For each of the 12 days of Christmas, here鈥檚 something to beguile, distract 鈥� and leave you with questions for the year ahead
Simon Barraclough dons a bright yellow jacket, orange Ray Bans, and strides to the front of the stage. Rocking on his heels, he says:
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鈥�I pity you your brief lives
over in the squint of an eye.鈥�
Sunspots is Barraclough鈥檚 one-hour, one-man show, with video montage, poems, and a spot of trumpet-playing. It has toured the UK since June 2015, with a this month.
Based on his book of the same name, Barraclough acts as the sun鈥檚 voice but also delivers different angles on what the sun has meant to us throughout history.
His poems are packed with full and half-rhymes, and music. Read them, and they can occasionally feel twee, but live they pack much more of a punch. There鈥檚 plenty of humour: some shorter poems are pretty much one-line gags, while some of the longer ones deal in powerful imagery.
Take these final lines from one of the poems:
鈥�For she sets herself by the grid of Manhattan.
For she will kill you with the loving of you.
For she can shine.鈥�
Barraclough鈥檚 show comes at the end of a year in which I feel that there has been far more poetry about science. Maybe it鈥檚 cognitive bias, but then I work at New 杏吧原创 and write poetry (I recently had one published about heavy element researcher, Yuri Ognesssian).
Playing with ideas
Big-name poets such as and Michael Symmonds Roberts have played with scientific ideas for years, but the rise of neuroscience in particular seems to have attracted a new generation, such as Helen Mort.
It makes sense: neuroscience speaks to the same urgency to know what makes us tick as poetry. And poetry can be a shortcut to the greater truths science strives to answer. It tells us why we care: the 鈥溾��, as the poet-astronomer Rebecca Elson put it.
In 2015, , a magazine for poems about science, tapped into that awe with itswith some stark and elliptical poems. One of the magazine鈥� editors, Dorothy Lehane, had previously co-edited Sequences and Pathogens, an anthology bringing together poets and scientists. Her own collection about astronomy, Ephemeris, was also published last year. One of my favourites 鈥� about supernovae 鈥� begins 鈥�worrying little striptease/ soliloquise through the night鈥�.
Barraclough himself has taken the connection between science and poetry further with a stint as poet-in-residence at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory in Surrey, UK. Out of this came , an interesting but uneven collection of poems, some of them from scientists at Mullard.
Eco-poetry growth
2015 also welcomed the winners of , which offers 拢5000 to the best poem about ecological issues. This year one of the biggest US poetry magazines, , is publishing a special issue called The Poetics of Science and wants submissions.
One of my favourite science poems of 2015 featured the year鈥檚 biggest science story, NASA鈥檚 New Horizons mission to Pluto. Written by Fatimah Asghar, it was published in Poetry magazine just a few months before the fly-by. Poetry is where T.S.听Eliot鈥檚 The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock was first published in 1915.
I wonder what Old Possum would have made of , which begins:
鈥�Today, I broke your solar system. Oops.
My bad. Your graph said I was supposed
to make a nice little loop around the sun.
Naw.
I chaos like a motherfucker. Ain鈥檛 no one can
chart me. All the other planets, they think
I鈥檓 annoying. They think I鈥檓 an escaped
moon, running free.
Fuck your moon. Fuck your solar system鈥�鈥�
听
