Sherry Chandler » 2008 » July » 18
This post was written by sherry
from Gregor Mendel and the Cats
Up the monastery wall, the brewery’s yeast-scent
huffles. And the dusty cat, stretched high
over warm stones, swings her blunt snout this way
and that, yeastward and monkward, from
release to salvation. In the bright sun
her irises, like shutters, close,
leaving just a strip of liquid glint, the pupil’s
vertical box.I am sleepless today, the cats of my childhood
mewling all night, their phantom shapes
alit on my ceiling. Cat backs, stretched, flexed,
cat tails in counterpoint. Such mystery,
to be of the body perpetually …
This poem is from Linda Bierds’s First Hand (Putnam’s, 2005) of which Bierds says in her “Author’s Note and Acknowlegments:”
As they trundle through the centuries, swaying this way and that, from wonder to foreboding, the poems in this book rest most frequently at the inscape of science. It is there, in that innermost space lit by the nature of human achievement, that their interest and questions lie, their praise and disquietude.
An inquiry such as this, which moves from third-century-B.C. theories of buoyancy to twenty-first-century biochemistry, must acknowledge what are for many the global and spiritual implications of a science increasingly adept at creating, extending, and annihilating life. To help me with that task, I turned to the character of Gregor Mendel, whose work on the hybridization of peas forshadowed genetic cloning. …”
Bierds’s biosketch at Poets.org reads in part:
Because her poems are often laden with historical references and challenging language, Bierds is often described as a difficult and overly-intellectual writer. In an interview with the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Bierds responds to the notion of obscurity by saying: “In grade-school classrooms, there’s this notion that a poem is similar to a mathematical problem and that it has a solution. That’s very off-putting to people. They remember back to fifth or sixth grade and how they didn’t ‘get’ poetry then and probably never will. But they did get it, just in a different way. Much of the reputation that ‘poetry is difficult’ comes from this mistaken thinking that a poem has one answer.”
I do find these poems difficult but the fault is mine entirely, in my ignorance of science. On the other hand, while I seldom “get” a whole poem in the way the teacher might have liked, I often find passages like the one quoted above that are just exquisite, and very clear and simple.
Edward Byrne in Valparaiso Review says of First Hand:
Presenting Gregor Mendel as a primary subject in her poetry, Bierds provides readers with a persona representative of the conflicted scientist, whether historic or contemporary, seeking to unlock mysteries of the physical world while maintaining a vigorous faith in the mysteries of the spiritual world. By extension, this poetic persona and his actions also show evidence of the intrinsic clash — often attendant and sometimes inevitable — between a search for knowledge and a trust in one’s religious beliefs, a pair of pursuits at constant risk of incompatibility with each other for inquisitive people who maintain a great faith.
…
Elsewhere, in “Gregor Mendel and the Cats,” Mendel speaks of painting blue the backboards of the monastery’s bookcases. The poem discloses Mendel’s thoughts on the importance of using the mind (“We are minds here,” he begins) as well as the body (“And hands,” he continues), stretching one’s intellect for both practical knowledge and imaginative purposes.
In talking about the poem “Sunderance,” Byrne leads me to hope I am not the only reader not quite learned enough to keep up:
At times, comprehending archival information in Bierds’s poetry does demand a greater degree of active intellectual involvement, perhaps even firsthand research, by readers. Nevertheless, while searching for information is sometimes required for a full understanding of clues embedded within the content of the poems in each of Bierds’s books (and may be a contributing factor that hinders her ability to attract a larger audience), when engaging in the process one can achieve a certain amount of satisfaction and delight, not to mention enlightenment about some lesser-known facets of historical events or individuals.
Bierds’s wanderings in scientific history takes her from Mendel to Newton back to Galileo, forward to Hedy Lamar and on to James Watson and Dolly the cloned sheep, with a detour to some fishermen stranded on breaking ice near St. Petersburg. Oh yes, and Marie Curie makes an obligatory appearance who is paired with the artist Paul Cadmus, working on a WPA project.
When a genetic scientist uses the term expression, s/he is referring to the action of a gene in the production of a protein or a phenotype, the gene expresses itself. When a poet speaks of expression s/he has something perhaps more lyrical in mind. In First Hand, Bierds shows us how to experience both kinds of expression firsthand.
This post was written by sherry
