Poetry, Science and the Contemporary University
I
My last contact with the Irish-American poet Michael Donaghy occurred not long before his death in 2004. Donaghy agreed to take part in a project I was organising on ‘Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science’, and met Professor Kevin Warwick, a ‘cyborg researcher’ who had had a silicon chip transponder surgically implanted in his left arm. Michael was taken aback by all this, but gave as good as he got. Writing a poem in response to the experience of meeting this scientist, he entitled it ‘Grimoire’. A grimoire is a magician’s manual for invoking demons – hardly a familiar word nowadays. As Professor Warwick honestly responded when he first saw the poem, ‘“Grimoire”. What the hell did that mean?’ (Crawford, ed., 2006, 48). Like many other poets, Michael Donaghy delighted in the ability of poetic language to conjure. Yet when he met a man who seemed to him a scientific conjuror, he was unsettled. Poets and scientists are sometimes more surprised by similarities between their activities than by differences. Yet often they develop an innate respect for the distinctions that remain between poetry and science, distinctions that academia ought to respect, though not necessarily to regard as in every sense absolute.
Kevin Warwick writes of working with Michael as ‘a deeply moving experience’ and of how ‘Through Michael’s words I was able to look at myself in a ten-dimensional space’. He also goes on to say, ‘I will press ahead even if others are horrified’ (Crawford, ed., 2006, 49). Like Miroslav Holub, Michael Donaghy contributed to the book of essays and poems Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science but died before it appeared and so became also one of the people to whom that volume is dedicated. Of all the poets, academic literary critics and university scientists who met and worked together in the making of the book, Michael produced probably the most sophisticatedly uneasy response, and its complexly nuanced unease makes it memorable. So it seems appropriate to invoke his work at the start of an essay on poetry, science and the contemporary university, and, at the end of this essay, to return to the final, short section of ‘Grimoire’.
The topic of poetry, science and the university is scarcely new. It fascinated, for instance, the British Renaissance poet who, in his own lifetime, enjoyed the greatest European reputation. George Buchanan was hailed by some as easily the leading poet of the age, but, because he wrote in Latin, his work is now largely sidelined. In his long poem De Sphaera (On the Planet), he hymned:
Macti animi, heroes, seclis melioribus orti,
Qui primi ingenii nixi pernicibus alis,
Perque leves vecti stellas, totque orbibus orbes
Implicitos, magni intrastis penetralia coeli […]
Master minds, born in a better age,
Spirits whose nimble intellectual wings
First flew you through light stars, then through so many
Circles within circles to go deep
Into the furthest reaches of deep space –
(Buchanan and Johnston, 2006, 66–67)
Buchanan is here celebrating scientists and science – not a surprising thing for a Renaissance man to do, though his De Sphaera is based on the medieval De Sphaera Mundi of Sacrobosco, the English mathematician John Halifax, whose own work derives from Ptolemy and from Arab mathematics. Buchanan’s hymn to science is thus anti-Copernican, and so raises a question that recurs today: does obsolete science render poetry about it obsolete? I don’t think it does, if the poetry is good, but that in turn tips us towards the ‘ontological problem’ highlighted by Michael Whitworth at the start of his study of literature and science, Einstein’s Wake: ‘faced with two terms [such as poetry and science] which are commonly understood as antithetical, we must explain in what sense we are comparing like with like’ (2001, 1).
One can turn this on its head and say that the whole point of bringing together poetry and science is that they are unlike. Though they share elements, such as imaginative discovery, a need for nuanced calibration and (often) a structured articulation of rhythmic interconnectednesss, it is their unlikeness as much as what they share which is the source of imaginative challenge and excitement for us now, as it has been for many generations. Buchanan’s neo-Latin example may prompt the reflection that even older classical texts like Hesiod’s Greek Works and Days and Virgil’s Latin Georgics have their scientific aspects; but more than that, Buchanan’s work is a reminder that it is hardly new for poets to have a productive, and sometimes spiky, relationship with universities. For Buchanan was not only the schoolteacher who taught Montaigne in France; he was also a university academic in France, in Portugal and in his native Scotland. His poetry draws on older and on contemporary ‘scientia’ – knowledge – and he lived in a period when it was not unusual for Scottish universities to be run by poets: Arthur Johnston at Aberdeen, Andrew Melville at Glasgow and Buchanan himself at St Andrews are all examples of that. In that age of ‘scientia’, though, universities both before and after the Reformation were as firmly tied to the sacred as they are now to modern scientific rationality and the capitalist system. It may be easier for poets to gravitate towards the sacred than towards the scientific, and a challenge for poets in an age of contemporary science may be in negotiating with that sense of the sacred which was once central to academia but is now at best vestigial to it, at the same time as inhabiting a world where the paradigms of science are paramount.
It is easy to get entangled in high-minded woolliness over all this, and, however much contributors to a 1985 anthology produced under the auspices of the American Association for the Advancement of Science may contend that ‘The intersection of the two [poetry and science] represents the full dimension of the human psyche’ (Gordon, ed., 1985, ix), in the end it is the making of individual poems that counts. In a book called The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s, I have argued that the relationship between the making of poetry and the university teaching of English literary texts is much older than is usually realised. Robert Fergusson is as much part of it as W. H. Auden, Marianne Moore as much as John Burnside. In his mid-eighteenth-century ‘Elegy, On the Death of Mr David Gregory, late Professor of Mathematics in the University of St Andrews’, Fergusson (Robert Burns’s favourite Scottish poet) wrote of ‘surd roots’ in frisky ‘Standard Habbie’ – surely introducing the term ‘surd roots’ to poetry for the first time (1954–56, II, 1). Burnside in our own day writes in his poem ‘Science’ of ‘a sine wave of grace and attunement’, the vowels of ‘wave’ and ‘grace’ playing off against each other while the polysyllabic ‘attunement’ counterbalances all the preceding monosyllables (1995, 3). These usages are not just curiosities but integrated parts of the music of their respective poems; they help create that music and make it more interesting by their deftly managed mixture of appropriateness and unexpectedness – their adventurous justness. For poets to be drawn to science through their contact with academic learning is not unusual in the last three centuries, though an example like Buchanan’s is a reminder that the link between poets, scientists and universities is older still. So it should not be seen as new-fangled, gimmicky or some cash-led offshoot of hastily erected creative writing programmes. For poets to write of science is part of a deep need, a hunger for words, ‘scientia’ and attunement with the larger and the more microscopic rhythms of creation. Universities can help create the environment and opportunities where that need comes to be addressed and answered.
In large measure my interest in poetry and science comes from my poetic practice. Not least it has been bound up with poems in my first collection, A Scottish Assembly, where Scotland is presented as a ‘Semiconductor country, land crammed with intimate expanses’ (1990, 42), and I took a certain glee in using, sometimes metaphorically and sometimes not, words like ‘superlattices’ and ‘optoelectronics’ in a lyric context. Yet there are also larger arguments about poetry and science which can nourish an individual poet’s work and supply a context for it. The need to write of science comes in part from a realisation that nothing should be off-limits to poetry, unless we want poetry to become a sort of weekend activity, rather than something which addresses the central concerns of our lives. Love, sex, religion, death are among such concerns – but so is knowledge, which can relate to all of these yet also range far beyond them. In an age so obsessed with information and with knowledge as our own, poetry needs to engage, however obliquely, with these preoccupations. It has tended to do so in two ways: through opposition and through attempts at a linguistic interaction between the language and procedures of science and those of poetry.
To put it this way is too diagrammatic and polarises things too much. All language is available to the poet. However, there is often an assumption that some words – bird, star, grass – are for poetry, whereas long numbers or words like ‘musculocutaneous’ are for science alone. That is why when a poem successfully uses a long number (as does Michel Deguy’s remarkable French war poem ‘Passim’), or when a poem successfully uses a word such as ‘musculocutaneous’ for the first time (as does Hugh MacDiarmid’s famous poem of parturition ‘To a Friend and Fellow Poet’), something is added to poetry. If artistic expression does not shift in this way, then it becomes subtly divorced from contemporary knowledge, and so from the contemporary world – as Wordsworth realised in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads when he wrote not just about older poetic diction but also attended to the sort of scientific diction associated with mineralogy.
It could be argued that it is good for poetry to sound antique: poetry is about the eternal verities, and should avoid slipping on the emperor’s new clothes. The truth of this may appear self-evident. In Sappho’s beautiful fragment on the evening star –
Hesperus, you ferry home all bright dawn scattered,
You ferry home the sheep, you ferry home the goat, you ferry the child
home to mother
(Crawford, 2008, 33)
– the appeal comes from a sense of repeated shape and immediacy that permits recognition across a gap of two and a half millennia: a confirmation of something constant in our humanity. Yet whether Sappho’s lines are translated by Anne Carson or Michael Longley or by other contemporary poets, their perceived antiquity is part of the work’s appeal. Its relationship with our own age is moving in terms of continuities, but also nuanced disjunctions. In our era of radioastronomy we still write about stars, but no longer talk or sing to them in quite the same way; we are much further off than Sappho from shepherding and goat-herding; and motherhood is for us not only continuous with what we know of the experience of motherhood in ancient Greek societies but also differently inflected in many of the social assumptions which now surround it. There is a danger, perhaps, that we construe rationality and science as somehow masculine in gender, but few kinds of science have impacted more on contemporary poetry than those sciences associated with gynaecology and childbirth, so that scientifically tinctured poems about childbirth have become almost a genre of their own, not only for women poets but for men also; ‘The Baby Poem Industry Poem’, W. N. Herbert calls it, explaining with a complicit and accusatory wink in my direction, ‘Sensitive male minus labour pains equals poem’ (1998, 73).
Obviously, childbirth is not a new phenomenon, but shifts in attitudes to gender as well as scientific advances have made it available to poets in new ways. This has happened not just as regards overall subject matter, but also with regard to the most essential element of poetry: words. Some of the words associated with modern birthing techniques have a clear appeal for poets – the word ‘scan’ for instance might be found in more poems of the 1990s to refer to pregnancy than to poetic scansion, but its allure is clear. As science and technology make available new senses of familiar words, poets not infrequently gravitate towards them. But perhaps more interesting is when scientific terms are taken into poetry as part of what seems a challenge – a wish or instinct to extend the range of verse while at the same time acknowledging a certain risked awkwardness in using scientific vocabulary – a risk that, when it comes off, can add to the resonance of the poem.
A good example of this in recent verse is the use of the word ‘uterine’. In the Oxford English Dictionary all the citations for that word come from prose, usually, unsurprisingly, from medical prose written by men in an age when men were the only doctors. Though one could hallucinate the word being used in such eighteenth-century verse curiosities as Dr John Armstrong’s The Art of Preserving Health, I don’t think it is. ‘Uterine’ is not a word that could be imagined readily in Romantic poetry, where its insertion would have the effect of detonating a transcendent line in much the same way that Euripides inserts the phrase ‘a little bottle of oil’ to detonate the grander lines of Aeschylus in Aristophanes’s poetry-play The Frogs. The word ‘uterine’ must have sounded impossible for poetry until this last century, and I’m prepared to bet that its first significant use in modern verse is in MacDiarmid’s remarkable ‘To a Friend and Fellow Poet’, with its ‘all-else-consuming / Process of uterine expansion’.
MacDiarmid’s poem, with its use of the parturition process of a guinea worm as a metaphor for the making of poetry, is disconcerting on several levels. One of these is the level of gender. The poem is dedicated to Ruth Pitter. Pitter’s own poetry deals with an extravaganza of bugs and beasties that includes spiders, coffin-worms and caterpillars, but some readers have felt unhappy that in MacDiarmid’s poem there seems to be a too easy appropriation of female experience in order to arrestingly present male creative power. The male is clearly fascinated by enunciating in scientific language the way in which
The worm’s whole musculocutaneous coat
Thus finally functions as a uterus, forcing the uterine tube
With its contents through her mouth.
But, rather than letting that image simply stand and resonate in this poem, which as Michael Whitworth (personal communication) has now proved is modified from a scientific account, MacDiarmid – having set out how
[…] when the prolapsed uterus ruptures
The protruded and now collapsed portion shrivels to a thread
– cannot stop himself from finger-waggingly interrupting this account with his exclamatory parenthesis ‘(Alexander Blok’s utter emptiness after creating a poem!)’, so that the female process of giving birth seems there to explain the male poet’s triumph in a poem whose last word is not about guinea worms but about the ‘fame’ of poets. To be fair to MacDiarmid, his talk of ‘we poets’ towards the end of the poem presumably includes not just Blok and MacDiarmid himself but also Ruth Pitter, the ‘Friend and Fellow Poet’ whom he is addressing; but his poem is unsettling not only in terms of its vocabulary and subject matter, but also because of its naked preoccupation with fame. This may not weaken the poem, or detract from the daring way MacDiarmid has taken over scientific vocabulary, but it produces a certain wariness in the reader.
When the word ‘uterine’ is used in more recent poetry, its scientific, apparently ‘unpoetic’ resonance is likely to remain, but along with that can come a stronger, more critical awareness of gender politics, as manifested in Lavinia Greenlaw’s poem ‘The Gift of Life’, from her collection Night Photograph. The poem’s subtitle, ‘Dr William Pancoast, Philadelphia 1884’, refers to a particular historical individual and it seems clearly in part (though only, I would suggest, in part) the product of research by Greenlaw. Presented as a male monologue, the poem, especially in its last sentence, is a critique of the male ego, and the male scientific ego in particular. ‘The Gift of Life’ makes assured use of the ‘unpoetic’ sound of phrases like ‘limited production of sperm’, and words such as ‘uterine’, so that their coldness comes as a weapon, carrying a charge of its own which makes Greenlaw’s poem all the stronger as it delivers its cold, first-person account of how ‘In March I inseminated the wife / of a Quaker merchant who was childless’. Throughout this account of artificial insemination using ‘a rubber syringe’, scientific vocabulary is linked to an oppressively male perspective in a poem about playing God in a society where women are clearly secondary and linked with ‘agricultural livestock’. Greenlaw’s poem may have learned from Browning as well as from feminist thinking, but it has also learned from the vocabulary and history of science. It is strong, but also researched, part perhaps of a feminist interrogation of the history of medical and other kinds of science which has been a discernible strand in recent poetry and which links Greenlaw’s poem ‘Galileo’s Wife’ to Carol Ann Duffy’s ‘Mrs Galileo’, for instance.
Yet to see science and its terminology simply as oppressively male may be ultimately limiting. This poem states more, implies less, than some of Greenlaw’s other work. Certainly if we gender scientific terminology or thinking as masculine, then the effect will be to restrict the way these elements can be used in poetry. Interestingly, when Kathleen Jamie uses the word ‘uterine’ in her poem ‘The Glass-Hulled Boat’ from her 2004 collection The Tree House, while it carries perhaps a low-voltage disturbance, it is also made thoroughly part of something meditative and lyrical, so that this scientific term is no longer, as in MacDiarmid’s or Greenlaw’s poems, part of a poem of deliberate argument, so much as of a poem that seems, for all its precise balance and observation, more inwardly focused, less methodologically researched, more dreamed:
First come the jellyfish:
mauve-fringed, luminous bowls
like lost internal organs,
pulsing and slow.
Then in the green gloom
swaying sideways and back
like half-forgotten ancestors
– columns of bladderwrack.
It’s as though we’re stalled in a taxi
in an ill-lit, odd
little town, at closing time,
when everyone’s maudlin
and really, ought just to go
home, you sorry inclining
pillars of wrack, you lone,
vaguely uterine jellyfish
– whom I almost envy:
spun out, when our engines churn,
on some sudden new trajectory,
fuddled, but unperturbed.
This is a subtler and in many ways a more traditional poem than those of MacDiarmid and Greenlaw. It does not seem to have been ‘researched’ in a book as theirs do, and could not be tracked down to any source in science or the history of science. It does contain some moments in the diction that could be called ‘scientific’ – the phrase ‘internal organs’, the word ‘uterine’ and perhaps the word ‘trajectory’ – but these have become part of the mode of lyricism. The word ‘uterine’ no longer sounds as if it must be forever exiled from lyric possibilities. We can still hear it as scientific, but when this oddly blurring yet precisely phrased poem speaks of – and even to – ‘you lone, / vaguely uterine jellyfish // – whom I almost envy’, the tone carries both strangeness and fondness. The word ‘uterine’ is being absorbed into mainstream lyric tradition. Without poems such as those of MacDiarmid and Greenlaw, this might not have been possible. Their poems may be more daring than Jamie’s, though I would argue that hers is more beautiful, especially in the way it floats in and out of rhyme, flotationally patterned not just with intermittent end-rhyme but with subtle internal rhymes and acoustic pick-ups as in ‘ill-lit’ and ‘little’ in the third stanza. One thing that has happened is that the word ‘uterine’, seen in the second (1989) edition of the OED very much as a prose scientific term, has become by now an element of lyric poetry.
Examples like this are important if poetry in our day is to take cognisance of the scientific world of which it is part, and to present both the continuities and discontinuities that characterise our time’s relationship with earlier times. On occasion it may be that the presence of scientific terms may hybridise, play off against, or strengthen the lyric; it would be hard, though, to contend that Jamie’s use of the word ‘uterine’ represents a coarsening of the lyric impulse. Some might argue that lyric poetry in our era of science, technology and information glut is bankrupt, fuddy-duddy, used-up, and that what is needed is an avant-garde breaking of the contract with the mainstream reader, a replacing of old-fashioned rhetorics of personal love, death, sex, religion or stargazing with new, formally disruptive juxtapositions of textuality driven by the languages of science, economics, politics. This can be presented as an avant-garde strategy, but also as a ghetto strategy which assumes an almost apartheidlike divide between our scientific age and earlier ages, between our sense of being human and theirs, so that our ‘post-human’ information age is held to demand a rebarbatively technocratic, machined discourse in absolute opposition to traditional lyric and so to stand apart from all but a carefully filtered version of the history of modernism. Vincent Mosco (2004) cautions us that the sort of claims made for our own electronic age – that distance and space are being abolished by communications technology that dissolves national boundaries and produces information overload – were also made for the earlier technologies of what was once known as the age of radio. We should be wary of claims or implications that our era is so different from all others that it demands a ‘post-human’ poetry; or, as Michael Donaghy used to like to put it, we should not confuse poetry with typing.
The approach of a poet such as Jamie is very different from, let’s say, that of the so-called ‘Cambridge School’, and she uses modern scientific terminology extremely sparingly, but use it she does. Her sequence of poems ‘Ultrasound’ in her 1999 collection Jizzen acknowledges the everyday modern world of ‘nappies / carried from the automatic / in a red plastic bucket’, but relies generally on older, more poetically earthed imagery, deftly deployed as in the title poem of the sequence, with its fresh lineation of a well known Burns song,
Oh whistle and I’ll come to ye,
my lad, my wee shilpit ghost
summoned from tomorrow.
That relineation marks a realignment in which ‘my lad’ becomes less a lover than a potential child, the ‘wee shilpit [skinny] ghost’ seen on a foetal scan. The relineation breaks or readjusts the old (the Burns song) but does not enact a complete break from it. The presence of the scientific register enhances a thematic realignment which keeps the resonances of the old, but also reorients them. All the scanning imagery of this tactful, emotionally complex poem, with its ‘second sight’, its ‘seer’s mothy flicker’ and its ‘inner sprite’, is given an enlivening contemporary adjustment by being played off against the scientifically but also acoustically beguiling title ‘Ultrasound’. That title gives new meaning to ‘second sight’, refreshes the sense of a Pandora who ‘scanned / her dark box’ and reinvigorates the phrase ‘a net of sound’. Science here provides new metaphors and gives a fresh accent to old images. The technology is made to resonate metaphorically on frequencies that are both new and familiar.
Jamie would not be thought of by many people as a poet of science, and I suspect she does not regard herself in that light; she might be more readily thought of as an eco-poet, for instance, travelling on the green line, but ultimately she is simply and fully a poet. To go hunting for poets who wear their science always and only on their sleeve would be simplistic. Some aspects of science and its terminology are likely to be part of the work of most poets writing today.
II
There may be an irony in my juxtaposing these poems by MacDiarmid, Greenlaw and Jamie, which all in their way involve an awareness of the scientific. The most academic-sounding work of the three (clearly because it comes from a scientific text) is MacDiarmid’s, though MacDiarmid was substantially an autodidact and attended no university. Greenlaw studied literature and printing, though her ‘family are all doctors and scientists’ and, believing that today ‘artists also feel a greater sense of affinity with scientists because of their increasing understanding and experience of technology’, she went on to hold a residency at the Science Museum in London, which gave rise to her article ‘Unstable Regions: Poetry and Science’ in the collection of essays Cultural Babbage (Greenlaw, 1995, 79; 1996). Jamie, who has been a university teacher of creative writing for over a decade, is probably the least academic-sounding in her poem. What this suggests, surely, is that it may be the poet outside academia who hungers most for academic and scientific knowledge, while the poet who works within or has an ongoing relationship with academia instinctively and often with care ensures that his or her work does not become desiccated and ‘academic’ in the wrong sense. Counterbalancing is a vital part of any poet’s juggling of dreams and responsibilities, not least at a time when almost all universities where literature is studied have their quota of ‘creative writers’.
This is an issue which now faces many poets, though it may be usefully focused when we consider the relationship between poetry and the most obviously academic disciplines such as science: there are many amateur poets, but few amateur solar physicists or biochemists. The sort of ‘professionalisation’ which modern academia assumes may not always be beneficial to poets, though poets are expected to cope with academic professionalisation and follow its procedures, to substitute at times a culture of institutional auditing for one of attentive, cultured listening. Indeed, in the last few decades, these very procedures of professionalised auditing have done more than almost anything else to encourage universities in Britain and Northern Ireland to go out of their way to hire poets, bringing them into their processes of scientifically managed audit, so that it is hard now to think of leading universities in these islands that do not have poets on their staffs.
On the universities’ part this is frequently less a gesture of artistic sponsorship than an economically motivated piece of strategic game-playing. The Research Assessment Exercise or RAE which over two decades totted up and graded universities’ research activities, and particularly their publications, in terms of the perceived quality of work produced over a set period, encouraged universities to hire people who could be relied on to deliver high-quality publications, and universities have come to realise that writers are just such people. ‘Creative writing’, which until just over a decade ago was still regarded as a somewhat unusual area within British university English departments, has now become their fastest-growing field. Some time ago creative writing was recognised as something students wanted to study, and which creative writers were the very people to teach. Since many successful novelists did not need to take on this sort of work, but, the questionable quality of ‘success’ in poetry being what it is, ‘successful’ poets did, poets entered British academia in far greater numbers than before. Yes, there had been poet-academics for centuries, but never in such quantities. What made these new entrants economically valuable was not just student demand and hard-to-measure kinds of ‘kudos’, but the RAE’s definition of ‘research’ as ‘to be understood as original investigation undertaken in order to gain knowledge and understanding’ and including ‘the invention and generation of ideas, images, performances and artefacts including design, where these lead to new or substantially improved insights’ (Higher Education Funding Council of England, 1999, section 1.11).
So it was that a good poem (or story, or play) came to be ‘eligible output’ in terms of university ‘research’. The RAE, according to whose results much UK university research funding was allocated, was driven by the big money needed to pursue scientific work. It is highly unlikely that the RAE’s definers of ‘research’ had poetry in mind when they formulated their definitions – which elsewhere refer to such things as ‘the needs of commerce and industry’ – any more than they had in mind the study of Byzantine history. Yet this RAE definition of research was a godsend in terms of poets getting jobs in British universities. Where earlier generations sought entry to school teaching, the BBC or arts administration in order to make a living, today the universities are the most poet-friendly employers. Though some institutions have tried to hire poets as cheap labour on hourly wages, canny universities realised that such poets would not count in terms of research assessment, since they were not long-term employees. On the other hand, ambitious ‘research-intensive’ universities realised that if they had good poets on their long-term payroll then, provided these people could teach, their employers might succeed both in terms of answering clear student demand and in terms of maximising RAE scores. For poets, so long as they learned to call themselves ‘researchers’ and sound as scientific as they could when necessary (something made easier by a proliferation of how-to-write-poetry books addressed to creative writing classes), this seemed at times something of a bonanza. Nothing quite like it had happened before in Britain or Ireland outside of ancient bardic colleges. When Hugh MacDiarmid, living as Scotland’s most distinguished poet in a small grace-and-favour cottage without mains drainage, had to rely on the generosity of students from Glasgow University Communist Association, who came and dug in proper sanitation, it probably never occurred to him that one day in Scotland poets might be among such students’ professors, with terms and conditions to match. For Edwin Morgan at the University of Glasgow a generation later, such a situation was perhaps imaginable, but Morgan was regarded by many in his university as an asset more for his conventionally academic, pedagogical and administrative gifts than for his poetry. Creative writing was not then part of the syllabus. For Morgan’s one-time student Tom Leonard (later a professor at Glasgow) the situation was radically different, thanks to the advent of widespread creative writing teaching at British universities and the effects of the RAE.
Yet it is probably on a generation of poets now in their thirties, forties and early fifties that the developing relationship between poetry and the universities has had the widest and most thoroughgoing effect. It is increasingly hard to think of well known British poets of the generation born from the later 1950s onwards who do not hold some sort of academic appointment. Almost a third of my colleagues at St Andrews University have published books of creative writing. This may be unusual, but it is not wildly so. The writing of poetry is now part of the mainstream of British university English departments. As far as the view taken by some universities and funding bodies goes, the writing of poetry, it sometimes seems, is becoming not just ‘research’ but ‘science’.
One can see this at its most extreme in aspects of the behaviour of research funding. As the United Kingdom’s Arts and Humanities Research Council mapped itself awkwardly and sometimes damagingly on to the other research councils, it moved towards a use of the word ‘science’ to embrace its own activities. This rightly discomfited many humanities scholars, who felt pressures to be herded into teams and go for big-money block research grants of the sort familiar in the sciences, but the notion of presenting poetry as a form of scientific activity is at its most extreme when a Research Council insists that poets applying for grants outline their ‘research methodology’. It is possible to try to do this in ways which are deemed acceptable but – having done so, and having gratefully taken the money – I think there are also dangers inherent in a too easy assumption that poetry is ‘research’ or even ‘science’.
If this assumption really is what the financial relationship between poetry and academia currently requires, then it needs on the part of both poets and academics a kind of code-switching, a double life where the poet in one guise talks the managerial language of funding streams and research methodologies and in another, more instinctive, crafty and crafting existence actually makes poems. One could get too precious about this – after all, poets should have to cope with life’s little forms just like everyone else and some poets (such as Michael Longley, working for the Arts Council of Northern Ireland) have had to cope with big forms as well – but we need to be wary lest the financial and intellectual relationship between poetry, academia and science turns out to be a Faustian pact. By having poetry viewed as ‘research’, poets have gained not just admission but acceptance in academia as practitioners and teachers of creative writing, but the price of that admission may be to have to present their work for official purposes as if it were science.
This may work for a time, as a short-term fix, but in the longer run it will result either in an angry recognition (perhaps on both sides) of the phoniness of the situation, with a backlash from the scientists as well as from the poets; or – and this would be far more damaging for poetry as an art form – in the acceptance on the part of some poets that their art must conform to the expectations of managers and funders in appearing research-like, methodologically explicit, scientific. Only bad poets, I suggest, will accept this, but if bad though obligingly well behaved poets gain an ascendancy in the universities (where quasi-scientific difficulty is always an easier commodity to peddle than clarity or lyricism), then the relationship between academia and poetry will be seriously soured, embittered and increasingly hostile.
It is up to all involved in the relationship – poets, literary critics, students, funding bodies, managers – to be sufficiently imaginative to ensure that this does not happen. Immediately, we need an understanding that sometimes when poets appear spiky in academia they are not simply acting as prima donnas, but may be defending the integrity of the art they practise – an art that has duties to language and speech communities which necessarily extend way beyond the walls of the academy. Funding bodies and literary critics need to find ways to deal with poets and poetry that show greater respect for the medium; and here they might learn from Arts Councils and other bodies which, for all their faults, have had more experience in the field.
III
There are more valuable and more idealistic ways in which poets and poetry can play a part in the culture of academic research than simply pretending that poetry is a science, to be treated in just the same way as biochemistry or the physics of vulcanology. It is in this more idealistic spirit that the project which resulted in the book Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science was dreamed up, and, though it is important to be aware of the risks – the potentially damaging power play between poetry and an academia whose modern paradigm is almost always scientific rather than rooted in the humanities or creative arts – I think poets need to come to terms with the sciences in a rather idealistic way.
Probably if I had been better organised, less idealistic, more practical, Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science would not have taken eight years to constellate. But the idealism behind that book does have a philosophical grounding which relates to the position of poetry and creative writing in the contemporary university. For the book’s intellectual co-ordinates relate much more to the Scottish philosophy of George Elder Davie, expressed in such books as The Democratic Intellect (1961) and The Crisis of the Democratic Intellect (1986), and to the poetry and essays of Edwin Morgan than to the C. P. Snow of the notorious ‘two cultures’ debate. Grounded in the Scottish university tradition, Davie’s work sees humanities and sciences in a productive relationship, whose common denominator was philosophy. Today, it may be possible to suggest that it is the creative arts, and not least poetry, which are free to move between humanities and sciences, and even at times to link them up – as imagination constantly links disparate things. The case might most easily be made in the visual arts – from works which are nurtured by genetics, say, or cartography – but it extends to literature also. Though the distinctive Scottish intellectual tradition as outlined by Davie has largely gone (a victim, Davie argues, of Anglicisation, but perhaps as much a casualty of corporate management and relentless specialism, a sealed modularisation of the academic mind), elements of Davie’s Scottish tradition remain visible. The Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s principal learned society, includes scientists, humanities scholars and some artists, for example, whereas in London the Royal Society (serving the science community) and the British Academy (for the humanities) are separate institutions. In Scottish poetry the treatment of science has been strong, in a line of poets which includes John Davidson, George Davie’s friend and champion Hugh MacDiarmid, and Edwin Morgan – the most distinguished poet in these islands when it came to an engagement with science, and someone whose interest as a poet in both science and technology extended over at least six decades. As Morgan contends in Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, ‘Links between poetry and science, far from being rare and strange, are actually quite hard to avoid, if one takes the whole history of poetry into account’ (27). They are also quite hard to avoid if one looks either from the Scottish philosophical perspective outlined by Davie, or at the course of Scottish poetry both in the twentieth century and today.
Though the world is much bigger than Scotland, it is worth realising that the background of the sort of Scottish philosophical and poetic traditions I’ve indicated is wholly appropriate when the Oxford scientist Jocelyn Bell Burnell (the discoverer of pulsars) or the American psychiatrist Kay Redfield Jamison contends that poetry and science may be of continuing value to each other. The point isn’t simply that if you introduce John Burnside or Sarah Maguire or Michael Donaghy to a scientist and to that scientist’s work then sometimes an interesting poem may result; the point is that, just as the Scottish philosophical ideal suggests, on occasion the scientist may be as stimulated by meeting the poet. If a university is to function as an imaginative community, these meetings need to happen. Matchmaking and social engineering won’t always work, but if we go on being stuck in some sort of crude ‘two cultures’ model in which there is no will to make possible the sense of creative trespass, then that sense of ‘creativity’ which university managers claim so to relish will be only a piece of management-speak. Gillian Beer puts it well when she asks, ‘How do we avoid collapsing the differences between science and poetry in our eagerness to explore their interactions?’ (Crawford, ed., 2006, 204). To attempt to collapse the differences is to weaken science and poetry; to recognise differences but also similarities and possibilities of mutual nourishment is to strengthen both.
This is just what happened when Paul Muldoon and Warren Warren worked together. Their encounter was one of a series in the ‘Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science’ project made possible by a grant from the Wellcome Trust and Arts Council England. That grant substantially funded lunches. Having been given an opportunity to find out a bit about each other before meeting over a long lunch, a poet and a scientist talked about their work and about working practices, differences, similarities in how they went about things. At Princeton Paul Muldoon lunched with Warren S. Warren (a man whose very name is a Muldoon poem), who was then, by the sort of coincidence vital to life, in charge of a centre for Photonics and Optoelectronic Materials – whose acronym just happened to be POEM. After Warren showed Muldoon some of his work on MRI scanning and the making of digital images of brain functioning, Muldoon (who was initially reluctant to become involved in the project) wrote a stinging and characteristically sly sonnet about knowability and unknowability which moves from its opening line, ‘Once I looked into your eyes’, through perception of a ‘tissue of lies’ to speculation about the possibility of mind-reading (Crawford, ed., 2006, 169). This poem is elegant, but also deeper than the word ‘elegant’ may suggest. It may well be the first poem to use the expression ‘laser-enhanced magnetic resonance’, so it is all the more impressive that, like the poems I discussed earlier by MacDiarmid, Greenlaw and Jamie, it uses the scientific terminology with fluent dash and purposefulness, and (like Greenlaw’s and Jamie’s poems in particular) deploys the phrase in a poem that has an emotional resonance powered by more than exclamation.
The experience of working with Muldoon spurred Warren Warren to conduct an experiment in which quite different patterns of brain activity were detected when an informational prose text – the regulations of Princeton University – were read to a person whose brain activity was being dynamically scanned and when Muldoon’s poem was read to the same subject. Kay Jamison, as a psychiatrist with a marked interest in neuroscience, takes this experiment as a ‘hint of the possibilities to come’ in neuroscientific work (Crawford, ed., 2006, 202). The experiment was not designed as part of the ‘Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science’ project from the start: it just developed as an unexpected part of it. Happy, unexpected developments, like disastrous unexpected developments, are familiar both to poets and to scientists – are even at times part of their so-called working ‘method’ – and universities, of all communities, need to be tailored to understand that.
Though sometimes poets and scientists rightly insist on the differences between their procedures, there do occur real moments of sympathetic recognition. The mathematician, astronomer and Fellow of the Royal Society, Eric Priest, working with the poet John Glenday, writes of how:
Stimulated by observations of the Sun, lots of ideas are continually floating around in my conscious and unconscious mind, and occasionally, when I wake up in the morning or am walking in the hills or working in the garden, one of them will take on a life of its own and crystallise. I then know in general terms the way I want to go, but have to spend many weeks discovering the detailed steps, using all the skills and mathematical techniques at my disposal – and often I will be led in unexpected directions on my journeys to a fuller understanding. Indeed, the creative process of making poetry for John seemed very similar, including the initial spark of inspiration, the hard work (often taking a couple of months!) and the sense of the poem taking on its own life. (Crawford, ed., 2006, 123)
Whether or not you identify with this description, it is surely good in a science-driven academic community to have scientists realise that there are ways in which, however remote their own disciplines may seem from poetry, they can empathise and sympathise with the process of its making. For poets, too, there is value in realising that science has not only astonishing ideas and vocabulary as aureate as that of William Dunbar, but also, sometimes, involves just working in the garden. When John Burnside writes his essay ‘A Science of Belonging: Poetry as Ecology’, there is a strong sense of suspicious reaction to aspects of commercialised science on the part of a poet who turned his back on a career in computing as a ‘knowledge engineer’. Simon Armitage seems at times impelled to argue the greater potency of poetry as compared with science when he writes about poetry, science and the art of metaphor. If wariness, even scratchiness or hostility, can be detected in some of the ways contemporary poets and scientists deal with each other’s territory, this should not be airbrushed away. The important thing is that they are encountering each other and each other’s territory – as so often happened in earlier centuries – and so are giving the lie to the ‘two cultures’ argument, which treated such meetings as now impossible or meaningless. More than that, they are giving the lie to the idea that the only kind of poetry which can be considered somehow ‘scientific’ is one which has torn up its contract with anyone brave enough to go under the rubric of ‘general reader’.
Universities need to become again places where people from different intellectual communities meet in meaningful ways. That includes the communities of the sciences and the humanities, and poets may be well placed both to encourage and to benefit from such meetings. Poetry does not exist, though, to be the mere meek handmaiden of universities or of science. It can interact with either in a beneficial way only if it stays true to itself as a musical, verbal medium, and if it is respected as such by scientific and other communities. The lineation of poetry, for any poet, must take precedence over any line of science, but the way in which poetry articulates and enables vision lets it look beyond the wee boxes of academic subject boundaries. Nothing is more rooted in its own discipline, nor more interdisciplinary, than poetry. Academia needs to come to see that and to value it per se, as an enlivening, provocative and enjoyable, if sometimes flammable material; but poets should also realise that being part of an academic community can strengthen at times their impulse towards creative trespass. ‘Homo sum; humani nil a me alienum puto’: I am a human being, and think that nothing human is alien to me (Terence, 1986, I, 124).
Having met the would-be post-human Kevin Warwick, author of I, Cyborg, Michael Donaghy went on to write in terms of the ‘afterlife’ and ‘legions of divels’. Donaghy’s poem left Warwick with a ‘scary taste’ and made him see himself as ‘Dr Jekyll’ (Crawford, ed., 2006, 48–51). Warwick writes of his initial incomprehension when he opened his email and was confronted with the poem, and realised he would have ‘to work at it’. But he also writes of how it offered him access to a new view of himself and his scientific endeavours. If comings together of poetry, science and universities can result, even occasionally, in such ‘ten-dimensional spaces’, then their conjunction is desirable. Ten-dimensional spaces do not sound easy to inhabit, and we shouldn’t expect them to be so, but sometimes it may be good to be disconcerted. Donaghy could be outspoken about the relationship between poetry and academia, and he registers some of the disturbance that can result when poet and scientist meet within the contemporary university. As he puts it in the conclusion to his poem ‘Grimoire’:
Keep up. The argument will run ahead,
outstripping words, will tear down neural paths,
branching, recombining, out of sight
and far beyond your power to direct.
Upgraded man, who sees in the dark,
what you may tell us of the world beyond speech
no one, not even you, can say.
It is best to acknowledge respectfully, then to leave to the poet and the scientist, those last, unspeakable words.