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In this new series, I’ll be deconstructing a poem that intersects with science in some substantial way, learning how the poem ticks, what it’s accomplishing, what science is baked into the piece, and what we can learn from it. To start, I’ll be exploring a poem called “Thrush Music.”

Thrush Music

We have twenty-five spots left
for students who wish to disappear.

Twenty-five empty seats.
Twenty-five air conditioners
breathing through empty bedrooms. Twenty-five
bags of oxygen
lifting in twenty-five students
who wish
to disappear past
the exosphere.

Meals will be simple. Passage
will be long
and quiet.
Abubakri, Shackleton, Earhart
at least had waves. A tern,
thunderheads.
That’s the problem with space,
that is, one drip
of blue
in a whole ocean
holds something to listen to.

Radio communication will cease
upon landing.
When the anvil drops
at the squeezing of an airlock out,
out.

More than words, motion.
The noise of naked thighs
sliding skin against skin
in a forest. Somewhere
to get beyond dust. To see heat
bound through foliage,
darken a face not contained
in a fishbowl.

You may explore the planet,
make shelter, tend
to the greenhouse.
But please do not interfere
with the rovers.

2.

Some among us claim this dirt
was our first home, that our gods planned
for colder life but an asteroid knocked
us to a hotter rock
while still in our tiny forms.

That this is a return trip home,
that we were meant to breathe
carbon, to take form from sand and wind,
to celebrate in radiation.

Now home has filled with shivering drifters,
and the windows are all knocked out.
Our parents are long dead,
with stones out front to mark their graves.

 

3.

*

Sometimes we pretend the tracks we see are not our own. The moons
are oblong eggs digging into the sky.

*

Yesterday we heard Curiosity IX humming “Happy Birthday”
to itself.

Some nights we sit on our cubes, laugh
and make owl noises into the dark. Become quiet again.

*

There is nothing left to see, so we pretend. Make totem poles
from basalt, give them stray LEDs for eyes. Build temples

for the sound they make against the wind. Our children are orange, drink
to volcanoes. Are happy with us for leaving them here.

 

In 1983, my grandfather bought an airplane from Neil Armstrong. This was not a coincidence—the two men ran in similar circles in upper crust Cincinnati, golfing together and dining at the Camargo Country Club. My grandfather was always proud of this relationship. He was, after all, a space buff, the kind of person that built a telescope by hand—even grinding his own mirror– just so he could get a better view of Jupiter. Despite this, with one exception he never brought up the Apollo missions with Neil. Neil was, always, a very private person. Especially when it came to his astronauting days.

That one exception, however, happened on that day in 1983 when my Grandfather first got his keys to his Bonanza single-prop (I’m not actually sure if you use a key to start a plane). Neil took him into the air for a test-ride and the two cruised back and forth across the Ohio-Kentucky line, chatting idly about politics, family, and the Bengals, but mostly just enjoying the company and the view.

While they were in the sky, a rogue low-pressure front moved in from the west, and large cumulonimbus clouds built and burst above the airport. With the rain beginning to roll in, my Grandfather radioed the control tower, asking about clearance for landing. The man on the other end responded by asking something along the lines of: “Mr. Cooper, have you passed your Level 3 flight protocols? You need those protocols passed to land the plane in these wet conditions.”

He did not have the certification, though in those days it was rare that anyone kept up with that sort of thing. My grandfather was confident he could land the craft safely, and even more confident knowing who sat beside him.

Feeling punchy, he radioed back to the control tower and responded, “No, but my copilot did put the lunar lander on the moon.”

There was a long silence and my Grandfather, a bit embarrassed to have brought it up, tried to steal a glance at Neil, who was looking out the window, unresponsive. A few moments later the tower responded curtly, “Um, yes ah, Mr. Cooper, Mr. Armstrong, you are clear to land.”

Neil turned his head slightly to glance at my Grandfather, a hint of a wry smile playing across his face.

—

I am fascinated by the idea of spaceflight, thanks in large part to stories like these from my Grandfather. I always wanted to know more about Neil, about watching the moon landing and the thrill of the space race. But something that always struck me was how my Grandfather described Neil Armstrong. Quiet, reluctant, bleakly honest. Hard to hold a conversation with for long before his mind seemed to drift somewhere else. This image of the first man to step foot on the moon, in many ways, informed how I imagine space travel to be, how astronauts in real life might behave and be affected by their experience. The Right Stuff notwithstanding, astronauts, it seemed to me, were at their core less pilot ace whiz kids and more wandering introverts with boundless curiosity that found an outlet in the sky.

Every time I try to write about space, it ends up in this introspective, melancholy place, and I think that comes from this early view of the effects I imagined space having on those who visited it. What can you tell someone about your experience who hasn’t, with their own eyes, seen everything they care about in the world rise as a blue dot while they stand on a barren rock?

This interpretation of “Thrush Music,” (a title chosen because the call of the thrush can only be heard when one is truly remote; the wood thrush is solely a deep woods bird) however, actually came later. The original inspiration for this poem, truly, came from an email in my inbox promoting a study abroad trip, advertising space for 20 students looking to “disappear,” a typo for some other word that I have never figured out but that, at the time, I instantly wrote down because I found it so delightful. Years later, the line found a home in a poem about space.

Generally speaking, the poem explores a future world where there are the beginnings of colonies on Mars for the particularly intrepid, or bored. I once heard Antarctica described as the place where people go who, if god gave the earth a good shake, would gather at the bottom of the planet because they didn’t have strings holding them down anywhere else. I assume the first people to choose to live on Mars might be of a similar breed to them, and to the original pioneer of new worlds, the window-watcher Neil Armstrong. The poem explores what it might be like to make such a separation—in physical space, in introspection– permanent.

There is a lot of science to be found in this poetic sequence, science that I think sustains the world I am building better than any fiction could. For me personally, science always adds a flavor to the poetry that I find centering.

First, I mention the dust, something I always assumed would be a relatively neutral aspect of living on a sandy planet prone to dust storms. But in fact, scientists tell us that the dust could be unbearable. Martian dust is a lot finer than earth dust. It hangs in the air like cigarette smoke, making the horizon look yellow and polluted. When I first heard this, I found it incredibly jarring, though I suppose it shouldn’t be; there’s no reason a space devoid of human impact should be “clean,” especially on another planet, but that’s part of the mythology of exploration and something neat to continue thinking about as we further expand the bounds of our influence, as a species.

At a few points in the poem I mention the rovers, particularly “Curiosity,” whose software—it is true—is programmed to produce a binary code once a year that reads “happy birthday.” I like imagining a future where these robots are old tech, still milling around without much purpose—much like the characters in the poem—humming and thinking to itself as it goes about its business.

In part II of the sequence, I explore one astronomical theory: that life actually began on Mars back when the red planet would have been far more hospitable to life as we know it than the earth, which spent its infancy as a molten, bubbling mess. The theory goes, as Mars aged and began to get too cold, earth took the mantle as the planet in the solar system more accommodating to life. Fortuitously, a massive asteroid crashed into Mars, sending pieces of the planet into space. Some of these planetary fragments landed on earth, and the rest is (prehistoric) history.

Throughout the rest of the piece I think about the new colonization of Mars as a sort of continuation of that connection between the blue and red planets; being left behind, cyclically— cells on Mars gradually freezing to death, leaving the bright future of their city in disarray, and now displaced people looking for a new start, only to find to melancholy and long-forgotten. The “stones out front” are the fossilized remains of these (theoretical) cells, which scientists have found some evidence for.

Using science to build the kind of world I want for my poems helps me ground myself in a reality that I can then tweak and modify. I find that having walls of facts and knowledge to push against gives the work a dynamic potential energy that better holds everything in place. Starting from a blank slate, I end up just piling things on top of one another, without a cohesive gravity to hold them together. It’s a cliché that “fact is stranger than fiction,” and it’s not true, really. But facts do inspire a different way of thinking, and that’s why I incorporate science into my creative writing.

Scientists and science communicators looking to better engage the public with their work can learn a lot from creative writing. In this “toolkit” series, I take lessons from poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction and apply them to the science communication context in order to show how science communicators can leverage the lessons of creative writing to build empathy, emotion and gravity into their work. In this post, I will explore narrative.

Few aspects of human society are so pervasive and central across widely dispersed cultures than storytelling. From the Iliad to Game of Thrones, we humans have always been captivated by a good yarn. Writers of fiction know this. Hollywood directors know this. Even politicians, interested in making an engaging pitch to voters, have learned to capitalize on a compelling narrative.

Yet when it comes to science communication, the power of the story can sometimes get lost. Tasked with teaching the reader something about science, science communicators can sometimes lose sight of an equally important mission—getting readers interested. Granted, a short news article about a recent discovery doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the sort of character arcs and plot twists that Steven Spielberg can rely on. When you’re jointly relying on factual accounts and trying to explain a research concept, incorporating a story is a delicate and trying task.

But making the effort is worth it if you want your work to engage new people and build interest in the content.

Let’s start with what I mean by “narrative.” A narrative is what happens in a story. Typically, narrative specifically relates to what happens to the story’s characters. The classic hero story—the basis for the Iliad, Lord of the Rings, and nearly every Disney film—is perhaps the most pervasive of narratives: someone leaves home to go on a quest, goes through some trials that culminates in a final test, which they overcome, and then returns home changed for the experience.

The hero story, of course, isn’t the only type of narrative. There’s the classic love story—two people meet, fall in love, something comes between them, and then they overcome it. There’s the story of the martyr that sacrifices themselves for a greater cause, inspiring victory (think, 300, Jesus Christ, Joan of Arc). If you’re interested in learning more about story arcs, author Kurt Vonnegut famously explains the most famous arcs in a video recorded at the Association of Writers and Poets Conference. These narratives are so well-known because, for some reason, we as humans tend to be attracted to hearing about people going through similar sorts of things. While science writers might celebrate if people instead were just intrinsically curious about the inner workings of spleen cells, the fact is we’re just not wired that way. If we want to make content that people will consume, we need to take a page from what people actually do consume of their own volition—superhero movies, romance novels and murder mystery podcasts.

So what’s a science writer to do to make their writing sound more like The Avengers? For one, consider their characters. Scientists aren’t just buckets of facts and quotes to pull from to explain a science concept. They are living, breathing people with hobbies and families that probably got into science because of some intriguing childhood experience. They probably have a favorite pipette, and a good reason for it. And they have, at least once in their scientific careers, yelled out loud they were so excited about a discovery. Working small pieces of human drama into a science story can be tremendously helpful in sustaining a reader’s interest.

What aspects of narrative are most helpful? The advice from journalism, “if it bleeds it leads,” is a helpful start. Beyond being attracted to intriguing characters and their development, people tend to consume content that features sex and violence and acts of extreme bravery, bigotry or sacrifice. This may be somewhat disappointing news for those that might dream of a society of people not ruled by animal vices. But the fact that we are animals doesn’t mean your writing or your presentation needs to sound like a tabloid. It simply needs to be mindful of what draws people’s attention. Things need to happen to your characters or your atoms or your viruses by the end of the story. Nothing in life is static.

As science communicators, it is our responsibility to pull the reader through a piece by capitalizing on the lessons of narrative. If, at the end of your story, nothing happens to anyone, then you need to change your approach.

 

Scientists and science communicators looking to better engage the public with their work can learn a lot from creative writing. In this “toolkit” series, I take lessons from poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction and apply them to the science communication context in order to show how science communicators can leverage the lessons of creative writing to build empathy, emotion and gravity into their work. In this post, I will explore diction.

Diction is simply a writer’s choice of words. This may seem like an aspect of craft so obviously central to writing as to render it a useless metric to focus on. But that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Diction is a specific stylistic choice that can make a big difference in how a reader engages with writing. Working to hone your attention to diction can make you a more effective communicator of science—whether that’s writing press releases, science journalism, or giving a presentation.

Consider a blog post about a newly discovered ant species that starts: “Last week, scientists found a new ant in South America that sprays stinky goo all over would-be attackers.” Now consider a different article, about the same new discovery, that starts, “Last week, researchers at Duke University described a new species of Formica ant that can emit a noxious compound from its abdomen to deter predators.”

What differences do you notice between these two ledes? To most ears, the first will sound more casual, more fun, and perhaps more engaging. The second is more stiff, formal, and clearly intended for a different audience. This difference in tone is due in no small part to differences in word choice—in diction. What is the effect of choosing the phrase “stinky goo” versus “noxious compounds?” They both accurately describe the formic acid emitted by this family of ants. The former is simply more relatable to a general audience. It’s easy to imagine stinky goo. It’s much harder to place what a “noxious compound” looks like.

This doesn’t necessarily mean the first lede is better (though, in contexts where a more casual tone is appropriate it likely would be). But it does draw attention to the power of word choice in shaping tone and appealing to different audiences.

Diction also extends to the choice of parts of speech. In general, creative writing teaches us that nouns and verbs work better than adjectives and adverbs at conveying specific meaning—perhaps the ultimate goal of any creative writing. “A huge piece of ice quickly fell off the glacier and made a really big splash” is clearly less effective than “An Eiffel Tower of ice calved from the rest of the glacier, shattering the silence of the bay.” Choosing good, highly specific verbs and nouns is, of course, harder because it takes more thought. And that’s really the point.

Diction can also be wielded effectively as a means of continuing a theme or establishing a motif that runs through an entire piece. Even if this sort of “easter egg” isn’t noticed outright, it invariably brings the reader’s attention closer to the writing. Note in the above example the use of the word “shattering.” This word, beyond being a more engaging and informative choice than “made a splash,” is effective because it maintains the through-line of the narrative—the reader is inhabiting a world of ice, and ice shatters. This same reason is why, in good writing, a story about cadavers describes the morgue as “dead” quiet, or a story about searching for anacondas in the Amazon describes an old dirt road as “snaking.” It’s a way of building intrigue, or, in the case of a mystery or horror story, anticipation and dread.

Diction used in this way can of course also begin to sound contrived if too on the nose. Diction is, like all elements of craft, a balancing game between overwriting and underwriting.

So how might a science communicator utilize diction? One of the most important takeaways of a close study of diction is to be brave. Consider a neuroscientist preparing to give a talk about their research to the general public. In weighing how to talk about her work on synapses, she is faced with a choice of how to describe them. True, they are the tiny intercellular space where two neurons meet to exchange chemical and electrical signals. But they are also, truly, the brain cells’ personal space where they have a conversation, the forcefield space between two ends of a magnet that won’t go together, and the gaps in our brain where our memories live. Scientists and science communicators can be uncomfortable with this sort of interpretation, borne of the unconventional word choices. The sorts of descriptions and metaphors don’t show up in textbooks, certainly. But they aren’t any less true than a scientific explanation of their purpose. Being unconventional, within reason, can make your communication far more engaging and much of that “unconventionality” can come from more deliberate word choice.

It’s not an easy process shifting your thinking to more closely consider the diction in your communication. Fortunately, there are tools out there to help. One example is the fabulous website “UpGoerFive” an online text editor that underlines in red any word you use that is not in the 1,000 most used words in the English language (the site, appropriately, refers to these as the “ten hundred” most used words). It’s a fun and often absurd challenge, especially for writing about science, but it can be a really helpful tool in taking your use of diction to the next level by thinking outside the box. And of course, another training strategy is to go to the “source material,” as it were. Reading work by diverse creative writers can expand your understanding of how the pros utilize diction.

Scientists and science communicators looking to better engage the public with their work can learn a lot from creative writing. In this “toolkit” series, I take lessons from poetry, fiction and creative non-fiction and apply them to the science communication context in order to show how science communicators can leverage the lessons of creative writing to build empathy, emotion and gravity into their work. In this first post, I will explore the image.

Well-crafted images are central to good poetry and prose. In the context of creative writing, an image is simply a description meant to engage the reader by putting a specific picture in their head. Effective creative writers can use images to great effect, especially when they make a poem or story memorable. Take, for instance, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” by Edgar Allen Poe, a story so stuck in the American psyche that it has become a staple in high school English classes all over the country.  Why is this story about murder, guilt and madness so pervasive? One answer is that central, eponymous metaphor—the victim’s heart beating beneath the floorboards betraying the antagonist’s crime. This is such a delicious headworm of an image because it is so surprising.

We live, for better and for worse, in an era of “old language.” Where an idiom like “bite the bullet” may have once been a captivating turn of phrase, inspiring people to actively imagine snapping a bullet out of the air with their teeth alone (the hutzpah!) today the phrase hardly inspires anything. This is the circle of life for an image. As it becomes more commonplace, it loses its ability to be evocative. To inspire readers to actually pause and reflect on a bit of writing, when a language’s most obvious metaphors have become hackneyed and trite, a writer has to constantly supply fresh ways of imagining something. Poe understood this better than most.

If Poe’s murdered character woke up and started screaming, and that inspired the murderer’s remorse, the story would not be nearly so powerful. It is the fact that the heart alone woke up, and the obvious absurdity that the murderer can hear such a prairie-quiet sound, that is so compelling. You might forget what actually happened in “The Tell-Tale Heart” after high school. But you’ll never forget that eerie heart thumping away in the floorboards.

So what can science communicators learn from a master like Poe about the image? For one, avoid the sappily sentimental. Too often, science communicators reach for the simplest description, the one that comes from a cursory evaluation of a phenomenon, or worse something handed down from a long line of unimaginative writers. A drop of coral snake venom can kill five adult humans, sure. I’ve been reading that a drop of this or that poison can kill varying numbers of people and elephants ever since I picked up my first “Zoobooks.” When you read an image like that, does your brain light up with a picture? Probably not.

What if you read: “The coral snake is colored like a candy cane. But locked up inside that sugar-fun coat is the death of an entire family, with just a single prick.” Can you see the family? Can you see the end of the candy cane you sucked to a dangerous point? If you’ve never thought about a snake as a candy cane, your brain now has something new to hold onto. That novelty inherently makes an image like that effective at triggering a reader’s brain to picture something new and exciting, without doing any work.

Images are a tremendously powerful tool for anyone looking to better communicate about science. If you want to practice being a better image-maker in your own work, consider looking to creative writers for inspiration. For diction, I would specifically recommend reading image-heavy poets like Ron Rash, Elizabeth Bishop and US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (especially her collection Life on Mars, my goodness). While reading these poets, focus closely on what pictures populate your mind as you scan each line. What imaginative constructions lead you to imagine what you do? How does the image billow out as successive images rise and fall in your head? By focusing your attention on the craft of creative writing, you can learn how to incorporate the imaginative craft into your own work.

These days, it seems there’s a media niche for everything. Want to know how to care for a pet monitor lizard? Turn to Reptiles Magazine. Want firsthand advice about the nation’s best fast food chains? Listen to the Doughboys podcast. Want to watch people get pretend haircuts? Watch the Gibi ASMR YouTube channel.

It should be no surprise then, that there are a host of media outlets focused on the art-science nexus. Whether it’s visual art, poetry, music or dance, these sites connect the internet to the aesthetic side of science. The content they produce or curate ranges widely– from the work of budding sci-artists to features on art installations in major exhibits.

Explore this list to find a new fix for your SciArt bug, or to find inspiration for your own work. Enjoy!

1. In Layman’s Terms Literary Magazine

In Layman’s Terms is an online literary magazine “dedicated to encouraging a new appreciation of science, technology, and the natural world for the average person.” This biannual magazine publishes art, poetry and creative non-fiction that intersects in some way with science and the natural world (in full disclosure, I am also an Associate Editor for the publication). Founded by creative writers Brit Barnhouse and Beck Adelante in 2015, the magazine explores a new theme with every publication. The most recent theme, water, encouraged writers and artists so submit work that related to their memories and experiences with the liquid world.  “Show us ice and steam and pressure. Teach us about ocean acidification and microplastics and especially, what can be done about them,” the call said, in part.

While ILT is still a small outlet, its focus on publishing lesser-known artists and lack of submission fees make it a great group to follow– especially for aspiring Sci-Artists looking to get their work published.

 

2. SciArt Magazine

SciArt Magazine, brainchild of the SciArt initiative, is an international magazine dedicated to publishing “on the cutting edge of science- and technology-based art, third culture conversation, and STEAM education.” The magazine is run by an organization called the SciArt Initiative, a non-profit from New York that also organizes a twice-yearly art exhibit in Manhattan, monthly public events, and sponsors residencies and grant opportunities for aspiring “SciArtists.”

One recent interview feature explored the work of artist Yago de Quay, a Boston-based artist whose technology-inspired live performances have been performed around the world. Another explored artist Robert Rauschenberg’s work creating lithographs and collages relating to the 1969 mission to the moon.

Much of the work featured in SciArt is hidden behind paywall (though, it’s generous: just $50 gives you access to the publication for life).  The art featured runs the gamut from sculpture and oil painting to videos and dance. The magazine does not yet have a print edition, which is a shame given how beautiful many of the images are. But with more subscribers to the digital version, maybe founder Joe Ferguson will be able to expand the platform! The Magazine also accepts submissions from freelances– both for featured art and for stories. This would, however, be a labor of love– the publication does not currently have the capacity to pay these freelancers.

3. Labocine

Labocine certainly wins the award for the most beautiful web presence on this list. This group specializes in short films that intersect with science and the content they put out is stupendous. The site is an initiative of the Imagine Science Film Festival, an annual science film event in New York City, that is meant to sustain interest in science films throughout the year. If you are interested in creative science movie-making, you HAVE to be keeping up with Labocine. The group accepts submissions of films from amateurs and professionals, and those selected by the editorial team will be featured on the site.

Like SciArt, much of the content on Labocine is hidden behind a paywall but the “Spotlights” section has well-written summaries of the films and does not require a subscription to view. Likewise, the “Scenes” section features short clips from their Science Video Archive that can be viewed for free. Every month, Labocine releases a new issue based around a specific theme. This month’s theme is inventions. Beyond the fascinating science video content, Labocine’s site is also a masterclass in good web design. The site is full of GIFs, dynamic icons, and satisfyingly intuitive functionality.

4. Nautilus: Poetry in Science

You may already be familiar with Nautilus, the beautiful science news magazine directed by John Steele that publishes on a single topic once a month, releasing a new “chapter” every week (the publication also gained some notoriety in 2017 for failing to pay freelancers–fair warning). But their crossover project “Poetry in Science” is something else entirely. The site is essentially a series of articles and interviews run by Harvard English Professor Elisa New.  Professor New’s focus, not unlike that of Science Sonnets, is exploring the connections between science and the written word, particularly poetry. She  and her team of contributors interviews scientists, poets, artists and celebrities about how the artistic world connects with the scientific world, and what happens when those worlds collide.

One recent post is an expose on the poem “The Gray Heron” by Galway Kinnell. Another explores Richard Dawkins’ views on Robert Frost. Every article on Poetry in Science is a treasure, and I’m not sure I’ve found another place on the internet so interested in the role of science in poetry.

The publication itself is a collaboration between Nautilus and Poetry in America, the PBS television series also hosted by Professor New. While all the poems featured in Poetry in Science are by professional poets, they do accept submissions from freelancers exploring these poems. If your interest in sci-art is focused squarely on the written word, check out Poetry in Science!