Poetry

Over several years we have hosted the results of poetry competitions organised and judged by Jonathan Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Leicester in the UK. Here, Jonathan gives some details about the latest competition and discusses the link between poetry and science.

We welcome back Jonathan Taylor as a guest blogger. Jonathan is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at the University of Leicester, UK, along with an author and critic. He has written several poems for us in the past: “Black Hole in B-flat”, “History Lesson” and “!!**&@??”. He has also organized poetry competitions among his students, in blog posts here, here, here, here and here.

I was fascinated by Chandra’s press release of 27 June 2016, ‘Clandestine Black Hole May Represent New Population.’ The very title of the press release sounds ‘poetic,’ in the idea of ‘Clandestine’ – a concealed or secretive – Black Hole; and the findings described in the press release are even more so: having concluded that “a peculiar source of radio waves thought to be a distant galaxy is actually a nearby binary star system containing a low-mass star and a black hole,” astronomers have suggested that “there may be a vast number of black holes in our Galaxy that have gone unnoticed until now .... Because this study only covered a very small patch of sky, the implication is that there should be many of these quiet black holes around the Milky Way. The estimates are that tens of thousands to millions of these black holes could exist within our Galaxy, about three to thousands of times as many as previous studies have suggested.”

Science is a distinctly human endeavour that overlaps with many other fields.

Scientific discoveries can provide inspiration for music, art, literature and poetry. As an example of the latter, over several years we have hosted the results of poetry competitions run by Jonathan Taylor, a lecturer in Creative Writing at The University of Leicester in the UK. Jonathan asks students to write a poem based on one of the results in our press or image releases.

Following the success of our first poetry competition last year, the Chandra X-ray Observatory and Jonathan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, have now run a second competition, in which Creative Writing students at De Montfort University in the U.K. were invited to write poems inspired by some of Chandra's findings. The final two entries of the four winning pieces are included here. Congratulations to all four winners.
Want more astropoetry? See these previous pieces.

Following the success of our first poetry competition last year, Chandra X-ray Observatory and Jonathan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing, have run a second competition, in which Creative Writing students at De Montfort University in the U.K. were invited to write poems inspired by some of Chandra’s findings and research areas. For the first installment, two out of the four winning entries are shown below (See also part two). All of the entries explore, in their different ways, the overlap between poetry and scientific discovery. Congratulations to the winners and everyone involved for making this unique competition possible.

You can read other student poems inspired by Chandra here and here. Jonathan Taylor's own three poems for Chandra include:

Black Hole in B-Flat
History Lesson
!!**&@??

Nickname GRS 1915

embracing
the evaporating definitions
of space and time
blurred
like the disk clothing me
matter
in a fight
of gravitation
and radiation

Continuing our interest in poetry, here is a poem inspired by Chandra's image from August 11th 2011 of VV340 , in which two colliding galaxies look like a 'Cosmic Exclamation Point.' The author was fascinated by the image and the metaphor used to encapsulate it – by, that is, the whole notion of 'cosmic punctuation' – so he decided to explore these ideas further in a poem.

Jonathan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in the UK, wrote two poems called 'History Lesson' and 'Black Hole in B-Flat,' both inspired by Chandra discoveries, and featured on Chandra's blog. Because of the success of these poems, Chandra and De Montfort University subsequently ran a competition for Creative Writing undergraduate students, in which they were invited to submit poems inspired by one of Chandra's press releases. The competition aimed to uncover the poetry inherent in the kind of scientific discovery undertaken by Chandra, and the four winning entries certainly succeeded in doing precisely that.
Here are the first and second placegetters in the competition. The third and fourth placegetters included in a previous blog posting.

Jonathan Taylor, Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in the UK, wrote two poems called 'History Lesson' and 'Black Hole in B-Flat,' both inspired by Chandra discoveries, and featured on Chandra's blog. Because of the success of these poems, Chandra and De Montfort University subsequently ran a competition for Creative Writing undergraduate students, in which they were invited to submit poems inspired by one of Chandra's press releases. The competition aimed to uncover the poetry inherent in the kind of scientific discovery undertaken by Chandra, and the four winning entries certainly succeeded in doing precisely that.
Here are the third and fourth placegetters in the competition. The first and second placegetters will be included in a future blog posting.

Jonathan Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in the UK, wrote a poem about the cosmic 'ghost' lurking around a distant supermassive black hole. His poem also appears in the literary magazine Acumen, issue 67, http://www.acumen-poetry.co.uk/. Jonathan is not only a poet, but a memoirist and novelist.

NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a cosmic ‘ghost’ lurking around a distant supermassive black hole ....
                            (Chandra X-Ray Observatory, 28 May 2009)

Telescoped, the universe is a vast memory,
an over-long school-lesson in cosmic history,
background radiation droning on and on
from 300,000 years after the big bang,
remembering anything big enough (not us);

Richard Dawkins, the Oxford zoologist and author, once said that "science is the poetry of reality", an observation that inspired a new video from the people who run the Symphony of Science project.

Another link can be made between science and poetry when scientific discoveries inspire people to write poems. Jonathan Taylor, a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at De Montfort University in the UK, wrote a poem about the deep note generated by a black hole in the Perseus galaxy cluster.

Jonathan is not only a poet, but a memoirist and novelist.