Purple–yellow-green, bell-shaped corolla, five petals, flowers grow from rosette of leaves.
Habitat:
Stony waste ground, edge of woodland, coastal areas
The long taproot, shaped like a human form, was said to scream when pulled from the ground. Anyone hearing this would go mad. In Medieval times, it was believed the only way to harvest the plant was on a moonlit night and using a black dog with a cord attached to the plant to uproot it!
It was also believed that the mandrake first grew from the dripping ‘juices’ of a hanged man. This, by the medieval Doctrine of Signatures which taught that the shape and appearance of a plant linked it to parts of the human body, made the mandrake highly valued for specific ailments. However, the poisonous nature of the plant made its medicinal use difficult, as Harry Potter fans may know
The mandrake contains tropane alkaloids which give it narcotic, emetic, sedative and hallucinogenic properties. As early as the fourteenth century BC the plant is mentioned in cuneiform texts and subsequently in Arabic, Greek and Roman writing. It was said the root could be seen as a baby in form, albeit a rather ugly one. This gave rise to the belief that the plant helped childless women to conceive.
Mandrake roots were valuable and not surprisingly there were fraudsters at country fairs with oddly-shaped ‘mandrakes’ carved from turnip roots. It was even believed that these roots knew the sites of buried treasure. They would whisper the secret to their owner, if they trusted him. These beautiful lines from Shakespeare suggest Mandrake was still in use in the 16th century:
‘Give me to drink mandragora. That I might sleep out the great gap of time My Antony is away.’
William Shakespeare, Anthony and Cleopatra, Act 1, Scene 1.
Sarah Das Gupta is a young 81 year old. Loves writing haiku and most forms of poetry. Is learning to walk after an accident. Main outside interests include equine sports. Lives near Cambridge, UK. Read other sciku by Sarah here.
A cat has nine lives each belongs to an old witch what need for a vet
by Sarah Das Gupta
“And therof hath come the prouerb as trew as common, that a Cat hath nine liues, that is to say, a witch may take on her a Cats body nine times.” William Baldwin, Beware the Cat.
Cats may have been worshipped in ancient Egypt but by the time of Shakespeare superstitions about cats were largely negative despite their usefulness at hunting rats and mice. In fact, in medieval France cats were burnt alive as a form of entertainment, with some believing that the ashes of burnt cats gave good luck.
In the medieval and early modern period, people believed witches had nine chances of turning into their feline familiars. If a witch turned into a cat for a ninth time then they would be unable to turn back. The first written mention of this comes from William Baldwin’s ‘Beware the Cat’. Written in 1553 and published in 1570, ‘Beware the Cat’ is thought by many to be the first novel ever published in English. The gap between its writing and publication is down to the book’s anti-Catholic sentiments at a time when the devoutly Catholic Mary I was on the English throne.
“Good king of cats, nothing but one of your nine lives.” From Romeo and Juliet, William Shakespeare.
The idea that witches could turn into cats is tied to the Cat-sìth of celtic mythology – a large black cat with a white spot on its chest that resides in the Scottish Highlands. The Cat-sìth was thought to be either a fairy or a witch, and is linked to the British folk tale ‘The King of the Cats’, references to which appear in both Baldwin’s ‘Beware the Cat’ and William Shakespeare’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’. Tales of the Cat-sìth may actually have been sightings of the Kellas cat, an interspecific fertile hybrid between the Scottish wildcat and the domestic cat.
“A cat has nine lives. For three he plays, for three he strays and for the last three he stays.” Old English proverb
The origins of the nine lives myth are hard to know accurately, but many cultures believe that cats have multiple lives: in some European countries cats have seven lives whilst in Arabic traditions the number is six. Regardless of the specific number, many believe that the myth of having multiple lives is down to the quick reactions and righting reflexes that enable cats to survive perilous situations.
Whilst impressive, a cat’s ability to survive falls from great heights is not infallible, and neither is our ability to study this achievement. A study by Whitney and Mehlhaff (1987) suggested that the chance of injury from falling increased with falling height… up to a point. A falling cat reaches a terminal velocity of ~60 mph after falling about five storeys. The researchers found that up to this point the numbers of injuries increased but after seven storeys the number of injuries deceased. The explanation given by Whitney and Mehlhaff was that over a short distance a cat tenses and arches its back to turn in mid-air, but over a longer fall the cat adopts a more relaxed body state leading to fewer injuries.
Whilst there’s truth to their findings in terms of how cats behave whilst falling and the different injury types prevalent from different heights as a result, the hypothesis that heights greater that seven storeys lead to fewer injuries isn’t supported by the methodology. The study was based on cats that had been brought into a veterinary surgery for care but cats that had fallen and not survived were, for obvious reasons, not brought into the surgery and not included in the study’s fall survival and injury statistics. Indeed, a later study by Vnuk et al. (2004) found that falls from the seventh storey or higher were associated with more severe injuries.
Cats may not always need vets but they can certainly help preserve each of their many lives!
‘Feline high-rise syndrome: 119 cases (1998–2001)’, D. Vnuk, B. Pirkić, D. Matičić, B. Radišić, M. Stejskal, T. Babić, M. Kreszinger, and N. Lemo, 2004, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jfms.2003.07.001
Author bio:
Sarah Das Gupta is a young 81 year old. Loves writing haiku and most forms of poetry. Is learning to walk after an accident. Main outside interests include equine sports. Lives near Cambridge, UK. Read other sciku by Sarah here.
hear trees shoot the breeze take the forest floor, fungal roots confabulate
by James Penha
“The Last of Us” television series has energized discussions and imaginings of mushroom networks, but I prefer to consider in this poem not monsters but the beneficent “wood-wide web” that forester Peter Wohlleben describes in “The Hidden Life of Trees: What They Feel, How They Communicate – Discoveries from a Secret World”. That book explores how trees communicate and form alliances via their roots and associated fungi.
I myself was first exposed to this idea not from Wohlleben nor from scientific treatises, but from Richard Powers’ novel “The Overstory”, itself inspired by Wohlleben and the complementary work of Suzanne Simard.
Expat New Yorker James Penha (he/him🌈) has lived for the past three decades in Indonesia. Nominated for Pushcart Prizes in fiction and poetry, his work is widely published in journals and anthologies. His newest chapbook of poems, American Daguerreotypes, is available for Kindle. His essays have appeared in The New York Daily News and The New York Times. Penha edits TheNewVerse.News, an online journal of current-events poetry. You can find out more about James’ poetry on his website https://jamespenha.com and catch up with him on Twitter @JamesPenha
Australian science poems oft explore life death theories space horses
By Michael J. Leach and Rachel Rayner
We recently conducted a novel study to describe the demographics and characteristics of contemporary Australian science poetry. Twelve contemporary Australian poetry or science writing anthologies were used to identify science poems matching a set definition built from our research. After finding 100 contemporary Australian science poems by 73 poets, we proceeded to collect and analyse data on poem characteristics as well as poet demographics.
The specific scientific topics addressed in the 100 science poems were visualised in a word cloud – an image that uses font size to show the relative frequency with which words appear in a dataset. This sciku presents some of the standout features from our word cloud of contemporary Australian science poetry topics.
Word cloud from ‘The demographics and characteristics of contemporary Australian science poetry’ by Michael J. Leach and Rachel Rayner, published in Axon: Creative Explorations, 2020.
Other results from the study showed the state of New South Wales produced the most science poets; however, the Australian Capital Territory had more poets per capita. Finally, contrary to usual publication statistics, there were more science poems written by female-identifying poets than male or non-binary individuals.
Full details of our study can be found in a peer-reviewed research paper:
Michael J. Leach (@m_jleach) is a poet and Senior Lecturer at Monash University. Michael’s poems have appeared in the Antarctic Poetry Exhibition, the Medical Journal of Australia, GRAVITON, and elsewhere.Check out an earlier sciku of Michael’s here.
Rachel Rayner (@RaeRay4) is a science communicator at experimental PR and communications company, AndironGroup. Rachel connects with audiences through various means – whether articles, educational activities, live shows, broadcasts or poetry.
If you enjoyed Michael and Rachel’s sciku then make sure you check out their longer poems in the first issue of Consilience here!
In the final part of our interview with Mary Soon Lee about Elemental Haiku (check out Parts One and Two), we discuss writing for various format, her current and future projects, and Star Trek!
I’ve read
that when you moved to the USA you weren’t able to get a work visa and started
writing TV scripts. What made you want to write for TV and then what prompted
the move towards fiction?
Mary Soon
Lee: I was a fan of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I knew that
they were considering scripts from people without screenwriting credits. The
idea of getting to write a Star Trek episode was very appealing to me. I wrote
three scripts, and learned a great deal in the process, though none of them
sold. Beyond Star Trek, I wasn’t drawn to writing for television, so I switched
to prose. I don’t think I’ll want to write for television in the future, though
it’s not quite certain. In 2015-2016, I did write a handful of short pieces in
script format as part of a novel-length epic fantasy told in poems.
Next
Generation is the only Star Trek series that really clicked with me, are you
looking forward to the new Picard series?
Mary: I am
indeed looking forward to the Picard series. I re-watched both the original
series Star Trek and the Next Generation series with my daughter, and a lot
will depend on whether she likes the Picard series. (These days, I very rarely
watch television shows without one or more of my family. When left to entertain
myself, I read.)
Scripts and poetry both have a certain conciseness in their language, do you feel like writing those early scripts helped your poetry as well as your prose?
Mary: It
probably did help. I think that most writing, and indeed reading, helps you
become a better writer. At the time, I was most aware that the scripts helped
me with dialogue. N.B. Concision is one of the things that I love in poetry, a
quality that can be found in poems that lack rhyme or other formal devices.
You have degrees in mathematics and computer science, an MSc in astronautics and space engineering and spent time working as a programmer before becoming a writer. Do you miss the more technical career?
Mary: I enjoyed
programming in much the same way as I might enjoy solving a puzzle, but I don’t
miss it. On the other hand, I would have loved to contribute to science or the
space program, and in some small way writing science poetry approaches that.
I’m currently working on a collection of astronomy poems, as well as other
poetry and fiction.
Since
you’ve mentioned it I was going to ask about upcoming work. Let’s start with
the astronomy poems, can you tell me a little more about the collection?
Mary: I’ve been
working on the astronomy poems intermittently for over a year, writing a few at
a time. At the moment, all the titles begin with “How to.” For
example, there’s “How to Be a Star,” “How to Speak to
Pluto,” and “How to Fathom a Light-Year.” The poems vary widely
in style and tone. A few rhyme, most do not. They deal with the planets and
stars, black holes and people with a connection to space. To date, sixteen of
the poems have been published individually, but I would like to eventually
gather them all together in a book.
I’ve read
and enjoyed a couple of your ‘How To’ astronomy poems and did wonder if there
was a plan behind them. The periodic table has an obvious end point, how will
you know when you’ve reached the end of the project?
Mary: I’m not
sure! There are some topics I feel should be covered, such as having a poem for
each of the planets in the solar system. Beyond that, it’s far from clear. I’m
also undecided on whether to include any astronomy poems that don’t fit the
format of being a “How to” poem.
You’ve
written a fantasy epic presented in the form of poems – Crowned: The Sign of
the Dragon, Book 1. What made you want to tell a longer narrative through the
form of poetry and what are your plans for the rest of the series?
Mary: I wrote
“Interregnum,” the opening poem from “The Sign of the
Dragon,” at a time when I was just returning to writing fantasy after
years of writing mostly mainstream poetry. And I rediscovered that writing
could be both all-engrossing and a joy. When I wrote that first poem, I thought
it was a standalone piece, but the character of the sixteen-year-old boy tugged
me back, and I wrote more and more poems about him. A lot of the later arc of
the story is implicit in the first poem, though that wasn’t clear to me then.
I’ve now written Xau’s whole story, which comes to over three hundred poems,
and it is in the hands of my agent (the superb Lisa Rodgers).
It must be a nice feeling to have the whole of Xau’s story written, do
you think you’d want to take on any other longer narrative projects like this
in the future?
Mary: I would
love to write another long narrative work, whether in poetry or prose. At the
same time, it was a hugely absorbing project, so part of me wants to delay
until my daughter is older. (She’s fourteen. She doesn’t need attention the way
a young child does, but I like her company and I’d like to be available when
she’s at home.)
Do you find the process of reviewing the books you’ve read on Goodreads helps your own writing and do you have a recommendation from the last year?
Mary: My book
reviews aim to report my reaction as a reader, rather than attempt something
more scholarly. Even so, I think the process does help me assess what I like —
or dislike — and that may well help my own writing. I have many
recommendations, but will try to restrain myself. In the past year, the book
that I’ve loved most is “A Brightness Long Ago” by Guy Gavriel Kay, a
quiet, reflective, beautifully-written fantasy. On the science poetry front, I
very much liked Simon Barraclough’s “Sunspots,” which is a collection
of poetry themed around the sun.
Mary Soon Lee’s antenna being.
Finally,
I’m curious about your website and twitter profile picture – can you tell
me a bit about it?
Mary: Do you
mean the little antenna being? That dates back at least as far as the 1980s
when I was a first-year mathematics student at Cambridge University: I would
draw the antenna being in my lecture notes. N.B. I’ve been blogging about
my mail on the web since 1995 — my website is antiquated and alarmingly close
to its original version. I’m hoping it will soon be thoroughly updated.
Well
I hope the little antenna being makes it onto the updated website! Thank you so
much for talking with The Sciku Project about Elemental Haiku and your writing, it’s been an absolute pleasure.
Mary: Thank you very much for all your
questions and for your friendliness! I very much appreciate your enthusiasm for
the haiku.
I
wish you all the best for your next writing endeavours and I’m looking forward
to whatever you share with the world next. Thank you.
The Sciku Project was lucky enough to chat with Mary Soon Lee about her collection Elemental Haiku and in the second part of the interview we discuss revisiting the poems and the process of converting Elemental Haiku into a book (you can check out the first part of the interview here).
The
book is being published two years after you originally published the poems in Science. How did it come about?
Mary Soon Lee: A while after the haiku had been published in Science, Lisa Rodgers, my agent (JABberwocky Literary Agency) submitted them to editors at places such as Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster. Without Lisa, I wouldn’t have had any idea where to send a project like this. Several of the editors expressed interest, and I spoke to them on the phone. Then Lisa and I discussed the resulting offers, and I decided to work with Lisa Westmoreland at Ten Speed Press. (Yes, both my agent and my editor are called Lisa, and so is the book’s designer, Lisa Bieser.)
I
like the design of the book, the presentation and additions enhance the
poems without overwhelming them. How closely did you work with Lisa Bieser
and Iris Gottlieb?
Mary: I am also
very happy with the design of the book. Lisa Westmoreland was the one who
recommended that I add explanatory notes to accompany the haiku. As for the
illustrations and layout, Lisa Bieser suggested possible artists, and I
picked Iris Gottlieb as my favorite — I love Iris’s work! Then I came up
with an initial list of possible illustrations to accompany the haiku. After
that, the rest of the design effort fell to Lisa and Iris.
You
mentioned that Lisa Westmoreland suggested the explanatory notes for each
haiku, how did you find the process of writing these? I’m guessing your love of
concision helped to keep these brief, although I imagine for some of them there
was a temptation to provide more background?
Mary: Writing
the explanatory notes felt much closer to “real” work than writing
poetry or stories. I tried to double-check the facts I’d used about each
element, and then to find a clear but brief way to present the information. I
didn’t want the length of the notes to overwhelm the haiku. So I didn’t attempt
to summarize every interesting point about an element, only those touched on in
the corresponding haiku.
What
was it like revisiting the poems for the book – were there any that surprised
you?
Mary: I still
remembered the haiku well enough that they didn’t surprise me, though, for
older work, it can be almost surreal to re-read what I’ve written and to see it
as another person might see it. I also revised about a dozen of the haiku, in
some cases making very slight changes, in others writing entirely new versions.
In a few instances, both the original haiku and the new version are included in
the book.
With the elements in the book that have more than one
haiku it feels as if the original version published in Science is a bit lighter than the newer version, often more
about the word itself. Was there a deliberate attempt to ensure that
all the haiku were in some way informative?
Mary: My book
editor, Lisa Westmoreland, was the one who, wisely, suggested writing more
serious versions of the most frivolous haiku. While I harbor some fondness for
the original versions (particularly the one for yttrium), I think it was good
to add less flippant versions. N.B. After decades living in America, I still
sometimes use British spellings by mistake, and that’s doubtless why two of the
original haiku referenced the variant spellings for aluminum/aluminium and
sulfur/sulphur.
The original poem for yttrium made me laugh, I’m glad it was included as well as the new poem. Two of my favourites are nitrogen and sodium which as poems are very different but I think capture the essence of the whole project. They’re relatively early in the table and I wondered if I particularly like them because I’m more familiar with the elements themselves. Did you find your approach changed or that the poems were harder to write as you got further towards the end of the periodic table where less is known about the elements?
Mary: I worried
the poems would become hard to write as I neared the end of the periodic table,
but in the end it wasn’t as difficult as I’d feared. While I had fewer
pre-existing ideas and while there was less information to draw on, those
restrictions meant I spent less time flailing around, wondering what to
focus on. The information that does exist is fascinating: the effort to
synthesize new elements and to learn what we can of their chemistry.
Do you have a favourite element, poem or illustration – are they the same? I believe fluorine (F, 9) was a favourite when you first published in Science, has this changed?
Mary: My
favorites shift, but answering for my current mood: I have soft spots for
the haiku for helium, potassium, germanium, iridium, radium, and ununennium. I
wouldn’t want to upset the elements by naming any favorites among those! Among
Iris Gottlieb’s illustrations, I love the ones for helium and mendelevium, plus
the space-related images (tellurium, neptunium, curium).
I like that you’ve included a selected
bibliography at the end of the book – reading through Elemental Haiku reminded
me how fascinating chemistry can be and there are a couple of books on
there that I definitely want to read. What is the most interesting
thing that you learned during the process of writing the poems and
explanations?
Mary: I’m not
sure that there is one specific thing, but in general the process reminded me
that science is a marvellous endeavor, perhaps the best undertaking of
humanity. I liked learning a little more about the history of chemistry and
about specific scientists, such as Dmitri Mendeleev and Marie Curie.
I was struck by how fundamental units are defined and re-defined. One unit, the
kilogram, was redefined while I was editing the book! I also found myself drawn
to anything that touched on space, such as the nucleosynthesis of the elements,
and how the discovery of technetium in the spectra of red giants meant that it
must have been synthesized inside those stars.
I can see how it would be hard to pin point a single fact, it’s easy to forget that the elements are fundamentally everything! Thank you for taking the time to talk with The Sciku Project.
Check out Part Three of our interview where we discuss Mary’s writing, upcoming work and Star Trek! In the mean time, if you’ve missed them you can check out The Sciku Project’s review of Elemental Haiku and Part One of our interview.
In the summer of 2017 Science magazine published a collection of 118 haiku about the chemical elements by poet and writer Mary Soon Lee. Two years later Elemental Haiku is now being published as a book by Ten Speed Press, with added explanations from Mary and illustrations by Iris Gottlieb.
The Sciku Project was lucky enough to
chat with Mary about the collection and in the first part of the interview we
go back to the beginning and discuss the process of writing and publishing the
poems in Science.
In the introduction to the book you say that one day you sat down and without any grand plan in mind wrote a haiku for hydrogen and the rest seemed to follow from there. What prompted you to want to write a poem about hydrogen and why did you choose to write it as a haiku?
Mary
Soon Lee: I keep a list of ideas that appeal to me, and when I sit down to
write, I will sometimes pick an idea from that list. Other days, the process is
more haphazard. I am fond of a book called “The Daily Poet” by Kelli
Russell Agodon and Martha Silano, which contains writing prompts that may start
my thoughts wandering in a helpful direction. Often I jot down semi-random
words or notions in a notebook before settling on a topic. For 12/14/2016, the
day that I wrote the hydrogen haiku, I have no scribbles in my notebook. I
think the idea must have just popped into my head, including the decision to
make it a haiku.
Why
Science, was that Lisa Rodgers’
suggestion or did you have it in mind as you developed the project further?
Mary: Partway
through writing the Elemental Haiku, it occurred to me that that they might
appeal to scientists, and so I decided to try submitting them to a scientific
journal before sending them to a conventional poetry market. Lisa Rodgers has
given me many excellent suggestions, but this idea was my own.
Having been through the Science review process a couple of times (both successfully and not!), I’m intrigued by how they reacted to your submission and whether there was any review process involving chemists or indeed other poets?
Mary: I
submitted the haiku to Science as if
they were a normal article, though I think I included a brief explanatory note.
Six weeks later, I heard back that they would like to run the haiku as a poetry
feature in the Letters section. The editor, Jennifer Sills, suggested several
small revisions, but they were of a poetic slant rather than a scientific one.
(It may well be that they reviewed the science content of the haiku behind the
scenes.) After their appearance in Science,
my book editor, Lisa Westmoreland, was able to get a chemist to review the
haiku. Happily the reviewer didn’t spot any errors. I should also mention that
my husband is usually my first reader, and he read the haiku before I submitted
them anywhere.
What
reaction did you get when the poems were published in Science?
Mary: I received quite a lot of emails from people who’d enjoyed the haiku, which was lovely. There were also a few articles, including an article in the Wall Street Journal that quoted the haiku for lithium, carbon, and silver. Over time, I received more nice emails and a few permissions requests. For instance, Tarik Gunersel asked to translate the haiku into Turkish, and later published several of the translations. This summer, C&EN — Chemical & Engineering News — asked me to contribute an essay to a special feature on the periodic table. (The essay may be read here).
The
haiku have multiple themes to them – some are about an element’s history, its
usage, position in the table or its structure. Did you take several approaches
for each element and decide on the best or did you go with what felt right for
each element? Was it important to have a balance of approaches across the
collection?
Mary: With a
few elements, I knew the theme I’d choose immediately. For instance, I decided
in advance that the haiku for potassium would be about it yearning for the
halogens on the other side of the periodic table. In most cases, however, I
began by looking up multiple sources about the element, and then considering
which aspects to write about. As part of that process, I did indeed try to
balance the collection. I wanted the haiku to vary in tone as well as subject
matter, with some being more serious and some more frivolous.
How many haiku did you write for each element and are there any haiku that didn’t make the cut but that you would have liked to include?
Mary: I usually only wrote one haiku that I liked, but sometimes that meant writing several haiku that I abandoned. I don’t think there are any abandoned haiku that I wish had been included…. In the few cases where I liked two haiku for an element, they both ended up in the book.
I find haiku to be quite
a forgiving medium for science writing – I think that it’s hard to write a
truly terrible science haiku (although it’s also hard to write a good one). At
the same time a lot of the researchers I speak to find poetry itself
intimidating and then the conciseness of haiku especially so. To get them
breaking through that mental barrier I advise them to begin by writing a few
key words down about their research and counting the syllables,
almost piecing together a poem like a puzzle. How did you
approach writing the haiku themselves?
Mary: With haiku, I think I usually try to
decide what I want to say first, and then try to find a way to express that as
clearly, concisely, and poetically as I can. American haiku don’t always keep
to the tradition of a 5-7-5 syllable count, but I like to do so. As you
mention, the process can feel like fitting together puzzle pieces. Both with
haiku and other poetry, I often look up words in a thesaurus to search for
synonyms with different sounds or shades of meaning … or different syllable
counts.
Do you have any tips for anyone wanting to write
scientific poetry, and for scientific haiku in particular?
Mary: The
Elemental Haiku are my first significant foray into science poetry, so it is a
comparatively new venture for me. Beyond trying to research the scientific
content carefully, I’m not sure I have science-specific advice to offer. There
are a few things that have helped me more generally. Firstly, reading widely.
Secondly, writing about what matters to me or interests me. Thirdly, looking
for feedback to improve my writing. (I ran a writer’s workshop for about a
decade; nowadays, I ask family members to give me feedback on my work.)
I
hadn’t realised you’d run a writers workshop – how did you find the process of
teaching writing and why did you stop?
Mary: I didn’t
teach writing, just started and ran the workshop. We followed a format close to
that used by the Clarion workshops, where the author stays quiet while the
other members offer initial feedback on their story, followed by more general
discussion. I tried to make sure that comments — especially negative comments
— were restricted to the story rather than the writer. After the birth of my
second child, my limited free time became even more limited, so I withdrew from
the workshop.
I can sympathise –
small children are (wonderful) time thieves! Thank you for taking the time to
talk with The Sciku Project.
Check out the rest of our interview where we discuss the process of converting Elemental Haiku into a book (Part Two) and Mary’s other writing, upcoming work and Star Trek (Part Three). You can also read The Sciku Project’s review of Elemental Haiku here.
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 4th 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 1st October 2019. You can find out more about the book here.
Who wrote Beowulf? Look for stylistic changes – a single author?
Beowulf is one of the most well-known examples of Old English literature and debate has raged over whether the poem was written by a single author or combined from multiple sources. New research by Neidorf et al (2019) lends support to the single author theory.
Beowulf survives in a single manuscript that has been dated to around AD 1000. Using a statistical approach called stylometry the researchers analysed features of the writing, comparing the poem’s metre, word choices, letter combinations and sense pauses – small pauses between clauses and sentences. They found no evidence for any major stylistic shifts across the poem suggesting that Beowulf is the work of a single author.
