The Harkness Fellows Association were delighted to hear Katrina Porteous, Harkness Fellow in 1983/84 share her approach to her poetry and read some of her inspiring poems to us.
Her talk was in three parts, with questions between each part. Her latest book, Rhizodont, has just been published – see below for where to order. Katrina has her own website where you can see more about her work. www.katrinaporteous.co.uk.
1) How my Fellowship shaped my work.
I always wanted to write but read History, not English, at University. In America I studied Creative Writing, first (1982-3) at UC Berkeley. Then, at Harvard (1983-4), I was mentored by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. The Fellowship, especially travel in the SW, was a life-changing privilege. The courses bought me time to write, and taught me craft. However, for me, poetry is not an academic discipline but one embedded in everyday life.
Returning home, directly in reaction to my American experience, I immersed myself in things that made my area (NE England) special: its history, embodied in place and nature. I cultivated close empirical observation. In 1987 I moved to the Northumberland coast. Writing local history led me to the ‘coble’ fishing community. Aware that their tradition was dying out, I immersed myself in that culture. I admired the fishermen’s deep local knowledge, passed down the generations, especially their ‘mapping’ of the sea-bed in intimate detail through stories and landmarks. My later archival research showed that this culture was many centuries old, and was, by definition, ‘sustainable’.
I’ll read two poems: ‘The Marks t’ Gan By’ (The Lost Music, Bloodaxe, 1996) and Northumbrian dialect from ‘The Wund an’ the Wetter’ (Two Countries, Bloodaxe, 2014). Both dialect and poetry function at an ‘expressive’ level, where the physical ‘music’ of the words conveys meaning.
2) How I came to write about science.
I often work in collaboration with musicians. In 2010 inventor and composer Peter Zinovieff came out of retirement. We wanted to collaborate, and sought venues for Peter’s multi-channel electronic music. This led us to write a series of pieces for Life Science Centre planetarium, Newcastle. One of these, Field, explores the strange quantum worlds underlying the Universe, particularly the Higgs field, which gives matter mass.
I’ll read two poems: ‘Quantum’ and ‘Electromagnetism’ (Edge, Bloodaxe, 2019). These differ from the earlier poems, as the ‘form’ of a poem needs to convey its content.
- My first point about poetry and science: as someone with no scientific background, I do not write to convey a ‘message’, I write in order to work something out, just as if I was grappling with a difficult human experience. In a poem, sound, image and meaning map onto one another, allowing the mind to explore the subject in a multi-dimensional, non-linear way. The poems are not just about what we know, but about how we know.
Scientists are traditionally said to use words ‘objectively’, to signpost or ‘signify’. Poets ‘evoke’ atmosphere through rhythm, word-music and imagery. Poetic language appeals to the physical senses (as in the dialect poem). Unlike informational prose, a poem is not linear and may contain multiple meanings revealed through repeated reading.
Another planetarium piece, Sun, involved working with solar physicists from Northumbria University. I observed fascinating personal differences in the way that they conceived of the Sun. Helioseismologists saw it as serene and benevolent. Those who researched Magnetohydrodynamics depicted it as dynamic and violent. These contradictory points of view were both simultaneously true.
- My second point is that every scientific model, every hypothesis, depends upon perspective. To that extent, science too involves story-telling.
Listening to scientists explain aspects of quantum theory reminded me of ancient story-telling, in particular Plato’s ‘Ideas’. As in Plato’s cave, we cannot see ‘true’ reality, only its partial image. We only observe a tiny slice of the electromagnetic spectrum.
I’ll read two excerpts from Sun, ‘Window’ and ‘Frequencies’ (Edge, Bloodaxe, 2019).
- My third point is about metaphor. In my poems I deliberately avoid scientific terms. Instead, I use metaphor, a description which is not literally true. I argue that for a scientist to describe the world using words rather than mathematics may inevitably be to resort to metaphor.
Some of the scientists I worked with were dismissive of poetry; but it became a useful tool to translate science to a non-scientific audience. We worked with Northumbria University’s NUSTEM, an innovative cross-curricular project which uses the arts to inspire young people, especially girls, into STEM subjects. Although our pieces were intended for adults, NUSTEM used excerpts to inspire Year 6 children to write their own poems. This gave them a personal, emotional connection to the science which was extremely valuable.
3) My new collection, Rhizodont, brings together poems of place with science poems.
To recap, poetry is of the body. It has more in common with music than with expository prose. Like the fishermen’s dialect, it uses the sound of words to convey meaning. For example, think of two birds, the ‘pickie’ and the ‘gormer’. One (a tern) is light and quick, the other (a cormorant) dark and cumbersome. This physically ‘expressive’ language differs from scientific language, where words ‘signpost’ meaning.
Rhizodont is in two parts. It begins on the NE coast, and uses particular places as a microcosm to explore what we are doing to our planet, and how technology is changing our relation to physical experience. The second part contains two sequences written for NUSTEM, one about engineering (remote sensing, robotics and AI), and the other about how some of these technologies are used to investigate climate change in Antarctica. Juxtapositions between the two parts reveal unexpected links. The whole book explores themes of extinction, transformation and survival, in the natural world and in cultures and communities.
To conclude, I’ll read the title poem, ‘#rhizodont’. The rhizodont is an enormous fossil fish, 330m years old, discovered on the Northumberland coast in 2007. It belonged to the Sarcopterygian family, which made the transition from water to land, and from which all four-limbed creatures are descended. The rhizodont, which lived in swampy water, becomes a metaphor for a transitional moment for our own species. As we ‘evolve’ from analogue to digital technologies, as machine learning and AI increasingly affect our lives, and as we confront complex, interconnected ecological crises, poetry reminds us of the value of certain uniquely human qualities: imagination and sympathetic emotion, deeply embedded in physical sense experience. These qualities also lie at the root of scientific inquiry, inspiring curiosity and wonder.
An example of Katrina’s science poetry:
Quantum
ii
Emptiness, you are a paradox.
You are not empty.
You are full of numbers.
Wherever you are, expect commerce.
Matter travelling through you
Slows to do business.
Emptiness, you are a marketplace.
Matter, you are trade.
Only the light escapes
Free, gratis,
And the thing that holds us together.
Katrina Porteous
(‘Edge’, Bloodaxe Books, 2019)
Katrina’s Collections of poetry can be accessed via
https://www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/category/katrina-porteous