I can't think of a worse place for a poetry reading than the dreaded Room 14, the venue for yesterday's session on "Poetry and Science." A flimsy plastic door and curtain were all that stood between the science-poets and the roar of the crowd at the tapas bar and exhibition stands just outside. The audience leaned forward to hear, grimacing as a string of announcements blared over loudspeakers outside. But just as I was cursing ESOF and about to give up on the session, Roald Hoffmann rose to the challenge. Within a minute he made the noise melt away--I knew I had to stay.
It's not just that Hoffmann is a talented poet, though he certainly is. It's that he is at least as gifted a scientist. (He won the 1981 Nobel chemistry prize and now teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.) The first that he read to us was about solitons, a strange and very rare form of wave that carries energy across great distances with almost no loss of energy. Within the poem was a slyly hidden statement about human relationships. It's a very rare poet indeed who can draw on such a deep understanding of science.
The most haunting poem that Hoffmann, now 71, shared with us has never been published. "Nature commissioned me to write it in 2003 for the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA," he said. The result was a poem titled CODE, MEMORY. "They rejected it," he added with an ironic smile. I can see why the Nature editors might have been scared away. It's not a simple poem, neither in structure nor mood. Layered in are references to Nabokov, evolution, Mendel, genetics, and genocide. (As a boy in Złoczów, Poland, Hoffmann narrowly escaped the Holocaust; most of his immediate family were murdered.)
After the session, I asked Hoffmann if Science could have the honor of publishing the poem online here. He agreed and we present it below (And in case your blog reader disrupts the formatting of the stanzas, we offer a PDF version).
--John Bohannon
CODE, MEMORY
Walk in, to a Ticino alp's
wild strawberry midsummer,
see the blues flit, conjure up
a young Russian with a net.
Elsewhere, by lamplight,
one you loved can look
at the old photos and say
"you smile like your father,
he also wore a cap."
The way lit up in '53,
two young men just willing
a model into being. Walk,
toward them, past a monk
tending peas, on to stains,
agar plates and centrifuges,
come, walk by the light
of signals from within, past
x-shaped diffraction patterns;
on, past '53, heady
with the logic of splice
and heal, the profligate
wonder of polymerases,
into denominable bounty,
down this biochemical
rope trick of a molecule,
its rings' sticky signposts
tied to a backbone (chain,
chain, chain, she sings)
run -- of sugars, unsweet,
and phosphate triads.
There, there's memory's lair,
the inexpungable trail
of every enzyme that worked,
and those that did but
for a while, every affair
the senses had with a niche,
the genes turned off
as we came out of water,
what worked, what nearly killed --
the insinuating virus, code
immured in coiled softness,
coopted symbiotes. Move,
for here wiggling and collision
gauge shape, down necklaces
of meaning interrupted
by stutters, the ons, offs,
intent, a tinkerer's means
to function (that escapes us),
on, to difference, earthy life,
its dendral arms hazarding
berry and you, to the butterfly
that lights on torn up earth
in Srebrenice and Złoczów,
that flies to the far place
love obstinately chose.
An Alp... is to be climbed;
they did, our mid-century
helixeers. But oh, an alp
is also a sweet shoulder
of a mountain, that meadow
reaching for snowline, the place
where men drive cattle, rest,
move higher. An alp is clover,
a place to feed, and watch
another blue, now the morning
glory's winding grasp and
climb. The word sings, in alp
and alkaline phosphatase
and DNA, in nuanced refrain;
this side of memory, of a world
that was; and one that will be.
--Roald Hoffmann
