The Poetry of Science (2010)

National Science Week 2010

The Poetry of Science at Armidale Dumaresq War Memorial Library

As part of National Science Week 14-22 August 2010, the New England Writers Centre will stage a free public poetry reading at the Armidale Dumaresq War Memorial Library on Saturday 21st August from 10:30 to 11:30 a.m. Here's a link to the poster.

The event will be introduced by Dr Tom van der Touw of the UNE’s Science and Technology Department, and compered by Michael Sharkey, formerly of the UNE School of Arts.

Others taking part will be writers Julian Croft, Yve Louis and members of Poetzinc, an organisation of Armidale and New England poets.

The event is part of a national series of broadcasts, exhibitions, films, lectures, readings, conferences, interactive theatre, tours, festivals and even a travelling science show aimed at celebrating and promoting Australian science.

The Armidale reading is part of a national collaborative poetry and science project initiated by the Poets Union working in partnership with National Science Week 2010, The Royal Australian Institute of Science (RiAus), the Australian Poetry Centre, The State Library of New South Wales, and State-sponsored Writers Centres in every State.

Thirteen events specifically involving poetry, scientists and the public will be held around the nation during the week.

To mark the occasion, a national appeal for poems on and about science was launched earlier in the year, and from the more than 400 hundred submitted, around 90 were chosen for three collections published by the Poets Union Inc. in Sydney for national distribution. Each volume is a 32-page anthology of poems by Australians writing poetry now on science topics.

New England poets Julian Croft, Yve Louis and Michael Sharkey have contributed poems. The anthologies are titled:

Earthly Matters: Biology and Geology Poems
Law and Impulse: Maths and Chemistry Poems, and
Holding Patterns: Physics and Engineering Poems

Each volume features a colourful Ron Oldfield photograph of microscopic patterns occurring in nature. The Royal Australian Institute of Science has generously assisted the printing of the collections, which will be free to members of the public who arrive in time for the poetry events held around the nation.

Poets in the collections include professional medical doctors, engineers, chemists, biologists, teachers, botanists, health workers, astronomers, agronomists and environmentalists as well as poets with interests in science and the history of science.

An audio program of science poems will also be launched in National Science Week 2010.

Carol Jenkins, coordinator of the poetry project, writes:

Far from being uninterested in science, this call for poems has seen writers take up tools to consider the Hadron Collider, astronomy, Euclid, the biosynthesis of 3-nitropropanoic acid, fossil fish, what we’re made of, the nature of time and dark matter. Science’s accelerated progress continues to bring new materials for writers and poets, taking the poetry beyond the inner emotional life, the purely domestic themes. As the late great Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub puts it, poetry can "escape from the narrow limits of spectrum of metaphors that used menagerie, roses, cabbage, and, at best, garlic" into the extended reality "from pulsars to leptons, from prokaryotic organisms to our lymphocytes and interferons".

Here’s a link to the official Science Week promotion

Back to Program (Archives 2010)

The New England Writers' Centre is assisted by the NSW Government through Arts NSW.