A scientific lens: scientists deals first and directly with physical matter, discovers the parts & patterns therein, and then uses words to write down and communicate those findings to others. This is exactly what poets do, with the twist that for poets, words are also matter. A word stands in for something else, and it is a thing in itself: "Bye bye, blackbird" = as something else is the understood meaning: that a bird of a certain colour is leaving and we are hailing its departure. "Bye bye, blackbird" is also = Black marks in white emptiness, the rhythm of sounds and breath, the singing of the alphabet, the eyes moving at variable speeds through white spaces among the round and straight patterns. A poem is a landscape, a topography. All science and poetry are work: force x distance. Yet, how that gets played out is up to the one carrying the equipment: the ideas, the lenses, the language.
A great poem, a poem that works is an ecological hyper-object: its compound parts pulling together to stabilize and express a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts; on the meaning plane and on the material plane.
Results/Conclusions What I would like to do in this short time is to demonstrate how I use the patterns and named facts of the natural world "found" and "shared" by science, to manage the materiality of my poems toward a higher order of vitality, connectedness. What also matters, though, is how science might use the patterns and rhythms of the worlds of words "created" and "shared" by poetry, to better manage the various materials of their work -- whether basic research or applying for Ethics review or writing up findings or imagining next questions -- toward a higher order of vitality and connectedness. For this "demonstration" I will work with examples offered by the scientists in the room.
