Dark matter – clear poetry

The Royal Observatory Greenwich is holding a public event on 10 November to discuss poems about astronomy. The astronomer Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell, the poet Kelley Swaine, and I will be speaking at it.

There is a lot of poetry written about astronomy, and I find this surprising for a couple of reasons.

First, because there’s hardly any literary fiction (I’m only singling out literary fiction because, with its emphasis on language, it’s the nearest thing in prose to poetry) inspired by astronomy. There are the wonderful books by John Banville, ‘Copernicus’, and ‘Kepler’, which are fictional accounts of these astronomers’ lives. There is ‘The Discovery of Heaven’ by Harry Mulisch. And that’s it. (Is it? Tell me I’m wrong)

Second, poetry likes to restrict itself in terms of space, and numbers of words. It likes to be concise, condensed. Astronomy, by its very nature, attempts to explain the entire universe. How can there be any sort of dialogue between such a constrained art-form and such a sprawling subject? What can poetry meaningfully say about astronomy?

Looking at the anthology of poetry about astronomy, ‘Dark Matter’, what strikes me is how many of the poems use people to investigate the subject. As I’ve said before in previous blogs we can’t seem to escape the human-sized in literature. So is astronomy just being used as a metaphor for human activities and emotions? Or is it being explored as something interesting in its own right?

Rebecca Elson managed to write very concise poems that convey an accurate sense of the science – her poem ‘Explaining Relativity’ describes how, according to the theory of general relativity, space is distorted by matter, and the way matter moves is correspondingly affected by this distortion.
‘What if There Were No Moon?’ describes how the Moon affects the Earth; not only tides and eclipses, but also human constructions such as the calendar.

Perhaps poetry has similarities to mathematics, in that discipline’s desire to explain and describe as concisely as possible. Euler’s identity is much loved by mathematicians, because it links the fundamental arithmetic operations to irrational, transcendental, and imaginary numbers in one very simple equation. e to the i pi plus one equals zero. When you say it out loud it sounds like poetry.

Imagining accuracy

How important is accuracy in fiction? If you’re writing about something ‘real’ based on real information, experiences, or events do you have to stick to the facts?

If I spot a mistake in the use of science in fiction, it can throw me off course. I feel that the universe set up by the writer is flawed. If the writer can make one mistake, then perhaps others have been made too. Should I continue to believe in this universe?
And I’m more likely to be on the hunt for mistakes if I suspect that the author is using science for reasons other than telling a story.
For example, some authors appear to use science to bolster their authority. Ian McEwan does this in ‘Enduring Love’ with his use of quasi-medical papers to give a scientific ‘explanation’ for the way that one of the characters behaves. Others use science to provide pretty-sounding metaphors. Quantum physics and relativity seem to be particularly popular. The first line of ‘Cat’s Eye’ by Margaret Atwood is
‘Time is not a line but a dimension…’
After I read this oxymoron (a line does have a dimension), I very nearly didn’t read on.

And yet. A desire for accuracy can shade into pedantry. The narrator of ‘Cat’s Eye’ is an artist. She’s not likely to understand the finer points of general relativity, and more importantly, she doesn’t need to for the story to work. All she, and therefore the reader, needs to know is that her brother has become a physicist and is removed from the hum-drumness of daily life (This depiction of an egg-head scientist seems somewhat clichéd but that’s another matter).

Too close a reading of the text in an effort to check its accuracy can stop the reader from appreciating the multiple interpretations that are always possible. When I first read the following lines from the poem ‘Carnal Knowledge’ by Rebecca Elson;
‘Performed the calculus
Of the imaginary i…’
I took the ‘imaginary i’ to refer to the square root of minus 1, which is depicted as i in maths and is the foundation of all so-called imaginary numbers. It took several re-readings of the poem for me to realise that this imaginary i could also be a person, a body. (I don’t know why it took me so long, the whole poem is about bodies…)
My knowledge of maths perhaps led me to assume that there was only one meaning of this phrase, and this actually prevented me from getting a wider appreciation of what the poem could offer. I might also have made this assumption because I knew that Elson herself was an astronomer and much of her writing is about astronomy, and science.

So I think there is a danger of being too proprietorial about knowledge. It shouldn’t be off-limits. If writers make mistakes which the vast majority of their readers won’t spot, then what does it matter? They have at least stretched their language to encompass new ideas.