“Poetic and scientific text should be very dense...”

Scientific talent is often combined with talent in other areas of life. And although there is nothing more important for the reputation of a scientist than his scientific publications, it seems to us that the poems of the doctor of physics and mathematics. Sciences, Professor of Radboud University (Netherlands) Mikhail Katsnelson are also worthy of attention. We offer our readers a new selection of his poems and a short interview with their author about how scientific and poetic texts are similar.

— Why do you write poetry?

- I don't know. I started writing poems that (in my opinion) are not embarrassing to show to someone quite recently. Somehow, the internal settings suddenly changed dramatically. I think there were two important points here: that I wrote and published two non-scientific treatises with Valya Irkhin, thereby gaining experience in literary activity, and that at some point I decided that I would not write any more treatises. I managed to agree with someone (or Someone) to exchange the awl for soap. A penchant for writing treatises on rhyming.

— Are poems born involuntarily, or do you specifically work on them, like on a scientific article?

— Usually something is written down right away, some unrelated pieces, two or three. Then the rest grows from them. It takes a day or two to polish, but sometimes something meaningful comes out right away. Nothing to do with writing scientific articles. There, the idea takes months, or even years, to perfect. And writing an article as such is always torture. With poetry it's a joy. Maybe also because you write poetry completely disinterestedly. No participation in the “literary process”, and no thoughts about it. But I still earn my living from scientific articles. And I have to think about where and how it will be published, etc.

— In your opinion, are the aesthetics of a good poem and a good scientific theory related?

— In both cases, I really value naturalness and don’t like showing off. Well, you know what they say, they “want to show off their education.” Demonstration of technical skills with poverty of thought. Look - I can do it this way and that way... It’s ugly, even in poetry, even in theoretical physics.

The method must match the task. Ideally, for each problem you need to find (or create) such an approach so that the solution looks trivial. In science. In poetry, this corresponds to precision in the choice of language and intonation. In general, the main word for me here is relevance.

Also (these are related things, of course) the text should be very dense. Both poetic and scientific. It should unfold when reading on many levels at once and evoke many meaningful associations. There should be a sense of rich and powerful structure behind it.

1. For the previous selection of poems by M. Katsnelson, see TrV No. 50, dated March 30, 2010 p. 15, http://trv-science.ru/2010/03/30/iz-novyx-stixov

2. Links to the author’s books in electronic form

http://gondola.zamok.net/bibl/kacnelson_1.html
http://gondola.zamok.net/bibl/kacnelson_2.html
http://gondola.zamok.net/bibl/kacnelson_4.html

* * *

Elegy

Only ants live in the forest,
Another mosquito instead of a bird of paradise,
But apparently it’s not suitable for vertebrates,
And even for naked bastards - ce la vie.

You won't find any fish in the river, even if you kill them,
And not a damn thing is visible from the turbidity.
In Claudius' Epistle to Gertrude
It’s right there: Don’t drink.

And there was a thing - the Garden of Eden around,
The protein cycle in nature is bubbling,
All are good, with patterns on the skin,
And the predator is a friend to the eaten.

* * *

Nobody knows their deadlines,
While the copper basin is being forged.
The earth has forgotten the diplodocus,
Apparently he will forget us too.

While the trees remain
While the leaves are green,
Live well without revolutions
And, of course, without war.

Look, the butterflies are fluttering gently,
There, the breeze rustles in the branches,
And the sun carelessly bleeds
Liah like water and Liah.

* * *

The dawn rises like the Liteiny Bridge,
The East is red, the West is sleeping
With your unprincipled hibernation,
And something bends and creaks.

The wheels of history creak,
A ghost walks around without pants
And Kovalev's face without a nose
Stretched over the homeland of elephants.

Scientist cat "Besame mucho"
Sings (his sadness is bright),
The sail is torn, the clouds are swirling,
The princess gave birth to a toad.

* * *

Monument

He's a good guy, but he thinks everything is make-believe.
He writes and writes, but life is on its own.
Well, the archangel was just about to play the trumpet,
So majestic. But even to lure the cat out

Weakly from under the closet, especially - open the door,
Dress the skeletons from this closet in flesh and soul,
Cast a spell stronger than from the sugary Lethe
Water, but what can we say about water from Styx.

Then what’s the point, all that’s left is just show-offs,
The miraculous pillar, the path to it, all that.
And he himself will die, as always, seduced by peace,
Taking a sip of bull's blood, wine, milk, emptiness.

* * *

And at the end of the issue - about the weather

A strange beast came to us on business,
Crawled through a hyperspace hole,
And immediately the storm covers the sky with darkness,
And the trees are split in half.

Life flowed by like a faucet above,
And the ceiling is covered in wet gray spots.
There's something drawn there that's unclear,
Understanding is even more difficult than who is who.

Actually, the rain god has slowed down,
He won’t wet himself to the fullest extent,
And the abysses became thinner, but in some places.
No need for an ark. And where should we go?