Why do I use poems in my teaching?
In a hurried little note, here's why:
My web site, One Culture: Science and the Humanities , describes itself as "Promoting science, scientific thinking, and the search for connections between science and other paths to knowledge."
My favorite "other path" is poetry, although I have also used art, music, and other media. In all cases, with poetry, I am looking for poems that can be interpreted as making connections between literature and these subjects:
1) science, or
2) the field of science I'm teaching, or
3) the specific topic I'm talking about.
This means that my focus is usually on a logical interpretation of the poem (making sense of the poem), because developing an interpretation of a poem is the most obvious and accessible connection of almost any poem science or a particular scientific idea.
Last week's poem by Billy Collins (and my brief interpretation of it, and Steve's harangue on the same subject) suggested that making sense of a poem is by far the most common response to it. Beforehand though, he reminds us, and most of us need reminding, that there are other things to do with a poem besides making sense of it (some poems might even be designed to thwart any attempted interpretation). But after listing, in a metaphorical way, some other ways to respond to a poem, he then says,
But all they want to dois tie the poem to a chair with ropeand torture a confession out of it.They begin beating it with a hoseto find out what it really means.
Not only is that the most common reaction to poetry (according to Collins's poem, and according to my experience, but then again, I worked mostly with students of science, who were learning how to make sense of everything), it is also the most science-like reaction to a poem.
How is interpreting poetry science-like?
The way I presented poems to my students was to show and read them the poem, but without showing its publication date or its author. I gave them the words on the page -- as data, if you will, to make sense of, like scientists do. I asked them what specific words mean, especially words with more than one possible meaning (like "spring" in Bronowski's poem). So the first steps in scientifically analyzing a poem include deciding which of alternative definitions for a word is the one that makes sense in every occurrence of the work in the poem. In science, this is like looking at data for patterns in data -- scientists call these patterns laws, and they are useful for making predictions, even though they do not usually explain why the patterns arise.
SCIENCE ||| POEM
data ||| words on the page
laws ||| consistent definitions for ambiguous words (advanced, later -- use of ambiguity)
theories ||| explanation(s) of what the poem is saying (again, perhaps acknowledging ambiguity)
I know well that, waiting quietly in any good poem, there might be interesting sounds, images, colors, evocations, and many other ways of making meaning that are harder to explain and express, than is simply trying to make sense of a poem. But that's the part that's easiest to connect meaningfully to science. And that's why it might seem that all I ever talk about is interpretation. It's also the hardest way to react to poetry, and because that response is so common, a reason that many people shy away from poetry, feeling that if they can't make sense of it, they have failed in some way.
So that's a glimpse at what I hope to achieve with a poem in a science class. Most of the time, with most people, I doubt whether I will succeed, just like the hawk sitting quietly in a tree by the highway, in plain sight, but unseen by 99% of those who drive past.
