Theft: An Essay in the Poetics of Scientific Language
Joseph Duemer, Clarkson University
The "two cultures" debate has been superceded by what might be called a
"multiple languages" debate; nowhere are these languages more in
conflict and at the same time dependent on each other than in the
language practices of science and poetry. This essay will explore and
attempt a preliminary map of this multivalent relationship, but it will
do so unapologetically from the point of view of poetry. The
theoretical orientation of the essay is grounded in the study of
rhetoric and in phenomenology.
Nobody talks about poetry as a form of truth anymore that right has been
ceded to science. And while the author is no Luddite having composed
this text on a computer as a poet the author is unwilling to capitulate
to the hegemony of scientific language, and its implicit claim that it
can completely describe the physical and phenomenal world. The essay
will briefly critique the notion of description.
Marginalized discourses not to mention marginalized social classes often
find strategies for combating their inferior status. Such strategies
have been called "weapons of the weak," and a number of contemporary
poets such as Alice Fulton, Albert Goldbarth, and Claire Bateman have
developed rhetorical "weapons" for responding to science. They have
learned how to "steal" the language of science and put it to their own
sometimes subversive purposes. This essay will describe some of these
strategies, and briefly suggest the outlines of an emerging poetics.