{"id":197,"date":"2006-04-18T12:17:04","date_gmt":"2006-04-18T12:17:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/18\/poetry-about-physicists\/"},"modified":"2006-04-18T12:17:04","modified_gmt":"2006-04-18T12:17:04","slug":"poetry-about-physicists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/18\/poetry-about-physicists\/","title":{"rendered":"Poetry About Physicists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Reading <a href=\"http:\/\/insidehighered.com\/views\/2006\/04\/13\/morley\">this article<\/a> reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.turningpointbooks.com\/drew.html\">local poet with a book of physics-themed poems<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>There are some <a href=\"http:\/\/www.turningpointbooks.com\/drew_poems.html\">sample poems<\/a> on that site, which give you an idea of the flavor of the thing (I don&#8217;t think he read any of those specific poems, but they&#8217;re fairly representative). They aren&#8217;t so much poems about physics principles as they are poems about the history of physics&#8211; lots of imaginary letters from one famous 20<sup>th<\/sup> Century physicist to another, and that sort of thing. <\/p>\n<p>I wish I could enthusiastically praise or damn them, but really, I&#8217;m sort of lukewarm on poetry in general, so it&#8217;s no surprise that my reaction to these particular poems was sort of lukewarm. Some of them were good, some of them suffered from the usual problem of science-themed poetry, namely trying too hard to cram Science into the poem, leading to some really strained metaphors. There was a nice re-telling the story of Adam and Eve largely from the point of view of an Adam suffering the world&#8217;s first and worst hangover (I&#8217;m not sure if it&#8217;s in the book, though), but most of them weren&#8217;t as memorable.<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, on the off chance that anyone is interested in poetry about physics, there&#8217;s a book to check out.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Reading this article reminds me that I forgot to talk about the poetry reading from a few weeks ago. In lieu of a regular colloquium talk one week this term, we co-hosted a poetry reading by George Drew, a local poet with a book of physics-themed poems. There are some sample poems on that site,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/04\/18\/poetry-about-physicists\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Poetry About Physicists<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,7,37,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-physics","category-pop_culture","category-two_cultures","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}