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Poetry
09/25/99
By Tom Mayo
J.K. Rowling's three Harry Potter books, which exploded onto best-seller lists around the world this summer, remind us of the connection between poetry and magic.
From the inscription over the doors of the main wizard supply store to the first, feeble spell in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone ("Sunshine, daisies, butter mellow,/Turn this stupid, fat rat yellow"), poetry establishes the mood and sets the stage for the magic that follows.
Although her stories are completely up-to-date in all other respects, Ms. Rowling's use of poetry to make magic has ancient roots. For example, conjurations and other incantations usually take the form of rhyming poems. The three witches in Macbeth are obvious examples ("Double, double toil and trouble;/Fire burn and cauldron bubble"). "Abracadabra," the most famous magical word of all, first appeared in a second-century poem by Quintus Serenus Sammonicus, and the word is liltingly poetic in its own right. The reasons for this strong connection between poetry and magic are probably legion, but I favor one in particular: The essence of magic is ritual, and poetry is ritual's handmaiden.
Math and the do-wah-diddy downbeat Magic is also the link between primitive belief systems and Western science, as surely as alchemy preceded chemistry and metallurgy. Similarly, poetry and science sometimes seem to be two different ways of following the same path. Science has long provided themes and analogies for poets, perhaps because science and poetry both attempt to grapple with the unfathomable.
If poetry and science meet at the intersection of imagination and experience, it is an intersection that is described (perhaps even defined) by the language of mathematics. In an interview on National Public Radio last May, Keith Devlin, dean of sciences of St. Mary's College in California, suggested that facility in math is actually a language-based skill. The multiplication tables that we recited in elementary school are, in this view, a kind of poem, and the key to learning the multiplication tables "is almost certainly that we are using the human ability to recognize rhythms, to recognize almost the human mind for poetry ... [W]hat's going on then [when we do multiplication] is we're not really getting at the numbers, we're remembering the patterns of the language. And the human mind is extremely good with dealing with language."
A language-based account of mathematics contradicts the idea of math as an eternal Platonic ideal that precedes and transcends human experience, that God created the integers and the universe follows mathematical law. If language skills – including the ability to reason by analogy, to think metaphorically and to organize thoughts using the sounds and rhythms of speech – reinforce math skills, there is at least an argument that mathematics itself is a product of our interaction with the world and the processing of that experience through language.
It seems to be all in our minds
In fact, it is more than just an argument, now that neurobiologists and psychologists are working to collect evidence that the source of basic math concepts such as integers and counting lies in the wiring of the human brain. Stanislas Dehaene, a French cognitive scientist, and his colleagues have tentatively located the human brain's "math module" in the inferior parietal cortex – the same region that processes language and distinguishes left from right. If their findings are confirmed, the relationship between poetry and science may be a two-way street. Not only is science a source of insight for the poet, but language shapes and directs the development of scientific knowledge.
The exploration of the complex relationship among mathematics, science and language is the idea behind the splendid anthology "Verse & Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics" (Milkweed Editions, $15.95), edited by Kurt Brown. The collection is divided into 11 sections (Verse and Universe, Space, Time, Matter, Heavenly Bodies, Earth, Animal, Human, Theory and Speculation, Number, Biography) and presents the work of nearly 100 American poets writing in the last half of this century. The breadth of subject matter is exhilarating, although the narrow focus on modern American poets excludes many worthy poems. One of my favorite missing poems is the transcendent "Pi," by the Polish Nobelist Wyslawa Szymborska. There are, however, scores of terrific poems here by the likes of Rita Dove, Howard Nemerov, Charles Simic, Pattiann Rogers, Billy Collins, William Stafford, Lisel Mueller and Jorie Graham.
For a narrower slice of the subject, but a broader selection of authors from both sides of the Atlantic and across more centuries, you might dip into "The Oxford Treasury of Time Poems" (Oxford University Press, $25). The book is aimed at young readers, but it offers sophisticated poems by world-class poets that will please adults as well.
Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.