A dog, a bird, and a scientist walk into a poem...

Trying to find current scientific research in line with Finch's Venn diagram poems, I came across the abstract of an article in the February issue of Cognition regarding how infants perceive labels. The study, done by researchers at Oxford University and the University of Texas, tested the responses of ten-month-old infants to cartoon drawings and spoken category labels. The different conditions included showing drawings without labels; showing drawings with two "correct" labels (labels that matched the drawing's category); showing drawings with random labels; and showing all drawings with just one label. Infants learned the two "correct" categories in instances both without labels and with the two correct labels. In instances with random labeling, no category formation happened at all.

Eighteen months seems to be the average age when babies start to talk, though it really varies. I have friends whose daughter could said "thank you" before she was a year old - and under the appropriate circumstances, no less. So at ten months, our brains are furiously chipping away at language and all the accompanying development, like recognizing categories.

I think Finch's Venn diagram poems encourage readers, among other things, to revisit that early process of categorization. Actual Venn diagrams deal with sets and subsets of categories. In Finch's poems, each word becomes a representation of both a concrete noun and a more abstract idea. Take "dogsnout" in the dry county poem. It's a very concrete noun, and yet incredibly abstract. There are Rottweilers, Great Danes, Poodles, Jack Russell terriers... the list goes on. With the abstract word in the poem, you get just an image of a doglike quality - a loyal friend, waiting with his snout pressed against the window pane.

This sort of thinking wanders into the "prototype theory" idea in linguistics, where "some members of a category are more central than others" (definition from the Wikipedia entry on Prototype Theory). The example I recall from linguistics courses is "bird." When asked to think of a bird, most people will report thinking of a robin, while almost no one reports thinking of a penguin. Somehow the robin has more "birdness" than the penguin and, thus, is more central a member in the bird category.

I'm not sure my point here, other than thinking it's worthwhile to bring to consciousness those thought processes of ours that usually remain unconsidered. While playing with categories in poetry can be beautiful and freeing, I imagine labels unconsciously applied in life limit us. And we don't even realize it.

Artscience Q&A: Ian Finch

Q: Can you start with a recap of your academic studies?

Undergrad I started out in literature at Geneva College and eventually added writing. I focused on poetry early, especially short form - haiku, anything ten lines or less. I was an E.E. Cummings fanatic but I didn’t try to mimic him because his style is so distinctive. In graduate studies at Emerson College, I focused on book publishing in the Writing, Literature and Publishing program so I could get some design experience and that's when I discovered Edward Tufte, artists' books, and concrete poetry.

Tufte published four or five books about information design – how to communicate scientific information, historical information, and so forth, in charts. They’re beautiful books; a lot of people I know into him are visual artists. I also started researching experimental books and typesetting and that's when I came across the concrete poetry movement, the first really international poetry movement, which became popular in the '60s and '70s. They’re writers but they’re also designers, trying to do something different than a normal poet.

Q: And then, after Emerson, you won a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand.

A: I got the Fulbright specifically to study artists' books and experimental poetry. It was a weird time when I was doing traditional typesetting but also learning how to create a Web journal. I went there thinking I’d be doing a handmade letterpress book, and instead I ended up making a hypertext nonlinear poem about Wellington that’s online, "Capital".

Q: What sort of software applications and programming languages did you need to learn to create hypertext poetry?

A: That was the most terrifying part. I knew nothing. I was just learning HTML and Dreamweaver. I had an idea of what I wanted this poem to look like, but I didn’t think I could do it with HTML. I didn’t have a copy of Flash. I downloaded the Flash demo, so I had 30 days to create something before it expired. It was the most intense 30 days I’d ever had, because I was trying to learn the program and make something look good the first time around. Looking back on it now, there are things I would’ve done differently, but it taught me how to write in a nonlinear way. Because you’re not telling the reader to read something in a certain order, it frees up what you’re able to do. Writing that was very much like the science of information design.

Q: With "Capital", you already had an idea of how you wanted the poem to look. When you do your Venn diagram poems, what comes first?

A: If I come up with the words first, the circles take on a more organic structure because I'm trying to show the relationships, so the design reflects the content. But sometimes I sit down and come up with designs, which are beautiful things in and of themselves. I think, “Can I use this?” It’s problem solving. I give myself a shape and try to find words to fit inside that structure.

Regardless of whether I start with words or the form, you can’t separate the two, because the form is half the content. I spend a lot of time trying to make sure the diagram shows some kind of logic for myself. I want the words to make some kind of sense together but I can’t ever expect someone to read it with the same logic that I’m using.

Q: Can you break down the process of writing one of the Venn diagram poems? I was interested in the hummingbird, foxglove poem.

A: I think that one actually started with the shape first. I put in that phase "dry county," and asked myself, "Okay, what’s in the dry county?" It's an abstract thing but it has a kind of geographical boundary represented by that circle. And then the idea comes that okay, maybe a dog is trapped inside the county, in a house. The way the circles work, you can show not just the proximity of things but also what happens when things are combined. When two circles intersect, the intersecting part shows that these two qualities combine and make up this third thing. It's like alchemy between the parts that you couldn’t do in a normal poem.

Q: Any final thoughts to add?

A: The future of book publishing, and by extension, the future of creative writers, is inseparable from the technology we use to communicate. As technology changes, writers will keep testing the boundaries of hypertext and experimental literature, figuring out new ways to use the electronic media as a venue for creative expression. Also the actual technology of the book itself – handheld PDAs and Blackberry – affects how we communicate. Although much of my experience has been to experiment with combining text and image in poetry, a lot of my research was on how writing programs might change in the future based on different avenues of creative writing.

Artscience profile: Ian Finch

Ian Finch is a Pittsburgh-based poet whose work combines elements of graphic design and word play. He completed graduate studies in the Writing, Literature, and Publishing program at Emerson College, and later, was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to New Zealand, where his studies culminated with the graphic poem "Capital." His current Venn diagram poems, which cross the boundaries between art and literature, were recently featured in the Plastic Poetics exhibition at Carnegie Mellon University's Regina Gouger Miller Gallery. His work will also appear at Zaoem, a new biannual poetry festival in Belgium, in Spring 2008.

I've known Ian since grade school. We both like to tell the story of our first "meeting," where we didn't actually meet. We were about 12 years old, and I was walking in the woods behind Geneva College, near the railroad tracks, with my best friend, Jenn. We could hear the train approach, and beneath that monster roar, I swore I could hear something else. Every so often, I heard a faint "I'm going to diiiie!" We ran down to the tracks and as the train blasted past, sure enough, hanging from the last car, his red sweatpants flapping like a kite, was a boy our age. He screamed "I'm going to diiie!" and then the train passed around the bend and we lost sight of him.

Jenn and I ran after the train a short distance but eventually turned around to head back the way we'd come. We passed two other boys walking along the track, sniffling, their faces tear streaked. They kept walking in the direction the train had gone; we kept walking back the other way. I don't think we even exchanged words. Kids are funny like that.

Years later, after I'd already known Ian a while, I happened to tell him about seeing the boy on the train. He informed me that he'd been that boy. He and the Henshaw brothers (the other boys) had jumped on when it was stopped and the brothers had jumped off when it started to pick up speed, but Ian got stuck. They'd been crying when Jenn and I saw them because, well, they thought they were going to have to tell Ian's mom that they'd last seen him on a train to Kalamazoo. Or worse.

But I digress. Tomorrow, I'll feature a short Q&A with Ian.

Open your throat

I've been an amateur musician most of my life, starting with clarinet lessons in the 4th grade. I played baritone for one year as an 8th grader (think giant trumpet for marching, mini-tuba for concert); B-flat clarinet through high school, one concert season in college, and later in an adult community band; and then switched to bass clarinet for a couple years in the community band and with a clarinet quartet. As my profile photo depicts, I've been practicing the euphonium since last November (you can read about the difference between baritone and euphonium here). It's been fun switching between reed and brass instruments. I think of it as changing up an exercise routine for the face and brain. The lips, mouth, tongue, and cheeks all work differently for the different instruments, and I've got to learn new fingerings and figure out a different clef.

I hadn't much considered how the throat and vocal tract were involved. A Brevia article in a February issue of Science reports that saxophone players learn to "tune a resonance of the [vocal] tract" near to the note being played when they're playing high notes. The researchers believe that players of other reed instruments probably do something similar.

In all the music lessons I've had over the years, no teacher ever gave me instructions on how to tune my vocal tract. However, when I played with the Beaverton Community Band a few years ago, our conductor, Dr. John Richards, once stopped us halfway through a piece in rehearsal and told the entire clarinet section to “open your throat.” And though we didn't really know what he meant, we did it, without further instructions. The change in sound was like the difference between flat soda and full-bodied wine.

A drought of giraffes

Thank you, serendipity. I'd been searching academic databases looking for a science article somehow related to "Syllables of Drought," which happens to be one of my favorite poems. I sat at the computer for the better part of an hour typing in keywords like giraffe, evolution, and language. But no dice.

Eventually I decided to re-organize and file the magazines piled up around my bookshelf and desk. I discovered single issues of Atlantic and New Scientist, which I don't remember buying (my husband says I bought them while working on my thesis, so maybe that explains the forgetfulness); subscription issues of New York magazine, which I don't ever remember subscribing to (my subscription expires in Oct. 2008 so I guess I subscribed to it also while in a thesis haze); and issues of Science, which I get because I'm a member of AAAS.

In the midst of the magazine piles, there lay a January issue of Science with giraffes from the Mpala Research Institute right on the cover. Researchers tested how the removal of large herbivores (i.e., the giraffes) from an ecosystem affects the system as a whole. They collected ten years of data on a plot of Acacia trees that had been made inaccessible to all wild herbivores over 15 kg. While you might think that freeing the trees from animals munching their leaves would benefit them, this was not the case. Four ant species use the trees in a mutualistic relationship (i.e. both the ants and the tree benefit), and with the herbivores removed from the equation, a breakdown in mutualism occurred.

Artscience Q&A: Mary Alexandra Agner

Q: Could you start with a recap of your academic studies?

A: After a little thought, I realized that my interest in science began with Wolfman Jack, who ran the planetarium that my elementary school classes visited every fall. He was a wonderful showman and I couldn't help but fall in love with the beauty of the night sky. When the time came, in high school, to decide what I would major in in college, I went with physics because it seemed to me that I could write on the side while being employed with a science degree but I had never heard of anyone who did science on the side while being employed to write.

Q: How did your science studies inform your poetry?

A: Science inspires my poems' subject matter, and my appreciation of form comes from studying science; my love of formal poetry resonates with the elegance of expression used in math and science. Really good poetry expresses truths in pithy statements, in a similar way to the elegance of a scientific theorem.

Q: I was surprised once when you mentioned doing research to write a poem - it seems like a very scientific approach. How is poem research different from your academic research?

A: I haven't done research in the humanities so there may be some similarities between their research and my studying for poems, but I'd say there isn't much the same between scientific research and poem research, except for reading a lot. In science, you are "testing a hypothesis" - trying to discover something that is not currently known or understood. When I am doing research for a poem, I am trying to learn something that someone else has already understood but *I* do not know/understand. To me, the scientific research explores the unknown-to-all, while my poem research explores the unknown-to-me-but-known-to-others.

The closest I come to exploring the unknown is in the writing of the poem itself. There I am looking to discover something I don't know. I am not testing anything but I am trying to create a situation wherein my subconscious can make clear something I do not realize consciously.

Q: So, poem research doesn't resemble "testing a hypothesis" at all?

A: The closest I get to hypothesis testing is when I have someone read a draft of a poem. I'm looking to see whether some core of the narrative gets across. Certainly I want everyone to experience the poem in a way unique to them, the sum of their experiences and so on, but there is usually some minimum that I feel needs to be clear in order for them to get anything coherent from the poem. For example, in any of the poems in which I retell fairy tales, I need to make sure that the reader has at least gotten which fairy tale I am retelling.

Q: Would you be willing to break down the research done for a specific poem: "Syllables of Drought"?

A: I became interested in giraffes in October 2004 when I visited the National Museum of Natural History. They had an exhibit on why the giraffe's neck evolved, due to the changing climate on the savanna. That was probably all my research, going through the exhibit, maybe a little reading online later. It wasn't until a year later that I actually started the poem and I did that mostly because I had had success with "Ode to Pioneers," which involved more research and is about moss, and I wanted to write more science poems. The language parts of the poem came as I wrote it; I needed to do something different after the turn. Looking through my journal I find that I worked on the poem for 10 days; two months later it was published online. I don't know that this process is in any way representative of my writing and publishing process, but there you have it!

Q: Any final thoughts to add?

A: Your questions seem to indicate that you're interested in a synergy/similarity that I'm not sure exists. People are people, whether they are scientists or poets - and scientists are just as apt to complain they don't understand art as poets are to complain they don't understand science (all of which I chock up to head-in-the-sand attitudes and laziness) - but the disciplines *are* different. I don't expect that understanding the physical universe and understanding the human universe would be things that you go about in the same way. Humans aren't high-energy particles, even if they are composed of things that do follow physical laws (and are charming and strange).

Artscience profile: Mary Alexandra Agner

Mary Alexandra Agner is a Boston-based poet with graduate degrees in both Earth and Planetary Science and Creative Writing. Her bio on her Web site, Pantoums & Persistence describes her as one who "writes of dead women, telescopes, and secrets."

Mary's numerous publications and accolades can be seen in her online bibliography. My personal favorites are "Sleeping Beauty," which was nominated for a Rhysling Award in 2007, and "Syllables of Drought."

Stop by tomorrow to read a Q&A with Mary.

Idea translators

I've been reading Artscience: Creativity in the post-Google Generation, by David Edwards. The book consists mainly of case studies told in a conversational style, from the story of Maurice Bernard, Director of the Research Laboratory of French Museums, where scientists use of things like x-rays and chemical analysis to test art and artifacts, to the story of Diana Dabby, a concert pianist who returned to school to earn a PhD in electrical engineering so she could explore musical variation via chaos theory.

"Interdisciplinary" used to be a dirty word for me when I was an undergrad, though interdisciplinary studies have interested me for a long time. I applied and was accepted into Pitt's Interdisciplinary Master of Arts in East Asian Studies (IDMA) shortly after earning my bachelor's degree in the mid-1990s, but I backed out. Partly it was a self-esteem issue (how good could a program really be if it accepted me?) and partly I felt like "interdisciplinary" was academic jargon for "can't make up my mind." Lucky for me, writing represents the ultimate interdisciplinary field. My decision to pursue science writing in graduate studies was simultaneously a conscious decision and a fluke: I needed a topic and the butterfly keeper at the Oregon Zoo agreed to allow me to be a participant-observer in the Butterfly Lab. And during the course of my research there, I learned how Vladimir Nabokov held positions both as a lepidopterist and a literary writer: perhaps one of the greatest "artscientists" of all.

Narrow focus brings progress but so does the ability to combine disparate fields. Successful scientists and artists share the same qualities: curiosity, drive, and the ability to look at the world anew.

Oh, butterflies!

Cow rumors

Anyone know anything about the headless cow mystery?

In 1988, someone cut the head off the fiberglass brown-and-white cow on top of Harold's Ice Cream Parlor in Chippewa Township. If you're from Beaver County, you know the area. If you're from Beaver Falls, you probably know the cow, too. It happened in the middle of the night, right across from the Chippewa Police Dept. and the police never figured out who did it. At least that's what I've heard. The story's become more local legend than anything.

The first rumor I'd heard about it reached me about two years after it happened, the summer I worked as a waitress in Beaver Falls' first Chinese restaurant. (A customer there once asked me if we ever cooked the goldfish in the fish tank. Gotta love small towns.) One of the dishwashers claimed that he was friends with the people who did it.

Five years ago, my best friend's cousin swore someone in his mom's generation did it. My own cousin says that her sister's husband knows the guys who were involved.

I've started to track the rumors this year to see if they might actually lead me to the source. It would be too much to hope they might still have the cow's head, but it's fun doing the research.

I heard rumor can be a good thing

As a teenager, I knew I was in trouble when one parent, usually my dad, would stand in the living room at the bottom of the stairs and shout up at me in my bedroom, "Dawn Marie, come down here. We have to talk." Well, one day my mother called me to the top of the stairs when I was about 16, and asked, "Is there something you want to tell me?" In years past, I'd been in trouble for smoking, jumping a train, and skipping the after-school computer club meeting, but I hadn't done any of those recently. Adolescent misdemeanors rattled through my 16-year-old brain as I tried to decipher her question.

It turned out our neighbor, Helen, had heard a rumor that I was pregnant, and told my mom. Helen had heard it from Brandi, a girl a year ahead of me in school (not a friend but also a neighbor who lived a few blocks away. I could never figure out under what circumstances the two had talked). Through my own rumor network I learned that Brandi had heard it from Jim, who'd heard it from his mother, who was a crossing guard in my school district. Go figure.

I've been reading Nicholas DiFonzo and Prashant Bordia's Rumor Psychology (American Psychology Association 2007) and it reminded me of that incident. For one thing, according to their definitions, the pregnancy rumor was actually a bit of gossip, something in the context of "social network building" with content involving "evaluative statements about individuals' private lives." And surprisingly, rumor has its good uses: According to DiFonzo and Bordia's research, rumors help a group make sense of a confusing or threatening situation, and sharing a rumor with group members can enhance the rumor monger's in-group status. But what the crossing guard gained from telling people I was pregnant, I'll never know.

More house buying stuff

Here I am again, ranting about my current favorite subject: house hunting. Here's advice to sellers who've actually got a buyer through the door to look at their property. This advice goes double for realtors!

1. Don't follow the buyer from room to room. Are you worried that he's going to steal something or that he'll have a question and won't be able to find you? If it's the former, I recommend you seek help with those trust issues. If it's the latter, just tell the buyer where he can find you (e.g., "We'll be in the kitchen if you have any questions") and hang out there.

2. Questions about financing are inappropriate during a first walkthrough of a property. Yes, we have financing. No, you will not see any paperwork unless we intend to make an offer on your house.

3. Pets that jump, slobber, urinate when excited, or bite strangers should be restrained while a buyer is looking at your house.

4. Don't treat a buyer like a therapist on a house call. They're not. Some basic conversation (weather, kids, the restaurant where you ate dinner last night) is fine, but I don't want to hear about how your mother sabotaged your career or why your ex-husband should rot in hell. I have a mother and an ex-husband too and I've managed not to mention them at all while looking at your house.

5. No wheelin and dealin on a first walkthrough. At this point the buyer is just deciding whether it's worth a second look. When we’re done with the walkthrough, we’ll exchange thank yous with you and be on our way. This is the speed dating stage of house buying, so don’t expect a marriage proposal.

FSBO is SLO

We enlisted the help of a buyer's agent yesterday. I was tired of working out the logistics by calling half a dozen people to see half a dozen different houses, and then, only half would work out. Having a buyer's agent will exclude many FSBO houses but I've been unimpressed with them anyway.

FSBO sellers are flakier than agents. Unless you plan to make selling your property a full-time job, it will interfere with your life. And that makes FSBO sellers flaky. Of the six houses I tried to arrange to see this week, three were FSBO. I called on Monday morning to see houses on Tuesday. Only one FSBO seller actually returned my call and met with us on Tuesday. One never returned my call, and one had an employee return my call today, three days later.

Based on our search experience, FSBO houses aren't any cheaper than the ones listed by agents.

Unless the seller is a realtor, FSBO sellers don't have enough experience in the process of home buying for me to be comfortable. I want someone who can help us with the paperwork.

So, there it is. FSBO is SOL with us.

Razor-chewing cat antics

Yesterday morning my husband found my razor in the hallway with the cat's teeth marks in it. Unbelievable. She remained unscathed - not even a nick in the gums. Mina the cat: 1. Schick: 0.

Santa Fe or bust

Great news! I've been accepted to the Santa Fe Writers Workshop to be held in May 2008. Sandra Blakeslee and George Johnson, two science writers for the New York Times, are the founders and part of the teaching staff.

I've been a writer my whole life, starting with poems when I was eight, discovering fiction when I was a teenager (I thought writers wrote all night while drinking pots of coffee, so that's what I did for a summer. I have a real aversion to coffee now), and tackling nonfiction after undergrad. I started my freelance writing career getting published on ThingsAsian.com because I'd just returned from a short stint teaching English in Taiwan and I had an academic background in Asian Studies. I did a bit of travel writing, wrote a China-related article for a business newspaper, and copy edited Asian Studies academic journals for a while, but it didn't feel right for me.

Science writing reminds me of a foreign culture - you have to learn the vocabulary, culture, and history of each field - but I'm still looking for something to click. I really admire writers who have found their sweet spot and never looked back.

Embrace your mistakes

I've always hated messing up, but I want to get better at it this year. I mean better at being okay with it. I fall into the category of people who take too few risks because they're afraid to look foolish or make mistakes.

What's a mistake, anyway - an unanticipated deviation from a plan? I realize some mistakes can be costly when it's life or death, but I'm trying to get a grip on the simpler "oops" in life. Taking the wrong exit off the highway. Forgetting how to set up the torch at my oxyacetylene welding class. Not the end of the world, but I hate feeling like an idiot. I hate being reminded of my weaknesses (bad sense of direction, not mechanically inclined).

It doesn't help when people tell you it's okay to mess up and they don't mean it, especially people like parents and teachers. In one of my graduate writing classes, the instructor announced, "There are two things you have to learn to get comfortable with: Writing crap and letting other people see the crap you've written." I thought, Yes! He's absolutely right. So my first workshop submission was, well, it wasn't bad, but it wouldn't have won any awards. My professor's response? He was critical because I'd "turned in crap." Go figure. I lost trust in him as well as my own judgment.

I'm here to embrace my mistakes by practicing what I'm bad at. In writing, I sometimes rework a page, a paragraph, a phrase, until I'm intellectually and emotionally numbed. But in welding, I can't go back and fix a bad weld by reheating the metal, and this finality lends a sort of freedom. I weld each joint once. I do the best I can each time, and then let it go.