Jacket2, an online literary magazine that is a continuation of the longstanding Jacket that was discontinued last year, hosted an online panel discussing the relationship of poetry and science. Contributors were Rae Armantrout, Amy Catanzano, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack. One section of this panel investigates the level at which scientific discourse would ideally be integrated into a poem: simply as a metaphor or “as an independent discipline or set of disciplines.” Many of the panelists reach the same conclusion—that metaphor is not contained within poetic language but also proliferates in scientific discourse as well. As Rae Armantrout observes, “[M]etaphor is 'always already' embedded in the language of science.”
Another issue the panelists discussed is potentially problematic issues relating to using scientific concepts as metaphors. As Joan Retallack states, “[W]hat if it turns out in the new cosmological physics that there really aren’t any black holes, leaving all those thousands (millions?) of poems with their black hole metaphors embarrassingly intact. Is this decade’s science true? … false?” Scientific theories are ever-evolving, and antiquated theories are discarded; however, poetry does not show such a linear progression. Many of the lines of discussion, such as this one, span the course of the entire panel, which is six separate articles. So to get a complete idea of the panelists ideas on these topics, one must devote the time to read around 60,000 words. However, as hybridity in subject matter and form makes further developments in poetry, discussion of the underlying ideology of such hybrids provides inspiration and caution on how to approach poetic composition.
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