A background note from Carol Jenkins on Science Made Marvellous - a national project from the Poets Union and National Science Week.

Science Made Marvellous has been something of a litmus test – well there you go - that slip of grainy paper, about as long as my little finger when I was in 1st Year high school, persists as a metaphor. Science, its craft and ideas, images, characters and words are intrinsic to how I communicate.

First off, I wanted to organize an national poetry event for the Poets Union - not an event in one city where 90% of the people who attend are from that city but hey the rest of you are invited.., [too bad you can’t come] but events in all States and Territories, where people who have contributed to the work which is being celebrated can participate and enjoy the limelight, and engage a local audience. I wanted to work with the existing Writing and Poetry organisations – building relationships with them, and letting them decide what they would do and how they would do it.

And I wanted to produce print and electronic collections of science poems, from great poets all over Australia , with beautiful graphics and an audio program. I wanted to build relationships between science people and poets. All this to be funded from money freely given from outside the usual art funding sources.

When I described this program to the NSW National Science Week co-ordinator, Kylie Ahearn, she said “That is ambitious.” The last time I’d heard this phrase in this tone, it was in Yes Minister, and coding for “You Are Mad- this is suicidal .” This was unnerving and I started to think she might have a point. After all $20,000 is not that much split between 13 organisations, run events, produce a series of booklets (perfect bound) and an audio program.

Well – it’s Happening – as my daughter sometimes says to me. There are events to celebrating science through poetry running from east to west, north to South, in the tablelands and on buses in country Victoria, there are star-gazing astronomical events on a Beach near Darwin, poets delving into Herbariums, toxicologists and biochemists will debate the grit of it with English professors, there are talks on poetry stromatolites and ecology in schools in Perth, and much more. The three wonderful anthologies have been dispatched to all corners of the country. The audio is nearly done.

Many of the poems written have been from work originally supported by the Australia Council and this is important too.

Cheers,
Carol Jenkins

National Science Week. The project, Science Made Marvellous, has collected poems that take up science, scientists, curiously investigating the facts, themes and language of science. A national call out has drawn science poems from both scientists and writers with hundreds of poems submitted from all corners and all backgrounds.

It seems both CP Snow and Keats were wrong. Far from being uninterested in science, this call out has seen writers take up tools to consider the Hadron Collider, astronomy, Euclid, the biosynthesis of 3-nitropropanoic acid, fossil fish, what we’re made of from, the nature of time and dark matter. And far from Keats’s worry that science was unpicking the rainbow, its accelerated progress continues to bring new materials for writers and poets, taking the poetry beyond the inner emotional life, the purely domestic themes. As the late great Czech poet and immunologist Miroslav Holub puts it, “escape from the narrow limits of spectrum of metaphors that used menagerie, roses, cabbage, and, at best, garlic” into the extended reality ‘from pulsars to leptons, from prokaryotic organisms to our lymphocytes and ‘interferons’.

Science Made Marvellous, a project funded by National Science Week will produce three booklets of Science poems and an audio program to be launched in National Science Week 2010. You might say this is a an experiment using 26 variables, and you can judge how well it works at the launching of the collections and a celebration of science in poetry in events organized by Writers Centres and poetry organizations in every Australian State and Territory. Chapbooks will be available free at the launch events, and also be available as a PDF download. A selection of poems and commentary broadcast as audio and downloadable from writing centres, The Poets Union and the
Australian Poetry Centre and broadcast on local radio.

Science Made Marvellous was launched in Sydney on:
Date: Tuesday 17th August
Venue: The Dixson Room of State Library,
the State Library of NSW

The Sydney launch included readings and a panel discussion on the relationship between poetry and science with guests including:

• Chris Winder, Professor of Toxicology, University of NSW;
• Dr Victoria Haritos, Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences;
• Paul Giles Challis Professor of English at University of Sydney,
• poets Stephen Edgar, Emily Ballou and Tricia Dearborn,

Victoria Haritos:(Principal Research Scientist, CSIRO Ecosystem Sciences) looks to Australian invertebrate diversity for inspiration and discovery of new bio-based products and processes as future bio-industries to replace fossil oils. Her research is investigating new unusual fatty acid chemicals made by insects for use as colour-changing sensors and anti-microbials, the conversion of non-food parts of plants to bio-fuels like ethanol using enzymes found in the guts of termites and other carbon dioxide reduction strategies. Victoria has also investigated protein-containing slimes and silks made by invertebrates for uses like bio-gels and luxury fabric.

For more details contact:
Carol Jenkins on 0418 216 480 or (02) 99692187 or by email at: cjenkins@riverroadpress.net