Uncertainty and Plenitude: Five Contemporary Poets

Notes

Notes INTRODUCTION 1. DeFrees' essay', "Resolution and Independence: John Berryman and the Meaning of Life," appears in the Gettysburg Review (Winter 1996), 9-29. 2. My experiences with John Berryman's skills as a teacher are recounted in my essay "John Berryman: His Teaching, His Scholarship, His Poetry," in Recovering Berryman.: Essays on a Poet, ed. Richard J. Kelly and Alan K. Lathrop (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 43-56. 3. In his book The Cosmic Code: Quantum Physics as the Language of Nature, physicist Heinz Pagels applies this understanding back to the macrophysical world: "Science shows us that the visible world is neither matter nor spirit; the visible world is the invisible organization of energy" (New York: Bantam Books, 1982), 312. 4. Pagels, 67-68. For humanist readers who are interested in this topic, I would like to recommend two additional sources. The first is the entry "Quantum Mechanics, Philosophical Implications of," by Norwood Russell Hanson, in The Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy, vol. 7, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan & Free Press, 1967), 41-49. On the death of determinism, Hanson (a philosopher ) says: "Such rules as do structure quantum mechanics run clearly counter to any metaphysical preconceptions familiar to philosophers with a nineteenthcentury outlook. Therefore, it becomes a reasonable metaphysical possibility that nature is fundamentally indeterministic; that elementary particles are, ontologically , ahvays in partially defined states; that they do not in any sense that is scientifically respectable and philosophically intelligible have both a precise position and an exact energy" (46). The other source.is one that I will be referring to several times in my argument to corne; although it was written almost seventy years ago, P. G. Bridgman 's article "The New Vision of Science" is - according to Robert P. Crease and Charles C. Mann, authors of The Second Creation: Makers ofthe Revolution in 20th-Century Physics (New York: Macmillan, 1986), 71-an "exposition of quantum mechanics for the nonphysicist as good as any that has been published in the intervening six decades." Bridgman defines the death of deter- minism in a somewhat different way, by pointing out that «The same situation confronts the physicist everywhere; whenever he penetrates to the atomic or electronic level in his analysis, he finds things acting in a way for which he can assign no cause, for which he never can assign a cause, and for which the concept of cause has no meaning, if Heisenberg's principle is right" (Harper's [March 1929],448). Many excellent books have been written on this subject for general readers. I do think that Pagels gives the best account, and the book by Crease and Mann mentioned above is excellent. I also recommend In Search of Shrodinger's Cat by John Gribbin (New York: Bantam Books, 1984), Quantum Reality by Nick Herbert (Garden City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1985), Taking the Quantum Leap by Fred Alan Wolf (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981), The Structure ofScientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962; 1970), and Quantum Profiles by Jeremy Bernstein (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991). Two somewhat more fanciful but still interesting books are The Tao ofPhysics by Fritjof Capra (New York: Bantam Books, 1977) and The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav (New York: William Morrow, 1979). Another essential text is Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg (New York: Harper & Row, 1958), though readers should certainly not begin their studies with it. 5. The first quote is from Pagels, 69; the second and third are from Pagels, 76. 6. Pagels, 73. 7. Bridgman, 446. 8. Charles Simic, "Negative Capability and Its Children," in The Uncertain Certainty : Interviews, Essays and Notes on Poetry (Ann Arbor: University ofMichigan Press, 1985), 91. JOHN ASHBERY 1. Robert Boyers, "A Quest without an Object," Times Literary Supplement (1 September 1978), 962. After quoting these sentiments, Marjorie Perloff replied in exasperation: "This is to regard meaning as some sort of fixed quantity (like two pounds of sugar or a dozen eggs) that the poet as speaker can either (leave out' or proffer to the expectant auditor with whom he is engaged in (shared discourse'" (The Poetics ofIndeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981], 255). 2. See Lieberman's "John Ashbery: Unassigned Frequencies: Whispers Out of Time," in his Unassigned Frequencies: American Poetry in Review, 1964-1977 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977),3-61. 184 : NOTES TO PAGES 11-20 3. David Shapiro, John Ashbery: An...