Thought experiment

What are the historical connections between creative writing and science? Is it possible for science to be a catalyst for imaginative writing? To explore these issues we must first open our minds to a conjunction of knowledge and work that some might find unusual. This poem is an illustration of possibility:

Fulcrum / Writing a World

While I talk and the flies buzz,

a seagull catches a fish at the mouth of the Amazon,

a tree falls in the Adirondack wilderness,

a man sneezes in Germany,

a horse dies in Tattany, and twins are born in France.

What does that mean? Does the contemporaneity

of these events with one another,

and with a million others as disjointed,

form a rational bond between them,

and write them into anything

that resembles for us a world?

I wrote this poem and published it in a collection called Scientific Papers. It was later featured as posters on London's Underground trains to celebrate the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society. It is a ‘found poem’, an excerpt spliced from the prose of William James's Reflex Action and Theism then arranged into lines. It is scientific prose and it is a poem; it is the work of the living and the dead; like Schrödinger's cat it is both there and not there. It is a thought experiment. But the poem presented itself, as poems do if you're lucky or receptive. Like science, creative writing requires apprenticeship, patience and practice to allow that receptivity to begin to feel like luck.