{"id":4340,"date":"2021-04-21T07:45:45","date_gmt":"2021-04-21T07:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/?p=4340"},"modified":"2021-04-29T22:35:16","modified_gmt":"2021-04-29T22:35:16","slug":"science-and-poetry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.rutgers.edu\/books-we-read\/science-and-poetry\/","title":{"rendered":"Science and Poetry"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>During the month of April, Poetry Month, we at Books We Read shouldn’t abandon our main focus: science. After all, Chang is a science library! Here comes the missing post about the intersections of poetry and science.<\/p>\n

Run a search in QuickSearch<\/a> or Google the topic, whichever you wish, and you will be surprised. So were we. The following results illustrate only the tip of the proverbial iceberg with a topic presenting itself as a great one for a dissertation. But which department would that candidate fit in? (Nick says “literature and science” is indeed a hot topic in literature, if not the other way around!)<\/p>\n

\"poem\"<\/a>Among the top ten science poems<\/a> are some oldies, such as Edgar Allan Poe’s poem from 1829, Sonnet – To Science<\/em> and Walt Whitman’s When I Heard the Learn\u2019d Astronomer <\/em>from 1865.
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The ties between poetry go way back in time as explained, with some great examples, in a post entitled Science and Poetry<\/a> in the American Scientist. <\/em>Looking around a bit more, one discovers some disputes, such as an article figuring out which really was the first-ever poem published in a scientific journal.<\/a><\/p>\n

\"poem\"<\/a>National magazines and scholarly journals got involved long ago. An article How poetry can help communicate science<\/a> in Scientific American e<\/em>xplains that poetry is an effective medium through which to communicate new research and even advance scientific knowledge. The author, Sam Illingworth, also writes The Poetry of Science blog<\/a>, which presents new scientific research via the medium of poetry, along with podcasts and a book entitled A sonnet to science: Scientists and their poetry<\/a> by the same author (Manchester University Press, 2019).<\/p>\n

Then there is this article in The New Yorker<\/em>, called Ode on a stethoscope<\/a>, which provides a some background on poetry published in medical journals. Additionally, JAMA<\/a>, the Journal of the American Medical Association,<\/em> a peer-reviewed medical journal, actually has a whole section called <\/span><\/span>Poetry and Medicine,<\/span><\/a> which publishes poems written by artists and physicians to address the experience and meanings of healing and illness. A heart-wrenching poem entitled Alzheimer Aubade<\/a> written by Marjorie Maddox is just one sample of this extraordinary selection, going back to 1998 (Rutgers-restricted).<\/p>\n

Did you know that there has been a Hippocrates Conference on Poetry and Medicine held annually for over ten years? The Hippocrates Initiative for Poetry and Medicine also solicits entries for the Hippocrates Prize Awards<\/a> every year in three categories; one of them is solely for health service employees, students and anyone working in education and training of health professional students and staff.
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For those with an aversion to science, a source that we must have mentioned a few times this month, the Poetry Foundation,<\/a> comes to help with Ten Poems to Get You Through Science Class This Year<\/a>\u2013\u2013among them one entitled Poker Star<\/em> by Richard Brautigan.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Check out some other thematic collections from the Poetry Foundation:<\/div>\n
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