{"id":5032,"date":"2020-12-31T12:03:17","date_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:03:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/?p=5032"},"modified":"2020-12-31T12:03:17","modified_gmt":"2020-12-31T18:03:17","slug":"scientific-american-writer-contemplates-poetry-and-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2020\/12\/31\/scientific-american-writer-contemplates-poetry-and-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Scientific American writer contemplates poetry and science"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2020\/12\/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-11.07.15-AM.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-5033\" src=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/files\/2020\/12\/Screen-Shot-2020-12-31-at-11.07.15-AM.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"182\" height=\"239\" \/><\/a>In the Arts &amp; Culture\/Opinion section of <strong><em>Scientific American <\/em><\/strong>posted 23 December 2020, <strong>Dava Sobel<\/strong> talks about being tickled to discover &#8220;a little over a year ago that the magazine had carried poetry in its earliest issues. Volume 1, Number 1, for example, dated 28 August 1845, included a poem called &#8216;Attraction&#8217; that touched on gravity, magnetism and sexual allure. Within a few years, however, the magazine&#8217;s original publisher, Rufus Porter, sold <em>Scientific American<\/em>, and the new owners showed no interest in poetry.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Between the 1840s and the 2010s, poems appeared in the magazine only rarely, most notably in January 1969, when W.H. Auden offered <a href=\"https:\/\/allpoetry.com\/a-new-year-greeting\">&#8216;A New Year Greeting&#8217;<\/a> to &#8216;all of you Yeasts, \/ Bacteria, Viruses, \/ Aerobics and Anaerobics . . . for whom my ectoderm is as Middle-Earth to me.&#8217; That same issue contained verses from poet and novelist John Updike\u2014verses inspired by his reading of the September 1967 special issue devoted to materials science. <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/index.cfm\/_api\/render\/file\/?method=inline&amp;amp;fileID=6F389D66-E8B8-4DF7-95E231FEFE12BE4D\">&#8216;The Dance of the Solids,&#8217;<\/a> with its rhyming references to ceramics, polymers and nonstoichiometric crystals, also appeared in Updike&#8217;s collection <em>Midpoint and Other Poems.&#8221;<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Read the whole article:\u00a0 <a href=\"https:\/\/www.scientificamerican.com\/article\/nature-in-verse-what-poetry-reveals-about-science\/\">&#8220;Nature in Verse: What Poetry Reveals about Science&#8221;<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the Arts &amp; Culture\/Opinion section of Scientific American posted 23 December 2020, Dava Sobel talks about being tickled to discover &#8220;a little over a year ago that the magazine had carried poetry in its earliest issues. Volume 1, Number &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/2020\/12\/31\/scientific-american-writer-contemplates-poetry-and-science\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":818,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[53],"tags":[87],"class_list":["post-5032","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-updike-in-context","tag-science-and-the-arts"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/818"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5032"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5034,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5032\/revisions\/5034"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5032"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5032"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.iwu.edu\/johnupdikesociety\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5032"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}