In her new book, Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science, Edmonton poet laureate Alice Major asks an interesting and provocative question: What do science and poetry have in common? She asserts that the two domains are “Intersecting sets” with multiple points of contact.
Unfortunately, her approach to the question is garbled, confused, and narrowly focused on her relationship as a poet to the science. She describes herself as “a magpie (…) picking up bright, oddly-shaped ideas that attracted me from various disciplines and arranging them along with anecdotes that I hope give them context.”
Accordingly, this peripatetic book drifts from one subject to another without much apparent order. Those coming in search of systematic arguments about the unacknowledged consonance of poetic and scientific language, or the value of a poet’s experimental approach to language versus the congealed categories of science, will probably leave confused and annoyed. Apart from meek claims that poets and scientists are not so fundamentally dissimilar as we might believe, she seems unable to offer the strident defense of poetry that would justify the book’s project.
Intersecting Sets is part treatise and part memoir, speckled with poems, images, and campfire aphorisms. Parts of it also read like science journalism, but of the kind that any professional science writer would be embarrassed to put out. All in all, one does not get the sense that Major has engaged with the science any more than Coleridge, who, when asked why he attended so many public lectures on chemistry, frankly replied: “To improve my stock of metaphors.” Major’s discussions give no sense of having mastered the science she dabbles with, leaving one feeling that she has only delved far enough into the material to come rushing out with a convenient metaphor. When she writes that she, “never understood the faintly sneering description of all science as reductive. All a scientist is trying to do is tell a story of how things came to be, just as any writer is,” Major’s populist analogy flattens out both writing and science into “storytelling,” doing justice to neither.
Major also has an academic agenda: taking down the postmodern trend in the North American humanities. Her recurrent polemics about “behaviourist” postmodernism is accompanied by troubling attempts to neuropsychologize the experiences of reading and writing poetry. Major has little grasp of postmodernist thought, however, and her case is not helped by the amateurish feel of her “scientific” analyses.
To its credit, the book does land on many intriguing insights that, if they were followed to their conclusions or if they were backed up by more than anecdotes and insufficient exposition, might be convincing. In the contorted amalgam Major has put together, readers will surely find a couple of gems that pique their interest. For instance, this anecdote about 19th-century mathematician William Hamilton made me chuckle:
Hamilton wanted very much to write poetry and it took his friend William Wordsworth to point out tactfully that his talents did not lie in that direction. “You send me showers of verses which I received with much pleasure… yet we have fears that this employment may seduce you from the path of science.”
But Major is less interested in argument than anecdote, seeing what meaning a superficial engagement with pop-science can bring to her own life. All this is interspersed with complaints about the state of the Canadian poetry market:
It’s debilitating and discouraging to feel that all the attention is being sucked up by a few authors who aren’t even from around here—that the book readers and buyers in your own city will be more familiar with the name of a highly promoted author from the east (whose book isn’t so much better than yours that it deserves all those reviews.)
Intersecting Sets, so to speak, stares at poetry with a telescope. As such, it may provide speculative, half-satisfying answers to narrow questions a poet might pose about her own practices, in a country and a century where poetry, by and large, has cased to interest most readers. Unfortunately, this is also why so much of the book feels like a cry in the wild. But what else could one expect from a volume in which a poet looks at science? Ultimately, I have difficulty finding a positive answer to the question: for whom would this book be of interest?
Matthias Lalisse is a writer, editor and researcher based out of Montreal.
