I’ve told the origin story of The Sciku Project often enough that I’m not going to repeat myself here, except to say that the idea sprung from a particularly tedious commute one day and by the time I’d arrived home I had the whole thing roughly mapped out in my head.
Of course, I didn’t believe I was the first to come up with the idea of science haiku (‘sciku’) and lo and behold when I got home and started searching online one of the first things I stumbled across was a book of sciku written by over 150 students aged between 11 and 18 at The Camden School for Girls.
Published with the aim of raising funds to refurbish the school’s science laboratories, Sciku: The Wonder of Science in Haiku goes far beyond a mere school fundraising project.
It is, rather like its subject matter, pretty wonderous.
Friction
I walked down the street
By Poppy Boswell
And slipped on a banana
Reduced resistance
There are over 400 poems within its pages, covering the full breadth of scientific disciplines and interests. The poems are clever, playful, angry, funny, curious, thought-provoking, energetic and factual. There are poems that have genuinely made me laugh and there are poems that have made me feel the guilt of the old leaving the world in a worse state than when they inherited it. There’s a poem that entrances me on almost every one of the 150 pages.
Here’s an illustration of what I mean. To prepare for this review I re-read the book and folded page corners over every time I read a poem that I felt was especially worth highlighting. There are now more folded pages than unfolded. I could slot coins in the upper and lower corners of my copy and you’d never notice from it’s profile.
There’s just so much life in this book. Even the poems where you can feel the age of the writer coming through fizz with the energy of youth.
Last
Last fossil fuel burned,
By Edom Yecalo-Tecle
Last greenhouse gas relinquished,
The last breath we take.
I will say that a collection of more than 400 poems is a lot. They’re crammed on the pages; its not a book I find comfortable to read page after page of in a single sitting. Whilst I don’t believe haiku collections need to be one poem per page, it’s overwhelming in places with little space to breathe. I have a feeling that the editors, Simon Flynn, Karen Scott and twelve 13-14 year olds, wanted as many authors involved as possible, but the presentation sometimes makes individual poems feel rushed.
And not every sciku sticks a clean landing. None of them are awful but some are exactly what you might stereotypically expect a teenager or pre-teen to write. (All are far better than I could have written at that age, and most are better than I can write now.)
The majority are fantastic. Some are breath-taking.
I’ve been running The Sciku Project for almost 7 years now. As with any endeavour, there are peaks and troughs. It’s always an honour to be able to showcase the work of incredibly talented people and the majority of the time it’s a pleasure, but there are times when the publishing process itself feels more like a chore. In those rare moments when my enthusiasm wanes I reach for Sciku and am inspired by the passion and creativity of these incredible girls.
Bowel movement
The life processes,
By Eden Maddix Odeniyi
Most amusing – excretion.
Through the rectum … plop1.
This book was published 10 years ago in 2014. Everyone one of the authors will have finished school and gone on to other things. I wonder how many chose to go to university to study science. I wonder how many of them now work in science. I wonder how many carry with them a love of science and poetry as a result of this school project.
I hope writing these poems inspired the girls as much as reading them has inspired me.
1. This poem By Eden Maddix Odeniyi reminded me of Basho’s famous ‘Old Pond’ with its final line ‘mizu no oto’ which literally translates as ‘water sound’. Many English translations of Basho’s poem have written it as ‘the sound of water’ or even ‘splash’ but, for me, the sound of a frog jumping into a pond is more of a plopping sound than a splash.
You can find out more about Sciku: The Wonder of Science in Haiku here: https://www.iconbooks.com/ib-title/sciku/