and complicated language you need a PhD to understand.
But do you see a similarity there?
That whole “profound realization” thing, or what scientist have long referred to as the “eureka!” moment (guess what? Writers have those moments too). When you look at something that made no sense at all, just a minute before, and then all of a sudden the words shift, and you can hear something click in your brain, and it all falls into place.
Poetry – good poetry, not just words placed in an order that makes them rhyme – does that. It uses words to rearrange your brain so that what was unclear suddenly becomes clear.
Just like, in fact, a good description of the results of a scientific experiment.
So there’s the connection – poetry and science both lead us to a deeper understanding of something previously not understood.
But, you say, the stuff they’re talking about is totally different! Science is FACT and quantifiable, or measurable. Poetry’s all about feelings and emotions and stuff like that.
Well… yes. And no.
Haiku is traditionally about nature – the passing glimpse of changing seasons, the emotions these changes evoke in us. But what, after all, is science, but the passing glimpses of the natural world?
That’s how “Source Material” came into being. A friend and I were talking one day about how we know so little about the planets in our own solar system – our closest neighbors, after all – and how what we did know kept matching up with the names the ancients had given them: Pluto, Uranus, Saturn, Mars…
And then, because my friend and I were both writers, we started talking about how the mythological names evoked certain images as well, and discussing how closely those images matched with what science was telling us now, too.
And a line came to me -- Red dust is dreaming. That was all, just the one line. Except it was a classic five syllable line, which almost begged for a seven syllable line to follow it. And that’s where the science came in --
hydrogen and oxygen.
And after that –
Solitude is dry.
A perfect description of Mars, as we knew it at the time (now, of course, the idea that Mars has or had water on its surface is more science than science fiction, but the visual still works).
I scribbled it down, stared at it, and then thought “that’s a nice haiku.” Evocative, rather than explicit. Simple, but conveying the profound realization of Mars not just as a distant planet far away, but something real, immediate – and with a chemical and spiritual personality of its own.
So, we’re back to the question asked earlier – which description fits which form?
The answer is – both. Because they’re both about wonder, and discovery, and comprehension.
Sir Isaac Newton wrote poetry in his spare time, after all.
© Laura Anne Gilman, 2007
Cleaning up some files, and I found this essay. It was written more than a year ago, on request, and then the project was sidelined. But I kinda like it, rough and unedited as it is, so I'm going to share it here under the reasonable assumption that the project isn't ever going to get off the sidelines (and if it does, I'll probably want to rewrite this at that point, anyway)
Finding the Words Between the Stars: The Link between Poetry and Science
I’m not a poet. Not officially, anyway. I’m a prose writer who occasionally delves into poetry as a way to express things that don’t fit into fiction or non-fiction categories.
A year or so ago, inspired by a conversation I had with a friend, I wrote a series of haiku called “source material,” and sold it to this anthology. Then Madame Editor asked me to write this essay to accompany the haiku, about what led me to write ‘source material’ in the first place.
I’m not the best person to ask to deconstruct my work and intentions: I tend to think that should be left to scholars ten years after I’m dead. But I’ll give it a try.
SF poetry is an extraordinarily popular combination, and the ancient Japanese form of poetry known as haiku is second only to sonnets for usage. In fact, the haiku has become so popular that an Internet search on “Science” and “haiku” will lead you to websites dedicated to SciFiku – the haiku of science fiction.
So we know that people who like SF like to write poetry, and, presumably, people who like SF also like to read it. But that doesn’t explain the original question Julie asked – why?
Poetry and science, on the surface, seem to have nothing in common. One, after all, is about impressions, using words to create pictures in your brain. The other is about explaining what is going on around us, forming theories about the way the world, and people, work.
The question is – which description fits which form?
Huh? You’re asking yourself. What IS she going on about? Science and poetry? How can you confuse the two?
The strict form of the haiku – seventeen syllables, in three lines – makes many people assume that the material it deals with are also simple. In fact, it’s just the opposite. Haiku – in fact, almost all poetry – is about expressing the profound realization of something in the simplest of images.
Right, you’re saying. And science isn’t simple.
No, it’s not. Science – be it biology, astronomy, physics or any other discipline -- is a complex, experiment-driven, hypothesis-ridden form that expresses the profound realization of something in, well, deeply complex and complicated language you need a PhD to understand.
But do you see a similarity there?
That whole “profound realization” thing, or what scientist have long referred to as the “eureka!” moment (guess what? Writers have those moments too). When you look at something that made no sense at all, just a minute before, and then all of a sudden the words shift, and you can hear something click in your brain, and it all falls into place.
Poetry – good poetry, not just words placed in an order that makes them rhyme – does that. It uses words to rearrange your brain so that what was unclear suddenly becomes clear.
Just like, in fact, a good description of the results of a scientific experiment.
So there’s the connection – poetry and science both lead us to a deeper understanding of something previously not understood.
But, you say, the stuff they’re talking about is totally different! Science is FACT and quantifiable, or measurable. Poetry’s all about feelings and emotions and stuff like that.
Well… yes. And no.
Haiku is traditionally about nature – the passing glimpse of changing seasons, the emotions these changes evoke in us. But what, after all, is science, but the passing glimpses of the natural world?
That’s how “Source Material” came into being. A friend and I were talking one day about how we know so little about the planets in our own solar system – our closest neighbors, after all – and how what we did know kept matching up with the names the ancients had given them: Pluto, Uranus, Saturn, Mars…
And then, because my friend and I were both writers, we started talking about how the mythological names evoked certain images as well, and discussing how closely those images matched with what science was telling us now, too.
And a line came to me -- Red dust is dreaming. That was all, just the one line. Except it was a classic five syllable line, which almost begged for a seven syllable line to follow it. And that’s where the science came in --
hydrogen and oxygen.
And after that –
Solitude is dry.
A perfect description of Mars, as we knew it at the time (now, of course, the idea that Mars has or had water on its surface is more science than science fiction, but the visual still works).
I scribbled it down, stared at it, and then thought “that’s a nice haiku.” Evocative, rather than explicit. Simple, but conveying the profound realization of Mars not just as a distant planet far away, but something real, immediate – and with a chemical and spiritual personality of its own.
So, we’re back to the question asked earlier – which description fits which form?
The answer is – both. Because they’re both about wonder, and discovery, and comprehension.
Sir Isaac Newton wrote poetry in his spare time, after all.
© Laura Anne Gilman, 2007
