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Chapter Ten: Science
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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195 Chapter Ten Science Perhaps that old pair of antagonists, science and poetry, can be persuaded to lie down together and be generative after all. – William Rueckert, “Literature and Ecology: An Experiment in Ecocriticism ” (107) The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been and always will be the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities – Edward O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge (8) I feel fortunate to live in a time when a growing number of scientists are increasingly inclined to consider the work of poets, and vice versa. – Gary Paul Nabhan, Cross-Pollinations: The Marriage of Science and Poetry (39) American biologist and poet Gary Paul Nabhan recalls early criticism he received from colleagues with whom he shared some of his poems: “‘If you squander all your time reading poetry,’ one mathematics teacher admonished me,‘you’ll never be able to master the rigors of science’”;“‘Your poetry will become even more unintelligible if you continue to burden your free verse with the weight of scientific terms’” (11). A scientist first and a published poet later, Nabhan eventually followed different advice, namely to “use metaphor as well as technical precision” in his writing (12). Poetry and science both offer ways of looking at the world; if the former has a unique ability to examine humans’ relation with the phenomenological world by bringing us closer to it via metaphor, the latter has the benefit of engaging more directly with the phenomenological world. Scientific language uses metaphor, yes, but arguably does so in ways that distance readers from the objects of scientific study. Between them, metaphor and scientific 196 • Chapter Ten observation—Nabhan’s“technical precision”—provide an intertextual base from which to consider how to think and write human–nonhuman relations. In“Landscape,Untitled,”CanadiancriticJohnMossarguesthat“[t]hrough words the poet merges the experience of things and things themselves”(66). Of course, the poet’s primary dilemma then becomes deciding which words will enact a successful merging of experience and things. I have been arguing that if the poet writes about ecological relations, as McKay does, then field guides and scientific texts provide an ample, species-specific, and ecologically accurate vocabulary.“If appropriate language is not at the poet’s command ,” according to Moss,“then the world from his or her perspective and for those who share it is quite literally beyond comprehension” (66). For McKay, no language, no word, seems appropriate enough; McKay’s “gift for metaphor” (Coles 55–58) vies with his persistent uneasiness with the supposed authority of human language to produce objective knowledge. As a result, his poetry often speaks to a desire for an ecologically attuned mode of thinking, and it draws upon both symbolic and scientifically accurate language to celebrate the phenomenological world while simultaneously admitting the impossibility of ever fully knowing the species and objects it describes. McKay is searching for the “appropriate gesture” that approximates a merging of things and their ideas (“Appropriate”44–61). East-coast Canadian writer John Steffler echoes Moss’s claim regarding poetry’s interest “in human experience, in capturing what feel like the important moments in being both human and part of the world”(49). In expressing the merging Moss refers to and capturing the moments Steffler refers to,“poetry’s basic method might seem not very different from that of science. Both involve observation,analysis,and some form of expression or reporting”(Steffler 49). I agree with Steffler’s basic argument regarding the similarities between science and poetry, but I take issue with his use of the term “method”: poetry has no method like the scientific method. However, both science and poetry need to use language to communicate their observation and analysis. American poet Alison Hawthorne Deming usefully points out a key difference in what scientists and poets expect from language. Although metaphor and narrative have been used by poets and scientists alike to articulate “the unknown, to develop an orderly syntax to represent accurately some carefully seen aspect of the world,” scientists have a tendency to count on the uncomplicated specificity of words’ literal meanings (188). Deming describes this paradox as a “beautiful particularity and musicality of the vocabulary,”even if poets and scientists tend to use language in distinctively different ways (185). If scientists use words with as much precision as possible to articulate something of the unknown (even if their use of metaphor [34.230.66.177] Project...