Today I took 6,395,329 pounds of books to the used book store. The idea was to sell them and walk out with more money and fewer books than I walked in with. Rather, I walked out with the same amount of books I walked in with, minus $64.
I am working on a research paper about poetry written about science. I’m learning that there isn’t much of it out there. I got a book called “Verse and Universe: Poems about Science and Mathematics.” Other than that, I’m not finding much poetry about science (for adults—there are some kid’s science education books). Can any of you recommend anything? Specifically about the Universe/Space or about the opposite: Cells, microscopic stuff. They don’t need to be whole books about it—a single poem here and there will do. Anyone?
"It hit the news today: the telescopic evidence,
faint light from cosmic gas, traces of the stuff
that held everything at once--my fingernail, this pen...
my mother's hairnets, the plane that crashed in Dallas yesterday...
the cameo that vanished under my bed when I was ten, mountains
of bleashed conch shells, women washing sheets
in the Ganges... cobbled streets
of Paris, craters on the moon, spaceships not invented yet
and cameras clicking pictures of that cosmic dust
colder than the pain of loss--proving that everything came
from the same infintesimal seed
about the size, they say, of the dot at the end of this sentence."
--Dinah Berland, All Together, Nothing Lost
5 comments:
Remind me to loan you "Still Life with Insects" tomorrow.
Tough one, Cavu.
Gary Snyder has some good nature stuff.
I will look for you.
Or what about Brian Swimme's Hidden Heart of the Cosmos? That's more prose-y, but I'd bet you could argue for many of his passages being lyrical. I've got a copy of that too, I'll get it back from Dave so you can check it out.
If I never have to write another research paper again, I won't be disappointed. I hate research papers.
Here's a fun web site with some pretty impressive poets.
"Einstein's Dreams" by Alan Lightman comes to mind even though it's technically a novel. Lyrical prose.
Well, hey, the review at amazon says "it's more like a poetry collection than a novel." So there you go.
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