Elemental Haiku by Mary Soon Lee – Book Review

Two thousand and seventeen was an auspicious year for scientific haiku. Chromatin Haiku began the year tweeting DNA and histone haiku in earnest (having posted the first tentative tweets in the last days of 2016). The Sciku Project started in May, collecting examples of science haiku (sciku) from across the research spectrum. On the 4^th August 2017 the poet and writer Mary Soon Lee published her collection of poems Elemental Haiku in the journal Science; 119 haiku, one for each element of the periodic table.

Now, in 2019, Elemental Haiku: Poems to Honor the Periodic Table Three Lines at a Time by Mary Soon Lee is being published as a book by Ten Speed Press (you can purchase it here). The new version includes a couple of alternative haiku, explanations for each haiku by Mary herself and illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.

Getting Physical

There’s something about the physical. Sure, if you can access the Science webpage where the vast majority of the poems were first published then you’ve got much of what the book Elemental Haiku provides – the poems themselves. But as well designed as that webpage is (and it’s an excellent digital rendition) the book format means you engage with the poems more. You’re less likely to flit between poems rapidly, more likely to consider each poem individually. You’ll turn pages at your own pace rather than just twitching a mouse to have the next poem appear.

Then there are the explanations, which provide snippets of background to each poem and encourage you to go back, re-read and re-evaluate. The explanations are brief, the conciseness signposting key information in each poem, providing a taster of the research that informs each haiku. Occasionally I wanted more than a taster but the poems themselves are the stars of the show and lengthy explanations would likely diminish them.

Judging the suitable amount of information to present alongside the poems is something I’ve also encountered whilst running The Sciku Project, and I think Mary’s approach largely works in the collection’s favour. On a screen you can scroll, much of the additional information hidden, but on the page large blocks of text would be too imposing. The brevity is a success and for those instances where I’ve wanted more information the selected bibliography provides plenty of sources for further reading.

The whole book is designed to support the poems without over-whelming them. Iris Gottlieb’s illustrations are elegantly simple, cropping up every 2-3 poems and expanding the context with clean lines and a soft sense of humour. When present they’re a third channel of information, each chemical element explored through the mediums of poetry, art and fact. Triangulating between the three is a remarkably satisfying process, further helping the reader to explore the haiku and the elements themselves.

Lisa Bieser, the book’s designer, has created a minimalist design, the pages alternating between white and grey, quietly dividing the elements without you realising it. Space allows the work to breathe and some pages are little more than three brief lines of poetry and two lines of explanation. I can relate. When building the website for The Sciku Project I purposefully kept the design simple and discrete to help the poems stand out – it’s not just a lack of web-building skills! Haiku as works of art can be delicate and the design of Elemental Haiku helps to ensure that they aren’t lost amongst the additions.

Some Context

It feels strange to have been sent a preview copy of a poetry collection. I stopped studying English literature at the age of 14 and English language at 16, prevented by a combination of timetable clashes, an education system that encourages early specialisation and a lack of smarts*. Now that I look back, 20 years later, it seems an absurd system.

I don’t feel qualified or intelligent enough to comment on Mary Soon Lee’s haiku, to judge her turn of phrase or use of juxtaposition. I wouldn’t know where to start. If you’re looking for an insightful literary critique you may be disappointed.

Yet…

I’ve spent over two years running The Sciku Project, publishing scientific haiku by scientists and authors from around the world. I’ve written articles, given presentations and offered tips for researchers wanting to write haiku about their work. I’ve penned hundreds of sciku and published many of them. One or two I’m even proud of.

So with some reviewer context covered, let’s talk about the poems themselves.

*You weren’t allowed to continue with literature at my school unless your combined score across English, History, Geography, French and Latin was high enough. I struggled to learn vocabulary by rote, learning best through narrative…

The Haiku Themselves

I often say that sciku are a remarkably forgiving medium, that the brevity of the format means that even just putting key words next to each other can produce something that’s not completely awful. If you’ve spent your career at the laboratory bench the idea of writing poetry can be seriously intimidating. Sciku allow hesitant researchers to apply an analytical approach, piecing together syllables to create poems that, more often than not, work.

Writing a sciku is relatively easy, but…

Writing excellent sciku is hard, it’s a process that goes way beyond slotting words together like a puzzle. Sciku can include narrative, drama, humour, pathos, queries and a whole range of other elements on top of being informative and factual. Great sciku stimulate curiosity and provoke thoughts about the research. As a result of reading a good sciku you should be able to understand the ideas and information presented but should want to find out more. At their best Sciku can be moments that echo in the mind.

In Elemental Haiku Mary Soon Lee walks the balance between information and artistry perfectly. Her poems are graceful, humorous and fascinating, sometimes all three in a single haiku.

Each element is imbued with a sense of personality: carbon is a “diva”, dysprosium plays “hard to get” and caesium is a firebrand with a “softer side”. There’s humour in neon’s embarrassing red lights and tragedy in the Radium Girls and their fatal luminescent paint. Through the haiku Mary Soon Lee makes these collections of protons, neutrons and electrons relatable.

The poems cover a range of subjects around the elements. Iron’s haiku is just a list, a powerful reminder of the integral role it’s played in human history. Lutetium compares electron structure with helicopter parenting. Rubidium’s haiku reminds us that Robert Bunsen did more than just invent his burner.

Some of the haiku flow smoothly in a single tale, whilst the dynamic phrasing of praseodymium is key to its success:

“Magnetic cooling.

Absolute zero beckons.

Approach the limit.”

This mix of approaches, the use of language and emotion, and the varied structures and wordplay keep the haiku both interesting and informative throughout. I think my favourite is Sodium:

“Racing to trigger

every kiss, every kind act;

behind every thought.“

It’s a haiku that takes as a starting point sodium’s role in the transmission of nerve impulses but adds a new dimension and depth by demonstrating what the synaptic processes can actually mean at a human level.

The least interesting for me personally are those that take as their subject an element’s location in the periodic table but even then Mary Soon Lee injects a humanity that elevates the subject – Potassium yearns “for the halogens / on the other side”.

For those elements you know something about already there’s a fun degree of interpretation to reading the poems – seventeen syllables isn’t long to convey information and its satisfying to pick up on subtle references. But even those elements I’m more familiar with allowed me to place new information within an existing context.

Having not studied chemistry for many years, the second half of the book covering the latter elements is more a journey of discovery. Where these poems work best is in connecting things I already know with chemical elements I’m clueless about. Take americium:

“Alpha particles

dispatched in smoke detectors

to protect and serve.”

I couldn’t have told you whether americium was an element or not, far less how it might play an important role in my life. Now I know it plays a crucial role in ionization smoke detectors, by emitting alpha particles and ionizing air molecules – if the flow of ions detected is broken by smoke then the alarm triggers.

The problem with latter chemical elements, especially those that don’t occur naturally, is that we know very little about some of them. It gives Mary Soon Lee less to work with and there are perhaps a touch too many poems about half-lives towards the end (in fairness, I honestly can’t see how this could be different). To clarify, it’s the number of poems and not the presence of poems with half-life as a subject matter that I was less a fan of, and this is really a very minor quibble. Having read the collection cover-to-cover I’ve since had an awful lot of pleasure dipping in and out at random, an approach that removes this issue.

Final Thoughts

The big question is if you can access the Science website and the versions of the poems published there, is the book of Elemental Haiku worth checking out? Absolutely. The format and the additions alter the experience of reading Mary Soon Lee’s poems for the better, the explanations and use of space enhancing each haiku. Reading from cover-to-cover you get a sense of discovery, a faint echo of the progress made from Dmitri Mendeleev’s original version of the periodic table to its current state.

Science and art are often portrayed as mutually exclusive, but Mary Soon Lee’s wonderful poems show just how wrong that is. In our quest to define and organise the chemical elements it’s easy to transform them into abstract concepts. Elemental Haiku is a special alchemy of poetry and science that demonstrates something that’s easily forgotten: that these chemical elements are more than just symbols in squares on a table. Excellent sciku indeed.

Interested in how Elemental Haiku came about, the process of creating the book and Mary Soon Lee’s writing? Visit The Sciku Project next week for our interview with Mary!

The preview copy of Elemental Haiku that this review is based upon was provided by Ten Speed Press, with no expectations other than some independent and unbiased coverage. Please note that some aspects of the text or production may have changed prior to publication on the 1^st October 2019. You can find out more about the book here.

All images and quotations are reprinted with permission from Elemental Haiku: Poems to Honor the Periodic Table Three Lines at a Time by Mary Soon Lee copyright © 2019. Published by Ten Speed Press, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC.