Amy Catanzano | Jacket2

Magical correspondences, part 1 of 6

Amy Catanzano

Image by Andrew Joron of eclipsed sun-images filtered through trees, casting zeros and almost-zeros on nearby objects.

What follows is part one of six written exchanges between me and Andrew Joron about poetry and science in 2012. Joron’s creative and critical work have been highly influential to me. When I contacted him after The Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog ran an article,“From the Golden Age of San Francisco Science-Fiction Poetry to the New Age of Quantum Poetics,”about our shared interest in poetry and science, he generously responded to my poetry and speculative essays on quantum poetics published on Poems and Poetics. Joron and I have decided to present our conversation here for Jacket2.

See also parts two, three, four, five, and six.

'Not like normal stars'

Amy Catanzano

Image of brown dwarf star 2M1207 and a companion object, 2M1207b. The image may be "the first extrasolar planetary-mass companion to be directly imaged and is the first discovered orbiting a brown dwarf." Courtesy of ESO and Wikipedia: http://www.eso.org/public/images/26a_big-vlt/

The impulses that inspire poets to think through science span from the investigative, speculative, conceptual, documentary, and more to impulses that use science as a form of address to and from the notion of the other. Lila Zemborain, in Mauve Sea-Orchids (Belladonna, 2007, trs.

'In truth the subtle web of thought / is like the weaver's fabric wrought'

Amy Catanzano

Image from a 1987 French-English Visual Dictionary, courtesy of Matthew Baird

“Both science and art form in the course of the centuries a human language by which we can speak about the more remote parts of reality, and the coherent sets of concepts as well as the different styles of art are different words or groups of words in this language.” –Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy (1958)

Poetry and quantum mechanics do indeed seem to speak to the more remote parts of reality as Werner Heisenberg suggests, and, as a result, both systems invite new ways of speaking, furthering what language is capable of within and outside of human experience.

Translation Controller, Neutral

Amy Catanzano

First page of the Apollo 11 onboard voice transcript, courtesy of NASA.

While the transcripts of the recordings of the Apollo 11 spaceflight mission to the moon were released in the mid-1970s and have been publically available on the internet for years, NASA has digitally released the recordings of the spaceflight mission as MP3s, available here. Ken Hunt published Space Administration (89+/LUMA Foundation, 2014) using the transcripts of the recordings, including some of the numeric time signatures for each speaker. Hunt’s book brings poetry in conversation with one of the greatest scientific achievements that humans have accomplished.

4th person narration

Amy Catanzano

Wang Hao at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Photograph: Oded Balilty/AP. Courtesy of The Guardian.

In my new novella I experiment with point of view by developing a question—“Is there a 4th person narration?”—posed by Shanxing Wang in his extraordinary work, Mad Science in Imperial City (Futurepoem, 2005). In physics, the fourth dimension of space is time. In the context of string theory, where our universe is thought to be one of a wilderness of universes comprised of infinite dimensions of space and time that are made up of vibrating membranes of energy, I imagine 4th person narration as a site for considering narrative mode in relation to higher dimensions in physical reality. To intentionally or unintentionally engage in a narrative mode within or beyond the fourth dimension might be to read, write, or construct texts outside of time, or in all times, making nonlinearity and simultaneity points of view and spacetime a literary device.

QUANTUM POETICS: Some of my work as a poet and fiction writer of cross-genre forms explores the historical and contemporary intersections of literature and science, particularly theoretical physics but also biotechnology, cosmology, genomics, and beyond. For this commentary series, I will write as a ’pataphysical correspondent, speculative documentarian, and poetry informant, reporting on largely under-acknowledged questions about literature and science and drawing from quantum poetics, where I apply principles in the natural sciences to poetry and prose. My commentaries will consist of field reports; explorations of literary movements such as conceptual poetry, post-confessional poetry, and visual poetry in relation to quantum poetics; and discussions about poems, books, and authors who seem to be working—consciously or without intent—from concepts in relativity, quantum mechanics, string theory, and more.

Jumping off from two previous projects, my four-part essay, “Quantum Poetics: Writing the Speed of Light,” published by Jerome Rothenberg on Poems and Poetics, and a collaborative discussion project about poetry and science titled Like A Metaphor in which I participated with Gilbert Adair, Rae Armantrout, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, the late James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack, I will discuss writing that uses science in metaphor but also writing that moves beyond reference alone by employing what Retallack calls “the dynamics of scientific modeling” in procedure and composition. One of my aims is to challenge practitioners of literature and science to conceive of their work and consider the work of others through a wider, wilder, transdisciplinary responsiveness to the contemporary milieu.

Amy Catanzano

AMY CATANZANO is the author of Starlight in Two Million: A Neo-Scientific Novella (Noemi Press), recipient of the Noemi Press Book Award for Fiction; Multiversal (Fordham University Press), selected by Michael Palmer for the Poets Out Loud Prize and recipient of the PEN USA Literary Award in Poetry; and iEpiphany (Erudite Fangs Editions). She has an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and taught for many years in Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics. Originally from Boulder, Colorado, she teaches at Wake Forest University in North Carolina.

Jacket2 Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.