The Measured Word: On Poetry and Science - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0820322873 ISBN 13: 9780820322872

Publisher: University of Georgia Press, 2001

Synopsis

Though the interests of science and art frequently seem to inhabit opposite poles, The Measured Word assembles a brilliant anthology of twelve essays that illumine the historic—and newly emerging—relationships between the poetic and scientific imaginations. Assembling the writings of leading contemporary poets, essayists, and thinkers, Kurt Brown highlights ways in which poets use scientific discoveries and mathematical ideas to their artistic advantage—and offers insight on the recently apparent integration of technology and other discoveries into the postmodernist poetry. Here are meditations on the similarities and differences between the poetic and scientific imagination; on the poetic use of fractals; on hypertext; on the changing shape of poetry in the scientific age. Commentary by Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub, Paul Lake, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Alice Fulton, Forrest Gander, and Stephanie Strickland, among others, presents a diverse selection of opinions. These viewpoints are complemented by many careful, innovative readings of individual poems informed by the sciences. The writings in this collection not only celebrate the advent of a new age of discovery but also identify the need for a revision of the western thinking that separates the mind and the heart—replacing division with the reciprocity of mutual communication.

About this title

About the Authors

ALBERT GOLDBARTH is widely heralded as one of the most creative voices in contemporary American literature. His work frequently appears in the pages of the New Yorker, the Nation, Harper’s, and the major literary reviews. Over the past two decades, he has published nearly two dozen volumes of poems and essays, including Heaven and Earth: A Cosmology (Georgia), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry. He has also been a Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, and a finalist for the National Book Award. Goldbarth is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Wichita State University.

JONATHAN HOLDEN is Distinguished University Professor of English and Poet-in-Residence at Kansas State University. In 2005 he was appointed as the first Poet Laureate of Kansas. Holden's many books include the memoir Mama's Boys: A Double Life, the poetry collection Knowing: New and Selected Poems, and the critical study The Old Formalism: Character in Contemporary American Poetry.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0820322873
• ISBN 13: 9780820322872
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Brown Kurt