Physics Envy

American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After

Peter Middleton

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226290140
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration.
           
In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American —shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.

Part I

Poetry and Science

• 1 •

The Poetic Universe

Mapping Interrelations between Modern American Poetry and the Sciences

Poetic Inquiry in Scientific America

Midcentury poets faced a dilemma. Scientists owned the natural world. The elements of green shade, of rocks, and stones, and trees, of the physical pines and the red wheelbarrows that make up the thousand threads of things were being explained by new sciences, most impressively by quantum theory and by a theory of genetics known as the modern synthesis. The poet as amateur naturalist looked increasingly old-fashioned. William Carlos Williams’s admission that the aim of Paterson—“To make a start, / out of particulars / and make them general, rolling up the sum”—relied on “defective means” looked all too true.1 If poets wanted to talk at all knowledgeably about what George Oppen calls the “things / We live among,” or the cosmos or life itself, they needed to be aware of what the scientists were saying about the intangible entities of atoms and genes.2 At first glance, this seemed to be a manageable dilemma for poets willing to stay off the turf of the natural scientists. Unfortunately, however, for any strategy of retreat into the inner life, scientific naturalism also extended into the green thought that accompanied the green shade, turned spirit into neurons, eliminated metaphysical pines, and provided scientifically materialist reductions of every aspect of the body, mind, language, and society of the poet and poem. Wittgenstein’s insistence at the end of the Tractatus that “we feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched” (his italics) was no longer reassuring.3 Morality, meaning, values, relationships, memory, history, languages, concepts, desires, and moods were all claimed by one science or another. And when the reductionism reached its limits, all these features of human culture turned out to be the product of atoms and their forces.

These pressures from the sciences were especially powerful in the United States after a war that was widely believed to have been won by physics, with the assistance of the achievements of other sciences, such as medical advances in antibiotics, cybernetic developments in weapons design, and chemical products with valuable military uses. Nuclear physics was seen as America’s special achievement since many of the leading nuclear physicists from Europe had fled there from persecution, and more had been persuaded to come by the enormous investments in the new science. American social science was also rapidly growing in prestige and put the humanities and the arts under pressure to justify themselves. The claim that only scientific method could be relied upon to produce reliable knowledge of the world, coupled with the idea that anyone, farmer or poet, could be a “scientific American,” created a dilemma for poets. Should they insist that they were not part of the new America, or—and why not?—should they become scientific American poets? I believe that the response of poets in the late-modernist lineage to this challenge to produce a poetics capable of full participation in a scientific America was to create some of the most ambitious Anglophone poetry of the twentieth century. These poets of the second half of the twentieth century wanted to claim their own right of experiment and inquiry as scientific Americans, and they could be vocal about this desire.

In this introductory chapter I shall sketch out how these poets conceptualized their interest in sharing the responsibilities and rewards of inquiry with the sciences. I shall address several questions. Is it possible to schematize the main kinds of poetic interaction with new scientific knowledge of quantum fields, genetic codes, electronics, astrophysics, and biology? What did literary theorists think of the use of experimentation and of reasoning with propositions in poetry and, above all, of poems that engaged with scientific knowledge and methodology? Could poems claim legitimacy as inquiry? Did poems have any epistemological traction as they engaged in what Ronald Bush aptly calls “negotiations between reason and desire”?4 The postwar poets that I shall be discussing saw themselves as inheritors of a modernist tradition that they wanted to renew. What were the main legacies of high-modernist poetics for poetry’s active pursuit of interrelations with the sciences? What new directions did poets take? The majority of late twentieth-century poems about science borrow scientific ideas and discoveries for metaphoric uses. This chapter maps out a broad theoretical and historical context for the postwar poetic ventures onto the terrain of the sciences, as a preliminary for the more detailed studies that follow in later chapters.

Alice Fulton speaks for many contemporary poets when she says of her poem “Cascade Experiment”: “I often lift scientific language for my own wayward purposes. That isn’t to say I play fast and loose with denoted meanings. I’m as true to the intentions of science as my knowledge allows. But my appropriations from science are entwined with other discourses, other ideas, so that a term such as ‘cascade experiment’ comes to stand for more than the laboratory event it is.”5 “Cascade Experiment” borrows a popular version of quantum theory to talk about the importance, if a relationship is to flourish, of having faith in the existence of unobserved emotions: “faith in facts can help create those facts, / the way electrons exist only when they’re measured, / or shy people stand alone at parties.” The poem appropriates a popular version of the uncertainty principle to suggest that the lover is like an atomic particle because intense interest about who and what this entity is both makes it knowable and at the same time sets limits to that knowledge: “Because believing a thing’s true / can bring about that truth, / and you might be the shy one, lizard or electron / known only through advances / presuming your existence, let my glance be passional / toward the universe and you.”6 Ronald Johnson’s poem “The Invaders” wittily finds scientific analogies to represent the aesthetic achievements of writers, artists, and musicians: “Mahler is a nova of / virus,” while Blake “descends in mystic / 7’s / the stairs / from Quasar to Orange to Atom.” In a note to the poem he criticizes the unquestioned facticity of science, saying that we live in a time when “science is no longer seeing it is fiction, or poetry, and makes its own solutions with intuition as stepping stones.”7 Fulton’s and Johnson’s scientific metaphors suggest that the poet and reader must now recognize that their everyday living takes place inside an organism genetically driven by molecular processes and living amid a phenomenal whirl of particles in electromagnetic fields. The image of the lover as shy electron also typifies a tendency in this kind of poetry. Metaphorization of science disembeds the new scientific entities from their epistemological contexts and often results in an ironic stance toward the expansion of scientific method into all areas of human experience. Not all poets treat the sciences as sources of fertile metaphors. Some treat them as inspiration for a poetics of inquiry.

Robert Creeley liked to quote William Carlos Williams’s “contention that ‘the poet thinks with his poem, in that lies his thought, and that in itself is the profundity.’”8 “We,” said Creeley of his generation of poets—“that unimaginable plural of I!—want our lives to be known to us,” a knowledge created in poems that form “a record, a composite fact of the experience of living in time and space.”9 Oppen argued that “the emotion which creates art is the emotion that seeks to know and to disclose.” He believed that the modernists had demonstrated that poetry could attain a “skill of accuracy, or precision, a test of truth.” The poetic image represents “an account of the poet’s perception,” and its effectiveness is “a test of sincerity, a test of conviction, the rare poetic quality of truthfulness.”10 Oppen uses his terms with great care. Accuracy and sincerity are what Bernard Williams calls the “virtues of truth,” dispositions essential for a discourse to be truthful and capable of producing knowledge.11 In effect, Oppen is arguing that poetry is as capable of rigorous inquiry as any scientific or scholarly discipline.

Robert Duncan did not want poets to give away any rights to define epistemic values: “We work as poets and take seriously what seems to most men the one ground surely not to be taken seriously—the play-reality of imagined religions, philosophies, sciences.”12 Poetry is an art of the hypothetical, an aesthetics of theories. Charles Olson told poets that “the human universe is as discoverable as that other,” the material universe, if only they would compose their poems as high-energy fields.13 And in a memo to the Black Mountain College faculty written with a copy of Lincoln Barnett’s 1949 Life magazine profile of Oppenheimer at his elbow, Olson echoed an aspiration attributed to the physicist: “I am, then, concerned as any scientist is, with penetrating the unknown.”14 Denise Levertov’s well-known definition of organic form reveals in a quieter terminology a similar interest in inquiry: “For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that there is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet can discover and reveal.”15 Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “inscape” was now reframed in a more science-friendly manner.

The generation of avant-garde poets who followed them were even more willing to affirm explicitly their commitments to experiment and inquiry. Lyn Hejinian entitled a selection of her essays The Language of Inquiry because “the language of poetry is a language of inquiry, not the language of a genre. It is that language in which a writer (or reader) both perceives and is conscious of the perception.”16 Charles Bernstein also endorsed poetic inquiry and linked it directly to knowledge: “It is just my insistence / that poetry be understood as epistemological / inquiry.” In place of Duncan’s mythic language of play and imagination, Bernstein knowingly makes a specimen out of the jargon of Continental philosophy in this free-verse essay first performed at the MLA: poetry resists the “hegemony of restricted / epistemological economies.”17 When Ron Silliman explained to readers of the first major anthology of Language Writing, In the American Tree (1986), that what the poets share is not a style or an ideology but “a perception as to what the issues might be,” his choice of these issues closely echoed the domains that define the scope of different, mostly scientific disciplines: “The nature of reality. The nature of the individual. The function of language in the constitution of either realm. The nature of meaning. The substantiality of language. The shape and value of literature itself. The function of method. The relation between writer and reader.”18 Each item in this list can be paralleled with a natural, social, or human science: physics, psychology, linguistics, philosophy, literary theory, and perhaps even the philosophy of science.

Anyone familiar with modern American poetry is likely to recall many other similar bold claims. Poems, say the New American poets, can think and inquire. Thinking about composite facts such as time and space with accuracy and tests of truth, working with imagined sciences in field compositions, and penetrating the unknown, discovering laws or forms in all things—these and other related modes of poetic research shape the poetry and poetics of the New American poets. Language Writers argue that poems can test the workings of public and personal language. Inquiring into the role of discourse, sentences, words, and phonemes in constituting subjectivity, politics, history, power, and knowledge—these are potentials of an expanded poetry. They and other postwar poets in the modernist lineage repeatedly argue that poems need not concede epistemological primacy to any other domain of research, whether a natural, social, or human science.

Puzzlement about the implications of such claims was the origin of this book. I say “puzzlement” deliberately. The conceptual resources to reformulate as research questions the mix of curiosity, uncertainty, and fascination that generated this puzzlement have been hard to find in literary and cultural theory. What are we now to make of such late-modernist aspirations for poetry? Are they at all plausible? These poets, whether associated with the generations of the objectivists, the New American poets, the Language Writers, or the less defined poetic movements of feminist or black activist networks, believed that poetry (like other arts) can be a site of inquiry and investigation, that poetry is more than entertainment, instruction, Orphic revelation, or self-realization, though in the course of their experiments and inquiries they might practice some or all of these other modes. Are such beliefs no more than boosterism for poetry? How might literary theory help us weigh up such beliefs?

We clearly need to approach cautiously such claims that the poem can be a site of inquiry, not least to look to the poetry for confirmation of the poetics. Bryan Walpert’s study of recent contemporary American poetry provides evidence that poets known for their interest in science can talk in their essays about the importance of science and yet manifest in their poems a steady resistance to scientific authority, “specifically claims that science holds a monopoly on knowledge.”19 Although three of the four poets whom Walpert chooses to represent the diversity of recent poetry—Pattiann Rogers, Alison Hawthorne Deming, and Albert Goldbarth—each approach the rendering of subjectivity differently, their poems often belie their authors’ discursive enthusiasms for scientific ideas and methods and display “different kinds of resistance to the authority of scientific knowledge.”20 Deming may say that “a mode of questioning we associate with science can become a nest of poetic delight,” but in the well-known poem “The Woman Painting Crates,” Walpert thinks she rejects the world revealed by physics “in favor of her common perception of her surroundings.”21 Only the fourth poet he discusses, Joan Retallack, manages to align her commitment to science (as in The Poethical Wager) with her poetic practice, and she does so by writing performative poems that are as experimental as good scientific research. Her poem “AID/I/SAPPEARANCE,” by “enacting linguistic critiques of scientific language, shows a concern for the human subject.”22 Although her poetic theory is of interest to anyone writing about poetry and science, Retallack’s poetic engagements with science are outside the historical frame of this book—Walpert’s insightful discussion of her is a reminder that poetry continues to develop new versions of Rukeyser’s “methods of science.”

In Physics Envy I argue that resistance is, in practice, usually mingled with admiration and sometimes, as in the cases of the poets on whom I concentrate, with a searching cognitive and affective negotiation between the poem and specific scientific epistemology. Deming herself might be better described not as resistant to science but as disputatious, in a scientific sense, because she is concerned to counter the assumption that one specific science can explain everything. Science is nothing if not intense argument, as Deming knows. In “The Woman Painting Crates,” the poet does not directly reject physics in favor of her own perception, but instead she challenges physicists to develop an even better model than is provided by particles or by the new halo theory (presumably a version of string theory) about which she has just heard a lecture. Although the poet reaches a point where she insists that “knowing is what I try / to train myself out of,” this implies that she herself wants to be as scientific as the physicist, and so she is training herself not to think that she already knows what she hopes to find out.23

Methodology

By midcentury the sciences were making strong claims to the right of inquiry over the outside and the inside places, over the green shade and the green thought. Poets who wanted their work to stand up to intellectual scrutiny as more than narcissistic fantasy had to find ways to negotiate with ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I Poetry and Science
• Part II Midcentury
• Part III Scientific Americans
• Coda
• Notes
• Index