Motherboard City edited by Mario Petrucci

Description

MOTHERBOARD CITY

The Poetry of Science & the Science of Poetry poems from the ‘Poetry ↔ Science’ workshop devised & led by Mario Petrucci

From Mario: Perhaps this project is best distilled via the notes I sent to participants ahead of the first session: “What, really, is a ‘science poem’? Better still, what can it be coaxed into, so as to galvanise and enrich our preferred subjects? Can those complex force lines of scientific knowledge be made to percolate and invigorate our work, simply? Can scientific DNA mutate our poems towards flight? These are a few of the questions we’ll be opening up together in a hands-on, 8-week course which will explore the many ways of amalgamating science and poetry. Amazingly, no scientific expertise is required! The course is principally a dynamo for new work that incorporates science interestingly, provocatively, and productively. You won’t be writing ‘about’ science, which can sometimes lead to fad subjects like Black Holes; rather, you’ll engage with the far less predictable activity of enlivening and informing your compositional practice through a variety of scientific processes. These processes provide a laboratory of fresh techniques, test-tubes and accidents (yes, accidents!) that can animate any subject, however light or profound, including your more personal, confessional work. The atmosphere will be inclusive and open, with an emphasis on enjoyment and experimentation, but full of surprises, maybe even the odd illuminating explosion!”

Poems by Gillie Robic, Mary Mulholland, Mallika Buckle, Neil Douglas, Evie Hever, Nicholas Catlin, Sally Child, Jacqueline Smith, and Sara Jane Gray.

Comments by the poets about the workshops series:

“Poetry ↔ Science taught me fantastic and innovatory ways to enter into poetry afresh, to explore language and concepts that open up my sense of what writing creatively can look like.”

“This project drew us to the uncertainties of science, to the discovery, proposal and rejection of theories and facts, the instability… our writing often came via random juxtapositions, instinctual leaps, as well as through close observation and graft – just as in science itself.”

“The course stimulated fresh and inventive thinking, utilising the methods and language of science to experiment with our approach to composition and to inject new life into work or ideas that were well on their way to rigor mortis.”

“Seeing change as the default state of the universe, as opposed to stasis, has been deeply transformative, particularly when witnessing contradictions as power- fully complex processes that can bring poems into being.”

“Artists and scientists explore similar objects, but through very different eyes and language; the Poetry ↔ Science course showed us ways, if not to walk in da Vinci’s polymath footsteps, at least to be more open to how science can enrich poetry.”

“From the water cycle to an interrogation of lead, I found new insights, new questions, and a world within a tiny diameter.”

“In this unique project, words were allowed their particular weight, fully; but they also acquired fresh weightings more varied than those I initially chose for them, delivering poems somehow more massive than my own initial ideas.”

“This course enabled us to access an entirely fresh poetic vocabulary, as a byproduct of some surprisingly simple yet invigorating scientific sampling.”

“Does a meteorite remember its mother? Does a pearl? How would a fossil describe its death millions of years ago? No longer constrained by my own perspective, this course has brought intriguing new voices babbling to my surface.”