The Science
Climate change is responsible for a wide range of global events, from weather patterns to rising sea levels. This poem deals with the reality of coastal erosion of the East Riding of Yorkshire. It and how protecting one piece of coast adversely affects other areas through increased land loss.

The Poet
Clint Wastling’s poetry has been published widely, including Orbis, Dream Catcher and Marble. Clint has a collection – Layers published by Maytree Press. His novel, The Geology of Desire, is an LGBTQ thriller set around Whitby in the 1980’s and Hull during World War II. He also has a sci-fi novel: Tyrants Rex set 3000 years in the future, both published by Stairwell Books.

East Of Zero by Clint Wastling

The Science

The poem was inspired by a rock I came across in Aberdeen, Scotland, which had a small sign which read ‘Glacial Erratic’. I liked the sound of those two words in combination and ended up writing a couple of poems about it. A glacial erratic is a stone that was transported over a large distance by glacial ice, and ended up far from its original location when the ice melted. A dropstone can be a kind of glacial erratic, but instead of being dropped onto land, a dropstone fell out of a melting iceberg and ended up in the water, becoming embedded in sediment.

The Poet

Hannele Luhtasela is a biologist, editor, photographer, and poet from Helsinki, Finland. They write poetry in English and Swedish, and have a great love for science. One day soon they hope to publish a book of poetry. You can get in touch with them through their website or on Facebook:
http://www.luhtasela.net/
https://www.facebook.com/LuhtaselaPhotography

dropstone by Hannele Luhtasela

The Science
This poem reflects a moment as a medical student, interviewing a patient in the hospital about his sexual history, in order to determine his risk factors for hepatitis. Medical professionalism paradigms historically have dictated that doctors should be objective third parties, entirely devoid of their own identities and experiences in interactions with patients; for me, that means not disclosing my trans and queer identities. When I made the decision to reveal that I, too, was queer to that patient in that moment, I ‘failed; to meet the expectations for me as a medical provider. Yet, that ‘failure’ enabled me to help the patient feel safe bringing his whole self into his medical treatment.
The Poet
Teddy G. Goetz (he/him or they/them) is an overly enthusiastic medical student, writer, photographer, biker, runner, and research dork, with a penchant for cooking without recipes and referencing Audre Lorde, Donna Haraway, and Buffy. His goal (as both an artist and a doctor-in-training) is to help people feel seen. His prior training includes an MS in transgender hormone therapy and BS in biochemistry and gender studies, focusing on interdisciplinary scientific research informed by individual embodied experiences. More of his recent poetry and photography publications can be found at teddygoetz.com.

Community by Teddy G. Goetz

The Science:
Gregor Mendel was an Augustinian friar and biologist, who studied at the University of Vienna and served at St. Thomas' Abbey in Brno. He devoted himself to studying the methods of genetic inheritance via experiments on pea plants in the abbey's garden. He discovered inheritance’s basic foundations, including the equal passing down of genes from both parents, as well as recessive traits that could be masked in one generation but reappear inthe next. In this poem, Mendel reflects on some of his experiments and discoveries, while interweaving them with insights from his faith.

The Poet
Angie Lo is an undergraduate student at the University of Toronto, currently studying English and Physiology. She enjoys reading and writing poetry in her spare time (Shakespeare, Herbertand Rossetti are some of her favourites), and performing her pieces at various arts events. She is honoured to be a part of ​Consilience ​for the first time, and hopes to continue exploring the intersection between literature and the sciences. Connect with her via email at15angielo@gmail.com​.

Mendel's Prayer by Angie Lo

About The Poet

Steve Smart is a poet and artist living near Dundee, Scotland. He has long-standing interests in science and art. Places his poems have appeared include Atrium, Firth, The Poetry Shed, The Writer’s Café, The Curlew, Ink, Sweat and Tears, Poet’s Corner, Poetry Scotland, and others. Some projects: filmmaker/co-ordinator for ‘Poems for Doctors’, a collaboration between University of St Andrews and Scottish Poetry Library; art-science poetry film ‘TRAWL’ with Matthew Caley and Alex South for StAnza; online interactive poetry reading ‘THIS’ for StAnza/Book Week Scotland with Rebecca Sharp; Drawing breath a collection of poems about trees, with artist Tansy Lee Moir.

About The Science

The research featured was by a team led by Dr Ellen Garland (University of St Andrews). Over 10 years of fieldwork, songs of humpback whales were recorded at locations across the South Pacific. The work demonstrated that the songs travelled in a regular west-to-east pattern over 10,000km long each year, and that songs changed year-on-year over the course of the study. Previously this phenomenon was entirely unknown. The poem is about how I came to understand a diagram representing this annual migration of whale song which I encountered when designing an exhibition about the group's research in 2019. With thanks to: Dr Ellen Garland, Dr Luke Rendell, Alex South, Natalie Sinclair, and Ken Boyd. Public engagement project supported by: University of St Andrews, Dundee Science Centre, The Royal Society.

Sea Symphonies By Steve Smart

The Science
 
The poem is inspired by sensory studies that expand from cognitive science to museum research. Contemporary museums have incorporated various digital and technological interfaces that affect how people experience museum galleries, artefacts, and dioramas. Studying haptics, as the science of obtaining information and understanding through touch, opens up opportunities to interpret and understand the complex interaction of mind, body, and built environment. The poem tries to capture the diversity of objects of touch as well as different forms of tactility happening in a museum.

The Poet
 
Bryan Joel Mariano is the Knowledge Management Specialist of Forest Foundation Philippines. He is a development and science communication practitioner who has been working in the forest conservation sector since 2015. With great admiration for landscapes and keen interest in understanding human-nature relations, he enjoys hiking, walking, and reading books about the environment.

Haptics In The Museum By Bryan Joel Mariano

Grave Goods By Melanie Giles

The Science:
Rain is formed high in the atmosphere as water collects around dust and smoke particles in clouds, but it also can form around other miniscule bits such as zooplanktons, pseudomonas, pollen, bacteria, feces, and bdelloid rotifers, known informally as wheel animals or wheel animalcules, anything whisked into the atmosphere by wind, updrafts, or storms. The tiny bits become the nuclei of raindrops made of water molecules held together by water tension. Rime ice layers itself into miniature fairy-tale-forms when supercooled fog droplets come in contact with sub-zero surfaces.     
 
The Poet:
Montreal-born writer Claudia Coutu Radmore’s Accidentals won the 2011 bpNichol Chapbook Award. Her latest lyric poetry collections are rabbit and Park Ex Girl, both published in 2020. Claudia is the President of Haiku Canada, and on the Council of The League of Canadian Poets.

when the sky Is falling By Claudia Radmore

The Science

This poem was inspired by the panicked look on my mother-in-law’s face at one of the last moments I saw her with true self-awareness. A well-respected pediatrician who earned her degree in medicine from Johns Hopkins in the 1950s, she is now an Alzheimer’s victim and can no longer speak. It is my view that dementia, in any form, is the most personalized expression of entropy. We are often challenged in our society to find the humanity in science. In its own way, this poem attempts to do that. It challenges the reader to consider order vs. disorder, the perception of reality and how the gradual descent into disorder could be perceived at the personal level. Of course, until that happens to us ourselves, we can have no real idea of how that feels.

The Poet

Eric Arnold is defined by his interests in life, death, music, patterns, chess, navigation, geography, and communication. He has driven taxis in Boston, hitchhiked and hopped freight trains across the United States and navigated submarines beneath the Arctic ice pack. He is, like you, gradually declining into a state of complete disorder. In the meantime, he does what he can to improve the lives of those around him. He is not always so bold as to declare himself a poet.  But really, we are all poets, aren’t we?

String Of Pearls (Dementropy) By Eric Arnold

The Science:
Heat death of the universe is one possible hypothesis on the ultimate end of the universe where entropy will not be able to increase. This thermodynamic equilibrium will mean no more heat transfers can take place so all forms of energy will not work in our universe. The second law of thermodynamics states that the amount of entropy in a system must always increase. For heat death to occur the universe would need to be infinite.

The Poet:
Alicia Sometimes is an Australian writer and broadcaster. She has performed her spoken word and poetry at many venues, festivals, and events around the world. She is director and co-writer of the science-poetry planetarium shows, ‘Elemental’ and ‘Particle/Wave’. Her TedxUQ talk in 2019 was about combining art with science. In 2020 she won the Bruce Dawe Poetry Prize.

Heat Death By Alicia Sometimes

The Science:  
This poem celebrates the breakdown of living beings into organic and then inorganic matter as a central part of the living and nonliving ebb and flow.  The decay process usually starts while a tree is still standing and continues after it falls.  Hyphae are the thin strands that make up the bodies of fungi that, along with bacteria and other organisms mentioned in this poem, do the essential work of breaking down and recycling matter in forests, freeing it for uptake from the soil.  The poem relates to the theme of entropy because this decay and degradation involves change from the ordered nature of living cells to a more disordered form, and the change of useful potential energy stored in organic molecules into less-useful forms. Because entropy means that energy degrades into less useful forms constantly over time, none of this continual cycling of matter into and out of life would be possible without the input of energy from the sun. 

The Poet: 
Amy Boyd is a professor of botany and ecology at Warren Wilson College. Scientist by training, educator by profession, and writer/artist by nature, she lives in Swannanoa, North Carolina, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains.

Altered Axis By Amy Boyd

The Science
The poem contrasts what appears to us as reality with the scientific reality: the speed of light, sound waves, and unseen atoms and molecules in air that allow us to see, hear and breathe. We do not see that bees’ wings as they hover over flowers are beating over 200 times a second. The emergence of light waves and sound waves create our reality. The poem describes how a woman experiences stillness waiting in her garden for her baby to be born and the scientific reality that everything is in fact in constant motion.
 
The Poet
Patricia Hemminger is a science and environmental writer and is currently executive producer of a documentary focused on green chemistry solutions to environmental pollution. She holds a PhD in chemistry and is a graduate of NYU’s Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and of Drew University’s MFA Poetry Program. Her poems have been published in Spillway, The Blue Nib, Tiny Seed Literary Journal, River Heron Review, Twyckenham Notes, and Streetlight Magazine, among others. Her chapbook What Do We Know of Time? is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in October 2022.

Everything Takes Time By Patricia Hemminger

The Science 

This poem attempts to measure the immeasurable void that comes from a big life change. It is inspired by the format of word problems in science textbooks and is an attempt to place an amalgam of feelings about leaving/change/the foreign/discomfort into such a word problem.

The Poet 

Allison Lindquist grew up outside of Boulder, Colorado. A Neuroscientist by trade, she worked in a research lab for three years before starting her PhD. With a background in painting, poetry became the brush of choice when met with a teacher who believed in the power of words. In her first book of poems, "A Search For Human Influences On The Thermal Structure of the Atmosphere” Allison’s work explores the complementary nature of science and art.

Problem 2d: Analysis on leaving by Allison Lindquist

To A Subsoiler By Lucy Beattie

Overgrazed By Anthea Lacchia

Darwin on Patagonia Shore by Philip Walsh

The Science
This poem looks at symbiosis through a human relationship lens.  Symbiosis is usually thought of as a relationship between two different species.  Mutualism, commensalism, and parasitism are possible symbiotic relationship types. In this poem, symbiosis is used to describe a human relationship that changes over time. It was inspired by the article The evolution of parasitism from mutualism in wasps pollinating the fig, Ficus microcarpa, in Yunnan Province, China (https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2021148118)

The Poet
Catherine Little (she/her) is a Canadian writer, educator and consultant who lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. As well as poetry, she has written textbooks, OpEds, professional resources for teachers, and picture books.

Relationship by Catherine Little

Bio
Poet and essayist Alice Major has been inspired by science and math since she was given a book on relativity at the age of ten. Since then, she has published 12 collections of poetry and a collection of essays, “Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science.” Her most recent collections are Welcome to the Anthropocene (University of Alberta Press, 2018) and the just-published Knife on Snow. Her numerous awards include the Lieutenant Governor of Alberta Distinguished Artist Award, and an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta. She served as first poet laureate of her home city of Edmonton, Alberta.

The Science
A 2016 study (https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ecs2.2077) calls Arctic foxes “ecosystem engineers.” The dens of these small canids can be seen from kilometers away as bright green patches on the brown tundra, and researchers found that the effects of a fox den increase nutrients in the soil drastically. The dens themselves can be centuries old—it’s hard work to dig in the poor soil and permafrost, and specific sites are chosen on ridges and other spots where permafrost is further below the surface and coarse sediment makes excavation easier. Den areas have much more vegetation that holds more insulating snow, making them attractive winter habitat to lemmings, the foxes’ main prey, and potentially influencing lemming populations positively.

Arctic Foxes Grow Their Own Gardens by Alice Major

One Hundred One Thousand Meters By Iris Van Zelst

Look Closer Green Goes To Purple By Edith Oaken

Mushroom is a Synecdoche by Corrado Nai

In Memory Of The Jurassic Horseshoe Crab Mesolimulus By Horus Balogh - Zanin

Light Years Away By Christianne Clarke

Ticking Like A Mountain By Laura Op De Beke

Relativity At The Midnight Matinee By Karen Schofield

TASCAM DR-1

Crayon box favorite by Meg Freer

Morning At The Painted Wall By Marilyn Wolf

Contrary To Popular Belief By Tanis MacDonald

Cornelius Drebble Discovers The Perfect Red By JLM Morton

The Scientist At Giverny By E.B. Smith Jr.

The science behind the poem:
Here I am sleepwalking through a world that is at once intimate and foreign. I know the forest exists, know this in my bones, and yet some days its serenity feels a galaxy away. In this age of hyperconnectivity, I constantly seek reminders of our primal origins — of that emerald tangle in which communication travels at the speed of dreams and blue-light feels utterly alien.

"Somnambulism" by Jared Mulhair

Welcome to Consilience
the online poetry journal exploring the spaces where science and art meet. Each issue of Consilience features poems about science all linked by a common theme, written by poets of all backgrounds. At Consilience, we aim to publish all the submissions that we receive and to make both the poetry and the science accessible to all audiences. Here, we feature audio recordings of poems or short pieces by authors who published in Consilience. For more information about the journal, team and how to submit a poem, visit our website: https://www.consilience-journal.com/

Audio poems produced by Zed Sehyr @Consilience Journal

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