‘I Am Interested in All Flow and Resonance’

In your essay ‘Quantum Poetics’ (2007), you relate to digital poems (or poems that have both a digital and print form). If we focus on printed forms only, do quantum laws inspire them as well? Alternatively, is the screen a prerequisite to make this ‘new level of emergence’ occur? In an interview,1 you explain that the frustration you faced with the limitations of Newtonian language led you to create digital poems that are more in tune with our quantum world. Did the exploration of digital poems help you to reinvent a language adapted to our quantum world and then applicable to print poetry?

The frustration with language I felt, and feel, is a frustration with its power to archive and establish an outgrown understanding of the physical world. In terms of archaeology, this failure is, of course, a gift, for it gives us language appropriate to a physics mostly thousands of years old: first prehistoric, then in the Western world Aristotelian, then Newtonian – in fact not fully Newtonian! Yet after a hundred years of quantum theory and research, we speakers and writers have not managed to convey to anyone not technically trained an intuitive grasp of the way the world, as triumphantly understood by quantum mechanics, works. Whether the platform is print, screen, VR, or other, all are conceived in the terms language gives us. Sometimes languages reach or probe to encompass a new environment, but to an amazing degree they slap older understanding onto a newly perceived phenomenon.

In How the Universe Is Made,2 is Astrolily a morph (the fifth quantum poetic feature in your essay)? Does the photographed sculpture echo the clover poem entitled ‘Invisible, Vision’? Does it help to focus on the singular aspect of your poetry and Brent’s sculpture at the same time?

Astrolily does not echo the poem ‘Invisible, Vision’ nor is it a morph (a slow surprising shift from one form to another), but it is a neurocognitive achievement of the kind that morphing can be, though not one necessarily based on quantum understanding. Brent Collins’s sculpture was done by hand and eye, free form, yet it follows perfectly a mathematical structure. Today someone would code it on a 3D printer. Today’s habits in fact dumb down such neurocognitive refinement, except perhaps in some forms of gameplay, as for instance by blind players, or those who play the games in reverse. There is no question that constant interaction with electronics affects brain structure and performance and could expand it, but today mostly does not.

‘IMAGES OF ASTROLILY COULD BE VIEWED AS A SPACE-CREATING deployment pattern… of unimaginably energized quantum flux trillions of a nanosecond’ (p. 222, Brent Collins, sculptor). It seems to me that slippingglimpse achieves this circulation of natural elements (chreods) combined with words and virtual images. Does slippingglimpse make us experiment the strange nature of the universe and the different realities behind quantum laws? Does it correspond for example to the laws of quantum mechanics with the superposition of different levels of experience?

The hands, eyes, and mind of Paul Ryan, photographer, videographer, and producer of the chreods videos, were unquestionably sensitive to molecular patterns, as were Brent Collins’s to the patterns he felt for and created in wood. They each find a kind of beauty that is mathematical without being a mathematical illustration. They find it deep founded in the world. slippingglimpse entangles the chreods with English text (in a ‘seaweedy’, drifting font). The chreod wave patterns act on, read these words, by laws other than those of human grammar. Quantum particles or states are in superposition until they are read or collapsed, at which point they emerge as a single state. Thus the slipping glimpse wave action of the chreod, ‘reading’ the text, is not a superposition. Undoubtedly, however, wave action of any kind is sensitive to quantum language and ‘reads’ that language as we cannot.

On your website, you explain that poetry in Dragon Logic (2013) creates ‘the semantic tunneling between apparent contradictions’. Does it mean poetry could resolve quantum paradoxes?

Tunneling between states does not remove either state, but depends on acknowledging the reality of both (or several). The key word I think is ‘apparent’. It is our job to resolve such appearance by either removing the sense of paradox or properly honoring it.

In The Iowa Web Review, you link Josiah Willard Gibbs’s scientific findings and Emily Dickinson’s linguistic inventiveness: ‘We have to make the kind of leaps that Gibbs and Dickinson did in their time. We need to renew our language in order to know and extend our values and visions’.3 Can you elaborate further on that? Does it mean that, parallel to quantum laws, poetry forces us to reconsider the nature of reality and make salutary quantum leaps?

Poetry can renew, it cannot force. One hundred years of quantum mechanics has upended our sciences and remade the world in its image. It is now a struggle to do anything outside an electronic realm. Ancient ways of doing are very nearly lost, as well as their respect for the entangled knowledge of entities such as trees and waves, whose language must indeed understand quantum reality beyond electronic devices. What is not renewed, as yet, is the non-technical language of our common tongue. It is poetry’s job to do that, just to keep up with physics as it has in the past. Beyond that, poetry has its own views of reality exceeding physics. The question remains whether a renewed language would be powerful enough to redirect physical understanding according to a different set of values, or whether we may face AI capture of huge swaths of the common tongue for commercial purpose.

‘5 (IMAGINARY NUMBERS)’4 seems to relate to mathematical beauty and the mystery of poetic creation. Does meaning emerge from the microscopic nature of things, be they poetically or mathematically apprehended? Does your work aim at reconciling the technology of lasers and the poetic symbolism of the moon?

Meaning can emerge from below or descend from above. How does Collins feel his form, find his ‘form’, or refine it? How does Ryan grasp chreods, how does he move beyond ‘capture’ to create them? Are there mathematical ‘bones’ to reality which artists can sense? We know languages change and diverge, including most certainly mathematical language. In the late twentieth century, there is a movement toward unifying logic, physics, ‘pure’ mathematics, and computation, each form of abstraction learning something from the others. Are there elements in language that emerge for the language-smitten (e.g. poets, or arguably AI large language models) which guide their work? Or are they simply workers in the matter of the world, as are we all?

Can we understand that quantum physics and mathematical precision enable to get back to the magical aura of the world using ambiguous metaphors, images or ambivalent abbreviated symbols (like ‘RE’ for rhenium, real or Re the Egyptian god)? Do subjective interpretations correspond to the hidden dimensions or variables the quantum world offers?

Jung and Dirac and Eckhart and Dickinson did not all proceed in the same way. To each, their own. Quantum entanglement is real. Locality is not well understood. How do we decide what is hidden – in motive, in physics, in language?

Does your poetry invite to reconsider the way we perceive the world by finding unexpected correspondences or resonances? Shall we search for a yotta in a iota, waves in particles, see a chemical element as an art object (a sphere of beryllium, for example)? Would it mean that poetry creates weird alternate realities? Or that we all perceive but a tiny fraction of reality?

All poetry with which we resonate invites us to reconsider. Most certainly the investigations of math and science are led on by a sense of beauty, truth, and reality, all variably understood. Most certainly we perceive but a tiny fraction.

In our current quantum understanding of the world, it seems that we are now more familiar with the microworld of particles, waves, molecules and light than the macro effects of the quantum world. Does your collection How the Universe Is Made strive to consider this lack? Will your next poetry collection target a further and wider exploration of the quantum world? How?

My next poetry collection engages a history of truth-telling, under the aegis of Simone Weil, in a space governed by quantum and algorithmic thinking, hugely inflected, as they are, by historic bias. Most especially, perhaps, understanding of time is shifted. The quantum world governs the macro as much as the micro: GPS, James Webb Space Telescope, global communication, our ability to hear gravity waves ‘sing’, and ongoingly.

Are you interested in the concept of quantum energy or flow? How do you transpose the experience in your poetry?

I’m interested in all flow and resonance. I understand the universe, at one scale, to be described by quantum mechanical effects, at another by mathematical equations, and at several others by patterns we don’t yet understand but perhaps glimpse in ritual. I recommend Mariam Thalos’s Without Hierarchy: The Scale Freedom of the Universe for a fresh view.

‘The Whole’5 focuses on polarisation; the way particles propagate or deviate. The poem seems to question the nature of reality we perceive: ‘Maybe / the real world we see / is a real projection of something / – complex: the solid / part of a table, one part, each quadrillion. And between these bullets? / Nothing / is less certain. The party of the hard part, the a-for-apple / real parts, halts and stops us: where and when;’. Does this mean that reading poetry is akin to experimenting quantum effects: reality as mystery infiltrates the gaps; there are uncontrollable trajectories, ‘possible lightpaths’ and necessary imperceptible interactions between objects, reader, poet and matter in and outside the poem?

I’m not sure ‘The Whole’ questions the ‘nature of reality we perceive’ as much as how we perceive, the wildly alternative interpretations we give, the frameworks we subscribe to, which often in various ways privilege those already empowered. People struggle to know and to speak, because much is imperceptible, outside the spectral range of the uninstrumented knower, but honestly who would imagine we could see black holes or the age of the universe by any means? You choose your path, of understanding or evasion or intuition or domination or poems…