Poet Tricia Dearborn examines elements of reality in her book Autobiochemistry
The gap in knowledge between medical experts and the public is often a linguistic one. This week, we examine the science of love.
It’s extraordinary to think how swiftly our lives have been upended by coronavirus. Rewind the calendar a few months and we were spending our Saturday mornings having breakfast at cafes, or turning up for our favourite gym class or boot camp, or going to the beach with friends or to the shops for a wander, or any other number of social gatherings that make the weekend feel like a respite.
Now we find ourselves cooped up in our homes that now double as offices, co-working with our families and hungry for community. In these circumstances, it’s easy to spiral into panic, especially when we see evidence of the human idiocy that has accompanied the coronavirus everywhere: the infected Aspen jetsetters flaunting quarantine upon arriving home, the beachgoers congregating at Bondi, the unseemly brawls over toilet paper in our supermarket aisles.
But at the same time this dangerous, indefensible behaviour is going on, doctors and nurses are working under extraordinary pressure to save the lives of COVID-19 patients in intensive care units and epidemiologists are working around the clock to formulate and test vaccines.
This simultaneous spectacle of human achievement, in the form of the heroic doctors and nurses on the frontlines, and of human ignorance, in the form of the quarantine escapees, got me thinking about the gap in knowledge between medical experts and the general public, which often seems, as much as anything else, to be a linguistic one.
Those of us who don’t immediately comprehend the scientific argot find ourselves grasping to acquire the language that will help us understand the bewildering circumstance we find ourselves in.
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Often, the way we uninitiated learn about science is through the poetic device of metaphor, where a new phenomenon is likened to one we already understand, exemplified by the unfortunate tendency to liken coronavirus to flu, even as experts protest vehemently that the comparison is misleading and unhelpful.
Even the name of coronavirus itself is metaphorical: it borrows corona from Latin (meaning crown or garland) as a poetic visual metaphor that describes the shape of the virus particles, which appear with a halo of crown-like spikes when viewed through an electron microscope.
In these instances, metaphor serves as a bridge between scientific and ordinary languages.
And just as there’s poetry in science, there’s science in poetry, too. Scientists throughout the ages have also been poets: among many prominent examples, I’ve always been particularly fascinated by Sir Humphry Davy, the extraordinary Cornish chemist who discovered potassium, sodium, strontium, magnesium and calcium, yet was also friends with Coleridge and Wordsworth, and wrote rapturous poems in praise of the natural world, and even corrected the proofs of Wordsworth’s second edition of the Lyrical Ballads. “Here my kindling spirit learn’d to trace / The mystic laws from whose high energy / The moving atoms, in eternal charge / Still rise to animation,” Davy wrote at the tail end of the 18th-century, at the same time he was undertaking ground-breaking experiments that established the euphoric effects of nitrous oxide, or ‘‘laughing gas’’, in his coinage, that we all still breathe in before minor procedures today.
This week’s poem comes from a book that is, in many ways, a fitting kind of tribute to the great chemist-poet Davy. It’s by Sydney poet Tricia Dearborn, who holds degrees in biochemistry and the arts, and has worked in a research laboratory in the past.
It comes from her third full-length collection, Autobiochemistry, a book, in part, devoted to understanding the chemical elements that make up our reality.
It’s a book I’ve been returning to for the solace of the empirical, but also for the empathic language and humane lens Dearborn brings to scientific phenomena.
Curiously, Dearborn’s is the second book of poetry I’ve read recently devoted to the elements: Melbourne poet Jordie Albiston, whose work I’ll feature a little later in the year, has published a book of love poems, Element: the atomic weight & radius of love, which won the 2019 Patrick White Literary Award.
I won’t say more about Albiston until then — but it’s clear biochemistry is in the air.
Dearborn’s book, as its portmanteau title suggests, sits at the intersection of autobiography and biochemistry, the study of chemical processes as they relate to living organisms. Her poems dwell on the way these elements make themselves felt in the poet’s body, from the mercury held in the ball of a thermometer to the oxygen the poet is deprived of through asthma, and the relief when, finally, a doctor injects her and she finds herself ‘‘hauling in triumphant / catch after catch of air’’.
Dearborn doesn’t shy from the abject aspects of her body’s biochemistry. In the poem Scar massage, she describes a mole biopsy as ‘‘that small piece of me / floating in clear fluid in a plastic bottle / in a pathologist’s office’’. There’s also the muculent Phlegm: a love poem, a surprisingly tender portrait of ‘‘sickbed ritual’’, as well as a suite of poems about the ‘‘out of kilter’’ hormones of perimenopause that swing from the serious to the comic: ‘‘I am a hothouse orchid,’’ the poet writes mordantly, ‘‘trembling on its stem / catch me ever / paying for a sauna again.’’
This week’s poem, Lead, describes a chemical reaction that takes place in an inorganic chemistry lab.
You’ll notice the poet begins in a detached, scientific voice, describing the colourless solutions suspended in a rack of test tubes. Different solutions are droppered into each tube’s mouth, catalysing a reaction.
There’s a pleasure to be found in the way the poet instructs us and lets us into the lexicon of the laboratory: the precipitates and insoluble solids that form as elements combine, the alliterative shapes — ‘‘crystalline, curdy, colloidal’’ — that materialise.
Then, in the second-last stanza, the poet enters in first person, with a surprisingly unscientific admission: ‘‘I was blind to my feelings for my friend. / One drunken night recognition bloomed,’’ she tells us, invoking a very different kind of chemistry, one whose nuances we glean from the lesbian love poems elsewhere in the collection.
The final image of the canary, with its superb evocation of the brilliant yellow clouds produced when lead nitrate and potassium iodide are combined, suggests the chemical frisson has deepened into a metaphor of both emancipation and desire.
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LEAD
Inorganic chemistry lab. A rack of test tubes
Filled with colourless solutions.
Drops of another transparent liquid added.
In each tube, something new appears:
a precipitate, an insoluble solid,
which may be crystalline, curdy, colloidal;
may float as a flocculent mass, or plummet
brightly coloured to the bottom.
I was blind to my feelings for my friend.
One drunken night recognition bloomed.
Add a drop of lead nitrate to potassium iodide:
a canary bursts forth from a clear sky.
Tricia Dearborn
Sarah Holland-Batt is a poet and an associate professor at the school of creative practice at the Queensland University of Technology. Her weekly column, Poet’s Voice, receives sponsorship from The Copyright Agency and the Judith Neilson Institute for Journalism and Ideas. She can be contacted at sarah.hollandbatt@qut.edu.au
Regular poetry submissions to The Weekend Australian should be emailed to poetry@theaustralian.com.au