Love of the unknown unites science and poetry, Kurt Brown discovered. It's a passion strong enough that it enables both poets and scientists to overcome humanity's inherent fear of the dark, creating new stories that eclipse older ones, embracing the reality and discomfort of uncertainty in both external and internal universes, he says. Recognition of these similarities, as well as obvious differences, is grounded in Mr. Brown's experience editing an anthology of poems about science and mathematics and a collection of essays that brings poetry and science together.

Himself a poet, Mr. Brown sees two overlapping universes shared by science and poetry. Scientists search the unknown outside of themselves, in the physical world. Poets focus inside, exploring the unconscious, subconscious, unknown self.

And in both pursuits, Mr. Brown says, surprisingly similar questions arise. They are to him crow bars that pry open a little rift in the mind, in what one thinks about the universe and the world, about experience. These are, not surprisingly, The Big Questions. What is the nature of the cosmos? Who am I? How did I get here? What is life? What is love? These are the questions that mean the most to us, he says, but get lost in the everyday of small talk, paying bills and running errands, things that fill the vast majority of our lives but divert our attention from what we know is important though we rarely explore or articulate them.

Both today's scientists and poets bear a striking resemblance, he says, to humanity's ancient need, the hero. Whether a Native American on a quest or one of the thousand other faces of Joseph Campbell's hero, this is the person who goes out into the unknown, does whatever it takes to get a glimpse of possibilities, then -- and this is critical -- comes back. S/he articulates what she or he has glimpsed, uses shared language to open up possibilities, to avoid certainties and absolutes. This is the job of the poet, Mr. Brown says unequivocally, seeing the role of scientists in the same light.

Of course, science and poetry are also very different, reflected in part in their languages, one using mathematics, the other words. Or consider approaches to ambiguity. Mr. Brown says poets are trying to fix a moment in time with words. But words are imprecise. Slippery. Full of connotations and ambiguities. The poet revels in it, trying to make a sentence or a phrase mean more than one thing, possibly 2, maybe 3, even better if it's 4. But, of course, this would drive a scientist crazy, he says. Scientists try to get rid of connotations, stick with denotations, because they need to replicate their results, over and over again, anywhere.

But in the end, uncertainty takes the day, Mr. Brown believes. Long before Heisenberg and his (commonly misunderstood) uncertainty principle, Keats was saying, famously, "I am not uncomfortable with not knowing." Why? Because, Mr. Brown thinks, poets like scientists know it will lead farther than certainty does, will open up a way to get farther, in short, open one to possibilities, to the universe.

[This Program was recorded March 3, 2005, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S.]

 

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