Reviewed by Jeremy Luke Hill
Madhur Anand’s debut A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes and Shane Neilson’s On Shaving Off His Face both present poetry that draws in part on the structure and language of science. Madhur, a professor of environmental science, includes many poems in her debut volume that take their language exclusively from scientific articles, citing them at the bottom of the page as if they were footnotes in a journal. Neilson, a medical doctor whose previous books of poetry include Complete Physical (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010), Meniscus (Biblioasis, 2009), and Exterminate My Heart (Frog Hollow Press, 2008), constructs the whole second section of his book as an imaginary scientific conference on Darwin’s concept of expressionism. However, whereas Madhur uses this structural connection to ally her poetry with the project and narrative of science, Neilson uses it mark the very limitations of scientific discourse.
Anand’s poetry engages science primarily in ways that reduce the perceived antagonism between the two disciplines. By drawing the words of these poems entirely from scientific journals, she seems to suggest that poetry is already to be found in the existing language of science, needing only to be distilled by the poet, and that this poetry finds a purpose through participation in the work of science. For example, in “Resilience Experiment (It Is Becoming More Apparent)”, she writes,
Researchers call for the need
for detecting critical indicators of a regime
shift: global initiatives.
The poem is footnoted:
- Chillo, M. Anand, and R.A Ojeda, “Assessing the Use of Functional Diversity as a Measure of Ecological Resilience in Arid Rangelands,” Ecosystems 14, no.7 (2011): 1168-77.
The aims of both poetry and science become the same here, right down to Anand’s authorship of both poem and research paper, the differences a matter only of style and emphasis. This way of representing the relationship between poetry and science remains fundamentally hopeful throughout the volume, consistently implying that art has a role to play in expressing the truths of science and in forwarding the solutions that science offers for the problems of the world, particularly those of an ecological nature.
Anand expresses this idea more explicitly in “Gap Dynamics,” her introduction to Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (Scrivener Press, 2009), where she describes that collection as “another kind of attempt to broaden views on the role of language itself in helping to solve the environmental crisis.” In her TEDx Waterloo talk in 2010 she goes even further, drawing a metaphorical connection between chlorophyl as a catalyst for transforming light into energy, and poetry as a catalyst for transforming human relationships with the environment through its ability to fire the imagination and its capacity to remember and reinvent. The poetry of A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes often does exactly this, seeking to catalyze the reader into scientific narratives of progress and ecological restoration. It calls for a belief in what restorative ecology might accomplish if only we might commit ourselves to it.
Neilson, however, far from enlisting poetry in the service of the scientific project, consistently undermines the discourse of science – along with other such dominant discourses as reason, faith, tradition, and art. While he too includes notes to his imaginary conference on expressionism, imitating the form of scientific scholarship, the information presented there is often absurd, false, or contradictory. The fourth note, for example, suggests that a Dr. Rush (1746 – 1813) may have written about a patient named Robin Pecknold whose given year of birth isn’t until 1986, while the fifth note suggests that the editor of the volume, Neilson himself, was corresponding with Sigmund Freud. Rather than drawing poetry from scientific literature, distilling and amplifying it, Neilson here recreates a semblance of science and then undermines it entirely.
This is not to say that science fails as science in these poems, no more than reason fails as reason or faith as faith or art as art. It is that science, like all of these other discourses, reveals itself to be inadequate to express the complexity, the ambiguity, the mystery even, of human experience in the face of disease, fatherhood, memory, and all the other things that are layered into Neilson’s verse. The failure of science here is simply the failure of all things – the failure to answer for human anger and pain and grief. As Neilson writes in “Afterword to Conference Proceedings”:
I am mentally defective,
I have no euphemism for pain,
I want none.
I am a certain physician with the responsibility of mercy and death, my son and I granted what sticks in two hearts: the human diagnosis.
These lines, closing the subverted science of the imagined conference, imply that the limits of science lie at its capacity to describe the diagnosis of being human, a sense that is reinforced in the final poems of the book, where the fictive science of the second section dissolves into a broken syntax of inverted clauses and awkwardly located periods, approximating diseased or childish speech, fragmented and spasmodic.
In “O Lord of the Seizure Pass,” Neilson writes,
the landscape of the face: imprint of seizures sons O lord what passes
now in the nature of grace so close to the common and you
on high hosanna of hedges holly a hero of ache
And further on:
I lie on pyre. Carried up. And I stretch, back from bent. Of lamb in field with no. Predating threat: as if me might die. Pain writ upon the body; a shake-pain. Entered a skin, choose to fall.
There is little or nothing hopeful remaining in these fractured phrases, not in the name of science or poetry or anything else, certainly not enough hope to provide a purpose or found a project or catalyze a shift in human understanding.
This stark distinction between Neilson and Anand in their poetic approaches to science is not without significance, because they embody two of arts’ central but competing functions. Anand’s work plays a role that is (without any derogatory connotations) essentially propogandistic, figuring itself as a catalyst in the service of a larger narrative worthy of our belief. It asks that we believe in restorative ecology in order that we might change what needs changing in the world. And this function is certainly necessary. The value of poetry (and of art generally) lies to a large extent in its capacity to engage us thoughtfully and humanly with the practical questions of our world.
It is also necessary, however, whenever we are confronted with the questions and answers of these grand narratives – science, art, faith – that we not forget their limitations, that we be suspicious of their answers, that our belief in what they do never become a belief in what they are. This is at the heart of Neilson’s poetry. He does not reject these narratives absolutely, but he also never represents them as sufficient. He pits them against one another and against themselves, mimics them, subverts them, insisting that there is much in human experience that they cannot answer satisfactorily. He reminds us that even our best words – whether science or poetry – can only say so much.
A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes by Madhur Anand | McClelland & Stewart | 112 pages | paper | $18.95 | ISBN #978-0771006982
On Shaving Off His Face by Shane Neilson | Porcupine’s Quill | 112 pages | paper | $16.95 | ISBN #978-0889843820
‘A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes’ and ‘On Shaving Off His Face’
Book Reviews
Madhur Anand’s debut A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes and Shane Neilson’s On Shaving Off His Face both present poetry that draws in part on the structure and language of science. Madhur, a professor of environmental science, includes many poems in her debut volume that take their language exclusively from scientific articles, citing them at the bottom of the page as if they were footnotes in a journal. Neilson, a medical doctor whose previous books of poetry include Complete Physical (Porcupine’s Quill, 2010), Meniscus (Biblioasis, 2009), and Exterminate My Heart (Frog Hollow Press, 2008), constructs the whole second section of his book as an imaginary scientific conference on Darwin’s concept of expressionism. However, whereas Madhur uses this structural connection to ally her poetry with the project and narrative of science, Neilson uses it mark the very limitations of scientific discourse.
Anand’s poetry engages science primarily in ways that reduce the perceived antagonism between the two disciplines. By drawing the words of these poems entirely from scientific journals, she seems to suggest that poetry is already to be found in the existing language of science, needing only to be distilled by the poet, and that this poetry finds a purpose through participation in the work of science. For example, in “Resilience Experiment (It Is Becoming More Apparent)”, she writes,
Researchers call for the need
for detecting critical indicators of a regime
shift: global initiatives.
The poem is footnoted:
The aims of both poetry and science become the same here, right down to Anand’s authorship of both poem and research paper, the differences a matter only of style and emphasis. This way of representing the relationship between poetry and science remains fundamentally hopeful throughout the volume, consistently implying that art has a role to play in expressing the truths of science and in forwarding the solutions that science offers for the problems of the world, particularly those of an ecological nature.
Anand expresses this idea more explicitly in “Gap Dynamics,” her introduction to Regreen: New Canadian Ecological Poetry (Scrivener Press, 2009), where she describes that collection as “another kind of attempt to broaden views on the role of language itself in helping to solve the environmental crisis.” In her TEDx Waterloo talk in 2010 she goes even further, drawing a metaphorical connection between chlorophyl as a catalyst for transforming light into energy, and poetry as a catalyst for transforming human relationships with the environment through its ability to fire the imagination and its capacity to remember and reinvent. The poetry of A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes often does exactly this, seeking to catalyze the reader into scientific narratives of progress and ecological restoration. It calls for a belief in what restorative ecology might accomplish if only we might commit ourselves to it.
This is not to say that science fails as science in these poems, no more than reason fails as reason or faith as faith or art as art. It is that science, like all of these other discourses, reveals itself to be inadequate to express the complexity, the ambiguity, the mystery even, of human experience in the face of disease, fatherhood, memory, and all the other things that are layered into Neilson’s verse. The failure of science here is simply the failure of all things – the failure to answer for human anger and pain and grief. As Neilson writes in “Afterword to Conference Proceedings”:
I am mentally defective,
I have no euphemism for pain,
I want none.
I am a certain physician with the responsibility of mercy and death, my son and I granted what sticks in two hearts: the human diagnosis.
These lines, closing the subverted science of the imagined conference, imply that the limits of science lie at its capacity to describe the diagnosis of being human, a sense that is reinforced in the final poems of the book, where the fictive science of the second section dissolves into a broken syntax of inverted clauses and awkwardly located periods, approximating diseased or childish speech, fragmented and spasmodic.
In “O Lord of the Seizure Pass,” Neilson writes,
the landscape of the face: imprint of seizures sons O lord what passes
now in the nature of grace so close to the common and you
on high hosanna of hedges holly a hero of ache
And further on:
I lie on pyre. Carried up. And I stretch, back from bent. Of lamb in field with no. Predating threat: as if me might die. Pain writ upon the body; a shake-pain. Entered a skin, choose to fall.
There is little or nothing hopeful remaining in these fractured phrases, not in the name of science or poetry or anything else, certainly not enough hope to provide a purpose or found a project or catalyze a shift in human understanding.
This stark distinction between Neilson and Anand in their poetic approaches to science is not without significance, because they embody two of arts’ central but competing functions. Anand’s work plays a role that is (without any derogatory connotations) essentially propogandistic, figuring itself as a catalyst in the service of a larger narrative worthy of our belief. It asks that we believe in restorative ecology in order that we might change what needs changing in the world. And this function is certainly necessary. The value of poetry (and of art generally) lies to a large extent in its capacity to engage us thoughtfully and humanly with the practical questions of our world.
It is also necessary, however, whenever we are confronted with the questions and answers of these grand narratives – science, art, faith – that we not forget their limitations, that we be suspicious of their answers, that our belief in what they do never become a belief in what they are. This is at the heart of Neilson’s poetry. He does not reject these narratives absolutely, but he also never represents them as sufficient. He pits them against one another and against themselves, mimics them, subverts them, insisting that there is much in human experience that they cannot answer satisfactorily. He reminds us that even our best words – whether science or poetry – can only say so much.
A New Index For Predicting Catastrophes by Madhur Anand | McClelland & Stewart | 112 pages | paper | $18.95 | ISBN #978-0771006982
On Shaving Off His Face by Shane Neilson | Porcupine’s Quill | 112 pages | paper | $16.95 | ISBN #978-0889843820