Edification – Newsletter #92 – October 17, 2021
Dear Reader,
Happy Sunday!
A quickie because I’m feeling depleted. As you surely know, it’s that time of year when the wheel wobbles.
This week I had a poem called “Woman Astronaut” published at Sledgehammer Literary. (This is a fun and freewheeling publication, if you’ve never perused it before.)
The long blonde hair of Flight Engineer Karen Nyberg
flows upward in microgravity, swaying, seaweed-like
onboard the International Space Station.And maybe I overthink these things, but why
of all questions, does the woman astronaut answer
the one about washing her hair?She pulls water meticulously through her tresses, stresses
how precious is each bauble pearled, captured by the system
to be used, again and again.
The poem was inspired by this video on the NASA website.
“Nyberg, an accomplished woman on her second space mission, holds a doctorate in mechanical engineering, which may lead people to believe she is focused solely on technical matters, but as with many, there’s a softer side to this Midwesterner, one that may catch many by surprise.”
(Nyberg is a wonderful and brilliant person, worth a follow if you’re on Twitter.)
I’ve been writing a lot of poems this year about science. I suppose all poets go through a space phase, what with the moon and all. Maybe I’ve always been a somewhat space-obsessed artist. I mean, what’s not to love?
Three of my four brothers are science teachers; my closest brother is a physicist. As it happens, I just had a poem he inspired accepted for a “poets are funny” call from The Indianapolis Review, about how to estimate the weight of the oceans.
These are actual conversations we have in our family, y’all. My husband (an engineer who is also very mathematically inclined) was confounded by the situation at his first family gathering. He calls our conversations about numbers “spittin’ digits.” Or “spidge-didge” for short.
So. Yes. My poems have been getting a little spidge-didge. I have enough “math poems” for a chapbook – something I couldn’t have anticipated before I printed a gob out and just sorted them all out.
Math, science, space were themes I did not expect to emerge. And the fact I didn’t expect it is in itself fascinating.
Writing is such a layered process, conscious on a very high level. And also a transmission belt for the unconscious, for the unprocessed. We begin to map our own thought processes, our own neural pathways, as we write. “Retrieval creates learning,” as we know.
There is much evidence to suggest that the work of writing also improves those neural activities and the encoding of memories themselves. Memory, memoir, not the same but complementary – folding one upon the other like the cultivation and aeration of the soil. (One other interesting consequence seems to be the resilience of “ego integrity” over despair in trying times.)
See? Thinking is good for you. Even thinking about thinking. I feel better already.
Talk soon,
Edie