Poet to Physicist in His Laboratory: Difference between revisions
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== Comments and Notes == | == Comments and Notes == | ||
This poem is an invitation to a dialogue between the speaker (a poet) and a physicist. The title and first line make this explicit: "Poet to Physicist..." and ''Come out and talk to me.'' This is an invitation for the physicist to emerge from his laboratory and engage with the poet. The speaker wants to know the "shape" of the research occurring in this laboratory; the word shape is peculiar in this context. It could be the research, as we would normally expect, or it could refer to the physicist | This poem is an invitation to a dialogue between the speaker (a poet) and a physicist. The title and first line make this explicit: "Poet to Physicist..." and ''Come out and talk to me.'' This is an invitation for the physicist to emerge from his laboratory and engage with the poet. The speaker wants to know the "shape" of the research occurring in this laboratory; the word shape is peculiar in this context. It could be the research, as we would normally expect, or it could refer to the physicist herelf, oddly enough. To the poet, the physicist's word is full of symbols and mysteries. The attempt to build a bridge from the Humanities to the Sciences, as the speaker conveys it, is an invitation but also an acknowledgement of frustration. There are mysteries, perhaps encoded in the abstract symbols of mathematics, that the poet cannot access. | ||
The dialogue quickly becomes a monologue or even a soliloquy. The physicist seems to have no voice of | The dialogue quickly becomes a monologue or even a soliloquy. The physicist seems to have no voice of his own in this narrative poem. The title, then, may be more literal than it seems at first: a one-way discourse from poet to physicist caged in his cavernous and unfathomable laboratory. Initial curiosity turns into an "animus". The long final line of the poem turns into a prescriptive warning, a credo. It recalls the Church's inquiry into Galileo's innovative but heretical experiments of the heavens. This is a reactionary poet, perhaps, speaking from a position of fear, and speaking with a disturbing turn of tone. We feel a growing sympathy for the unseen, voiceless physicist hemmed in from all sides. I like this poem because it is challenging and claims no simple moral agendas. |
Revision as of 20:34, 27 September 2010
Poet to Physicist in His Laboratory
by David Ignatow
Come out and talk to me for then I know into what you are shaping. Thinking is no more, I read your thoughts for a symbol: a movement towards an act. I give up on thought as I see your mind leading into a mystery deepening about you. What are you trying to discover beyond the zone of habit and enforced convention? There is the animus that spends itself on images, the most complex being convention and habit. You shall form patterns of research and bind yourself to laws within your knowledge, and always conscious of your limitations make settlement, with patience to instruct you as it always does in your research: an arrangement spanning an abyss of time, and you will find yourself patient when you are questioned.
Comments and Notes
This poem is an invitation to a dialogue between the speaker (a poet) and a physicist. The title and first line make this explicit: "Poet to Physicist..." and Come out and talk to me. This is an invitation for the physicist to emerge from his laboratory and engage with the poet. The speaker wants to know the "shape" of the research occurring in this laboratory; the word shape is peculiar in this context. It could be the research, as we would normally expect, or it could refer to the physicist herelf, oddly enough. To the poet, the physicist's word is full of symbols and mysteries. The attempt to build a bridge from the Humanities to the Sciences, as the speaker conveys it, is an invitation but also an acknowledgement of frustration. There are mysteries, perhaps encoded in the abstract symbols of mathematics, that the poet cannot access.
The dialogue quickly becomes a monologue or even a soliloquy. The physicist seems to have no voice of his own in this narrative poem. The title, then, may be more literal than it seems at first: a one-way discourse from poet to physicist caged in his cavernous and unfathomable laboratory. Initial curiosity turns into an "animus". The long final line of the poem turns into a prescriptive warning, a credo. It recalls the Church's inquiry into Galileo's innovative but heretical experiments of the heavens. This is a reactionary poet, perhaps, speaking from a position of fear, and speaking with a disturbing turn of tone. We feel a growing sympathy for the unseen, voiceless physicist hemmed in from all sides. I like this poem because it is challenging and claims no simple moral agendas.