POETRY AND EVOLUTION: "THE MUSIC OF WHAT HAPPENS"

Presentation by

Dr. Dorothy Sutton and Dr. Joe Pellegrino, Department of English, EKU

as part of

Eastern Kentucky University Chautauqua Lecture Series
with Lynn Margulis, Michael Ruse, Jared Diamond, and others
CONTEMPLATING AN ENTANGLED BANK: PERSPECTIVES ON THE IDEA OF EVOLUTION

15 February 2001 7:30 p.m.

Grand Reading Room, EKU Library, Richmond, KY

PROGRAM OUTLINE [see complete text below]

I. INTRODUCTION: FILM CLIP AND HOW ARTS AND SCIENCES ARE RELATED

A. (1) Film clip morphing ¼ billion years human skull evolving from reptile-like ancestor,
         Created by Richard Dawkins & Lalla Ward: science, art, philosophy, literature, music.
     (2) "From Far, From Eve & Morning" from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad
B. (1) Evolution and poetry are both the music of what happens
     (2) How poetry and science are related: Poets and scientists both splendid observers
    Dorothy Sutton's poem "Arts & Sciences: Finding Design"
    from John Keats's "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer": ("Then felt I like some
                              watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken"
    William Blake's "To See the World in a Grain of Sand"
    Dorothy Sutton's poem "Fossilized Feces"

II. Dorothy Sutton's eight DARWIN POEMS, some brief introductions and explanations

III. OTHER POEMS & POETIC PROSE SPECIFIC TO EVOLUTION
     Charles Darwin, Origin of Species, first edition ("Entangled Bank" section)
     Philip Appleman, editor of Norton Critical Edition, Darwin , poem "Darwin's Ark"
     Tennyson, excerpt from In Memoriam: "Nature red in tooth and claw" (pain) and
    "And Nature finds of fifty seeds / She often brings but one to bear" (waste)
   Whitman "Song of Myself" [Whitman, Tennyson both writing before publication of Origin]
    Richard Taylor's "Charles Darwin Addresses Meeting Kentucky Genealogical Society"
    Pat Boran of Ireland "Fish People"

IV. POEMS & POETIC PROSE ABOUT NATURE IN GENERAL (we evolved from nature, will return to it (behooves us to treat environment with respect). Our close relationship to the universe in general, to plants and other animals in particular; Special kindness to our fellow animals (including humans!) because of our kinship and common circumstance, the pain and brevity of life. ("Speak now and I will answer / How shall I help you, say")
Richard Dawkins, from Unweaving the Rainbow (science presented in poetic prose)
President of EKU Robert Kustra reading Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese"
Pierre Teilhard deChardin "Hymn to Matter"
Theodore Roethke, 4 short poems: "Cuttings" I and II; "River Incident"; "The Minimal"
Dorothy Sutton's poems: "Prometheus Among the Leaves"; "We Come In From the Stars"
from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Act III, scene ii
Sutton poem "These My Kissin' Cousin Kin"
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EVOLUTION: THE MUSIC OF WHAT HAPPENS  [text by Dorothy Sutton]

I. INTRODUCTION
   Morphing Sequence film clip with Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra" :
Richard Dawkins, evolutionary biologist at Oxford, chose these skulls from real fossils, his artist wife Lalla Ward drew them, and he created this morphing skulls sequence. They were kind enough to send it to me especially for this presentation here at EKU tonight. In his words, "The film covers about a quarter of a billion years of the 'evolution' of the human skull from a mammal-like reptile ancestor." Our thanks to biologist James Wagner from Transy and to Chris Kidd here at EKU, for helping me bring these skulls to life. If you want a few more details that Dawkins included, I'll be happy to share that during the question period afterwards.

We began with the opening chords of Richard Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," because it's the theme music for the movie 2001 (fitting for a 2001 presentation!), but also to show a correlation between Science and the Arts (the ART of the drawings, the PHILOSOPHY and the POETIC LITERATURE of Nietzsche, and Strauss's SYMPHONY, which he called an attempt "to convey in music an idea of the EVOLUTION OF THE HUMAN RACE."

Dot and Joe, responsive reading:

"From far, from eve and morning
And yon twelve-winded sky,
The stuff of life to knit me
Blew hither: here am I
Now - for a breath I tarry
Nor yet disperse apart -
Take my hand quick and tell me,
What have you in your heart.
Speak now, and I will answer;
How shall I help you, say;
Ere to the wind's twelve quarters
I take my endless way."

That was an excerpt from A. E. Housman's "A Shropshire Lad" written in the 1890's. He didn't know that the stuff of life to knit us might have literally blown in from the twelve-winded sky. But this article in yesterday's paper says, "Life on earth might have been kick-started billions of years ago when organic compounds landed on this planet aboard comets, meteorites and interplanetary dust." What's most important about the poem, however, is that he has us helping each other the brief time while we're here. It shows the human response, what we add on to our scientific knowledge.

The title of our presentation, "The Music of What Happens," is the title of one of Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney's books of poetry. He took the phrase from an ancient Irish description of poetry - "Poetry is the music of what happens." We want to show tonight that poetry AND evolution are BOTH the music of what happens, and we want to show the close relationship between poetry and science.  Scientists and writers have in common their close observation of detail to see what the world has to tell us. Both start with sight. And both use the imagination to go beyond that to insights, putting ideas together, illumination.
My poem, "ARTS AND SCIENCES: FINDING DESIGNS," deals with the many qualities the arts and sciences have in common and in the third stanza, I've incorporated, with Richard Dawkins' permission two lines from his book, Unweaving the Rainbow.

The art of science, the science of art:
both to perceive and to mastermind
these scattered patterns we call design.
Mapping the paths we've traveled thus far
to see how they converge on this spot.

Seeing ways to say it back
in a splendid rendering of the natural world.
Heightened sensitivity,
detecting connections, solving problems,
coruscating beams of music

to keep us in tune with the universe.
Constant decoding of signs, insight,
mind's eye dilated to such a point,
we see more than we've ever seen.
Dappled patterns on the woodland floor
reflected in the pelage of a fawn.

The poet, the scientist, the artist
conditioned to expect more.
Everyday life a deep study,
developing relationships.
Lives bent towards exploration,

seeking to meet in that medium where
disparate ideas intersect
in graphic collusion. Collision, a spark.
Message of precedent, beauty of new
that had not struck our minds before.

When John Keats first read Homer's great Iliad and Odyssey poems, he had exactly the same reaction that scientists have on making a great discovery in nature. Two lines from his poem, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer," reveal this common response of scientists and poets.
"Then felt I as some watcher of the skies
When some new planet swims into his ken."

And William Blake, late 18th , early 19th century visionary, poet, and artist felt the same
   way:
"To see the world in a grain of sand,
Heaven in a wild flower,
To hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour."

PELLEGRINO: Dot wrote this next poem, FOSSILIZED FECES, from the point of view of an anthropologist, so we have science and poetry together again. Another way it relates closely to us is that the setting is Mammoth Cave, right here in Kentucky.

We lay our hands on American Indian
bones they slipped away from
in Mammoth Cave 8000 years
ago, trace footprints left in mud
before the building of the pyramids,
in this oldest of my Old Kentucky homes.
* * * *
We shift from 6000 B.C.E.
to a later time, the moment we spy
slippers of woven grass, poke
desiccated feces offered
warm and steaming that long ago morning
(the temperature constant at 52)
by these long-ago peoples choosing
this place, hallowing this ground
500 years before Christ was born,
venturing fearless into the deep
bowels of the cave, lighting
with wooden torches, a sheltered place
to perform their own mysterious rites.

Delving into what they've left
from within themselves, we sift to find
maygrass and seeds they'd cultivated.
We study this early evidence
of moving from hunter gatherer
to scratching in fields of dirt, much
earlier than we'd thought, wresting
with elegance their food from the earth.
We call it archeology,
this laying, like poets, our hands on the past
to make it speak in present tense.

SUTTON: Scientists, like poets, lay hands on the past to make it speak in present tense.

II. Dorothy Sutton's eight DARWIN POEMS

PELLEGRINO: Dorothy has put science and poetry together in the eight Darwin poems of her chapbook Startling Art: Darwin and Matisse . In the "Foreword," Guy Davenport speaks of Darwin the scientist, Matisse the visual artist, and Sutton the poet who brings them together. All three are visionaries who see anew what was there to be seen all along.

"Poets and artists and scientists are interested in everything," Davenport says, "and that interest comes alive in sensual response, not a diffuse and general emotion, but its opposite, scientific observation. Darwin had a mind as exact, and as exacting, as Leonardo's. He observed with an exactitude and diligence that amounted to a sensual obsession.
   Every Matisse painting evolved through version after version. So did nature, Darwin showed us. Instead of being appalled by Evolution, Darwin's first readers should have REJOICED that creation, far from being finished on the first Saturday, is still going on like a house afire."

Sutton: I've dedicated this sonnet, NATURAL DISASTERS, to Charles Darwin 1809-1882 because it's from his point of view, starting with his mother's death when little Charles was just eight. He was just 16 when he went off to medical school, and there was no anesthesia for surgery. He was 22 when he set off on the voyage of The Beagle, and he saw the devastating aftermath of the Concepción earthquake. But far and away the worst thing that ever happened to him was the death of his little ten-year-old daughter, Annie, whom he practically worshiped for her effervescent, radiant generosity of spirit.

My eight-year's heart broken, eyes overwhelmed,
the beauty, wonder, and awe of that terrible scene:
Mother laid out like that in her black velvet gown.
We children never spoke of her again.
Off to Edinburgh Medical School at sixteen,
before anesthesia; buckets of sawdust caught blood.
I ran from surgery, a strapped-down child's screams
echoing later through earthquakes in Concepción mud.
The sun went out with my Annie's death at ten,
the final vote of this lethal legislature
of natural disasters. The world, then,
neither moral nor just: almost as if nature
cared enough to plant the evidence there
to let me know that nature does not care.

Pellegrino: Dorothy was inspired to write these poems when she read Adrian Desmond and James Moore's fine biography, Darwin the Life of a Tormented Evolutionist. She got many of her facts about Darwin's life from that book.

Sutton: As you know, it was in medical school and from an old taxidermist there in Edinburgh that Darwin learned anatomy, and how to preserve specimens, crafts that proved so useful later on his voyage, in shipping specimens back to England.

BUZZARDS CIRCLE THE OLD CHURCHYARD

Edinburgh, 1826
Darwin and brother Erasmus
meet John James Audubon, there to enlist
subscribers for Birds of America.
Black wings of fear hover in the air:
the man in the street might come to embrace
the notion that human beings evolved
independent of Supernatural Source,
cracking the Church's One Foundation
to leave it in ruins. If people think
of themselves as animals, they'll act that way.
Civilization so long in building,
they whisper, reverting to savagery.
Audubon tosses his long black hair
back over his shoulder, explains, as he roughs
out the buzzard on the drawing board,
to the students here for medical school
the intricate steps of preserving a carcass
to capture on canvas each exact detail.

Pellegrino: And Dorothy wrote this poem about the voyage itself:
MODERN ODYSSEY
It was settled then.
I would be a minister,
journey to find the Holy Places
in the far reaches of the earth.
I'd go by ship, my hammock slung
over the oak chart table,
the skylight just inches above my nose.
Removing a drawer to make room for my feet.

Later you ask how my six-foot frame
could endure five years in the cramped, shared space
of that Beagle cabin, eleven by ten,
the ceiling not even six feet high.

But I had found a blessed place,
a calling, a way to spend my time
(though sometimes sick in nauseous gloom)
reading the thick geology books
I'd brought along. Near the light I was,
and could peruse earth's history
or reconstruct lectures from science class,
finding causations, connections which seemed
Divinely inspired. That was the room
I withdrew to, this long lonely while,
confined to the silent, solemn, secret,
sacred spaces of the mind.

Sutton: I want to read my next poem directly out of the new Norton Critical Edition: Darwin, just released, because I'm so happy to be in this wonderful book. I highly recommend this book [hold up to audience], quite apart from my poem, for the excellent essays on every conceivable aspect of Darwin. When I say Darwin loses his faith here, I'm talking about his childhood faith in miracles, and myths, and superstitions. He never lost his faith in life itself, continued to make tremendously exciting discoveries about it all his life.

DARWIN'S SCOPE
To get it right, he had to become an actor,
create the illusion that this event glistened
unfolding now for the first time. He had to
listen to the other actors, listen
to the world's voices as if he had never heard
what they had to say. He saw all the way to the end
and beyond. Beneath, around the secret words,
past the scope of where we'd gone before, transcended
mystery and wonder to what was more awesome still:
the way the earth came into being, facts,
conclusions he did not want to know, revealed.
Fossils from an earlier life. He packed
and sent them home to England, crate after crate,
what would become the bones of his childhood faith.

Pellegrino: We mentioned earlier Scientists and poets have in common their close observation of detail. Poetry goes on to deal with human responses to the world, joys and sorrows, creation of belief systems, things that cannot be put under a microscope. Here's one of Dot's Darwin sonnets that captures that feeling:

IN SEARCH OF EARTH SOMEWHERE
Not a difficult task for him to do,
this matter of planting bulbs upside down,
watching with detached, clinical certitude
as wretched root-tips twisted towards the ground
in search of earth somewhere. Not hard to deprive
the plants of sleep by tying exhausted leaves
open, observing how long it took them to die.
Easy to measure, calculate, record these
facts. While ten-year-old Annie writhes
in his mind, dying helpless in pain.
Feelings blooming beyond his control, shying
away from being measured or tied down,
resisting what he has trained them to do, incapable
of being catalogued in a scientific way.

Sutton: Down House, Darwin's home, is near the little town of Downe, in Kent., 15 miles Southeast of London. In this next poem, I allow myself to have a dialogue with the dear old man there. Did I tell you I've fallen totally, irrevocably in love with this man, for his honesty and his bravery? I can tell you that because yesterday was Valentine's day, and Monday, 12 February, is Darwin's birthday. This presentation had to be on a Thursday, so we chose Thursday nearest Darwin's birthday. Joe reads the Darwin part of this poem, DIALOGUE AT DOWN:

DARWIN: God knows I didn't want to make a fuss.
I like myself--truly--but still I have
a deep down need somewhere for someone else
to like me too. The worst that can be said
for people like us, I guess, is that we're willing
to make a fool of ourselves in the name of the word--
the honest word--perhaps it's also the best?
ME: Questioning, redefining the nature of God,
still you would not speak publicly of your belief
or violently assail another's faith.
"People believe what they must," you said.
You embraced the phases of the world with such fervor.
Needing a heat like that to help me hold on,
I could turn and live in your yearning glow forever,
some grace to make us large and dark and strong
and brave enough to face the grueling test,
bracing ourselves for the stark departure
of every angel we had ever known.

Darwin was ill all of his adult life. Sometimes he couldn't work for days at a time. And he had that tension of trying to fit his unorthodox ideas into an orthodox society.

DESCENT OF MAN
Jesus they say spent thirty hours
hanging in anguish upon a cross.
For Darwin it was thirty years.

Towards the end of his long life,
Towards the end of each long day,
he shuffled from his upstairs study,
descending several times the stairs
to his new drawing room to see
if the clock ticked any faster there.

I laughed aloud when I read this in the biography. It's such a human thing. I have to say that my husband & I are getting so old, we do the same thing - look all over for a clock that will tell us it's time to go to bed!

Joe: Darwin brought up the big questions. What is the purpose of the universe, if any? What is the purpose of human life, if any? What is the place of humans in the world? We're still struggling with those questions.

Dot: Especially if you were brought up rural Southern Baptist in Kentucky, as I was. Much of it was good and reasonable, but during revivals, I heard many hellfire and damnation sermons, and no one mentioned that the Old Testament is myth and metaphor. I never once heard the name Darwin or the word evolution mentioned in all my high school years. So it was deeply unsettling for me to go off to college and learn the facts about the world. I must tell you that we poets are really writing about ourselves when we write about others. Flaubert said, "Madame Bovary, c'est moi." Regarding these poems, I would say, "Charles Darwin, c'est moi," and you will see it again in this next poem I wrote about him:

Joe: The last of Dot's Darwin poems, THE GREAT WAR: A Christian Ponders His Legacy:
Weary of struggle,
we try to understand
the strange hunger lingering
after we've grown beyond.

Doubting Thomas
the only disciple
we have no doubts about.
And yet . . . and yet . . .
Darwin mourned
for it crushed beneath
centuries of rock and debris.
Nietzsche declared it dead
but it wouldn't die.
The Great War smothered
it in tons of mud.
What was left evaporated
one morning in the furnace
of a desert in New Mexico.
But the lions in that den
where all of it had been
are still very real to me.

Dot: Fortunately, I'm no longer afraid. Unfortunately, learning about evolution was more difficult for me than it was for Darwin! The society he grew up in was generally more tolerant of new ideas than the one I grew up in 100 years later. May I say thank you to all you current science teachers for not condescending to your students? I wish someone had had that kind of respect for me when I was young. Thank you Kentucky scientists who are here tonight for believing that we Kentuckians, even when we're young, are quite capable of understanding evolution and all of its implications. It would have saved me much anguish of spirit if I could have heard the truth about science from the very beginning. PLEASE don't let the state legislators take the word "evolution" out of our science curriculum as they are trying to do!
==================================================================
III. OTHER POEMS & POETIC PROSE SPECIFIC TO EVOLUTION

Joe: Darwin is the first author we want to read from in this next section of poetry and prose about evolution. The last paragraph of Darwin's "Origin of Species" (first ed.) ends with these wonderfully poetic lines.
It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank,
clothed with many plants of many kinds,
with birds singing on the bushes,
with various insects flitting about,
and with worms crawling through the damp earth,
and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms,
so different from each other,
and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,
have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Dot: There is grandeur in this view of life . . .
that whilst this planet has gone cycling on
according to the fixed law of gravity,
from so simple a beginning,
endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful
have been, and are being, evolved..

Dot: And now a poem by Philip Appleman, editor of Norton Critical Edition: Darwin. This new edition, just out, has essays by Richard Dawkins, Steven Jay Gould, Steven Pinker (doing such wonderful work with the brain up at MIT), Daniel Dennett, and Michael Ruse (who spoke in this series last month), among many others.

from Philip Appleman's poem,"Darwin's Ark":
The fact is, I know those ancestors
floating through my sleep:
an animal that breathed water,
had a great swimming tail,
an imperfect skull, undoubtedly
hermaphrodite . . . I slide
through all the oceans with these kin,
salt water pulsing in my veins,
and aeons follow me into the trees:
a hairy, tailed quadruped,
arboreal in its habits, scales
slipping off my flanks . . . .
I have sailed the ancients seas to come
to the bones of Megatherium. . . .
The thing I want to father most
is the rarest, most difficult thing of all.
Though knee-deep in these rivers of innocent blood,
I want to be - a decent animal.

Important to note here the belief that all scientists have: We are heavily influenced by our animal instincts, but we are not totally at their mercy. Most of us have choices, and can choose discipline and control. Most of the time we can think rationally, and can choose to be "decent animals."
Alfred, LordTennyson wrote these next two lines in the 1840's, (pub 1850) before Darwin published Origin of Species in 1859, which shows that the ideas of evolution were in the air, that people were bothered very much by the idea of natural selection. Probably the most often quoted lines of literature used to describe natural selection are these dealing with the pain: "Nature red in tooth and claw" and these dealing with the waste of it: "And Nature finds of fifty seeds / She often brings but one to bear."
Interesting to note that Tennyson was born in 1809, the same year as Darwin. Walt Whitman was born ten years later. Section 44 of his poem "Song of Myself" also deals closely with the idea of evolution, very much in the air at the time. He published it 1855, four years before Origin of Species. It's full of mid-19th century American optimism & the belief most people held at the time: that evolution actually has a purpose: to create wonderful you and me and Walt Whitman, the apex of evolution! In spite of a few scientific inaccuracies, it has some rather amazing insights, such as that the stuff of life to build us was inherent in nature from the very beginning.

I am an acme of things accomplish'd, and I an encloser of things to be.
My feet strike an apex of the apices of the stairs,
On every step bunches of ages, and larger bunches between the steps,
All below duly travel'd, and still I mount and mount. (It's really about the ascent of man, rather than the descent, isn't it?!)

Afar down I see the huge first Nothing, I know I was even there,
I waited unseen and always, and slept through the lethargic mist,
And took my time....Immense have been the preparations for me....
Before I was born out of my mother, generations guided me,
My embryo has never been torpid, nothing could overlay it ....

The long slow strata piled to rest it on,
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and deposited it with care.

All forces have been steadily employ'd to complete and delight me,
Now on this spot I stand with my robust soul.

Now a poem by Richard Taylor, Teacher at Kentucky State, and Poet Laureate of Kentucky: CHARLES DARWIN ADDRESSES A MEETING OF THE KENTUCKY GENEALOGICAL SOCIETY

Take, for a moment, the long view -
before Jamestown, before Lascaux.
Visualize the descent of species
as a pond in which the generations
brew, a protozoan burgoo
simmering in the primal muck
that all of us call home.

Among the algae beds
in that dim lab, our first selves
rub shoulders with randy cousins,
swap essences with genetic duds -
doomed oddities
that just don't have a prayer.
The great ascent begins when some dingy hero,
some nameless also-ran,
sprouts bladders and rises.

Now fathom what the species has
come to. Examine the cipher of prints
here on these mudflats by the pond:
first, the usual slithering texts,
then birds and snappers,
finally, a bandit-faced raccoon, claws
dainty as lace in their precision,
the palm where it presses
a perfect template for the human hand.

Dot: And from one of the best poets writing in Ireland today, Pat Boran. He's become a dear friend of mine, and I got to hear him read this wonderful poem last time I was in Dublin.

SONG OF THE FISH PEOPLE
Give us legs and arms
to run and fight and kill,
then give us other skills
to plant and farm.

Give us warm blood
to feel the variations
of temperature, the patience
to untangle bad from good

while the known world spins,
and give us the desire
to create, and the fire
to destroy. And take the fins.

But leave us always tears
that we may not forget
the salty depths
of our formative years.
===============================================================

IV. POEMS & POETIC PROSE ABOUT NATURE IN GENERAL

In this fourth and last part of our program, we deal POEMS & POETIC PROSE ABOUT NATURE IN GENERAL. We evolved from nature, will return to it. This close relationship behooves us to treat the environment with respect. Isn't it wonderful to know that we share DNA with both plants and animals! Poets call for kindness to our fellow animals (including humans!) because of our kinship and common circumstance, the pain and brevity of life. To quote again from the Housman poem we started with: "Speak now and I will answer / How shall I help you, say / e're to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way."
Richard Dawkins, whose field is evolutionary theory, occupies the Charles Simonyi Chair of Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Here are a few words from his latest book, the beautifully poetic Unweaving the Rainbow:
"After sleeping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at UNDERSTANDING the universe and HOW we have come to wake up in it? . . . Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?"

President of Eastern Kentucky University Bob Kustra is a big fan of Mary Oliver, a Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. Her favorite theme is nature. Bob has kindly consented to read Mary Oliver's poem, "Wild Geese":

Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun
and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting - over and over
announcing your place in the family of things.

Theodore Roethke grew up playing in and around his father's greenhouses in Saginaw, Michigan, where he began his intense scrutiny of nature.  This poem, written in 1948, reveals his identification with evolution:

"River Incident"

A shell arched up under my toes,
Stirred up a whirl of silt
That riffled around my knees.
Whatever I owed to time
Slowed in my human form;
Sea water stood in my veins,
The elements I kept warm
Crumbled and flowed away,
And I knew I had been there before,
In that cold, granitic slime,
In the dark, in the rolling water.

Dot: I had already written this poem, "PROMETHEUS AMONG THE LEAVES," about the coal mining state of Kentucky, when I read in Dawkins' book, Unweaving the Rainbow, of his wish that D.H. Lawrence had written a poem about growing up in the coal mining section of England. So I dedicated the poem to Dawkins. I wanted to capture the scientific life cycle of heat stored in the leaf, then as coal, and then released as heat again.

Another Prometheus steals light from the sun,
processes it along the assembly line
of his own factory, into food.
Eventually dies, drops to the ground.
Pressed into service, this carboniferous fern
lies buried in swamps for millenniums.
In the world's musty cellar, put on hold,
squeezed into peat, and (if it can
hang around long enough) into coal.

We poke him into life again,
Kentucky coal to keep us warm,
burning in the fireplace grate.
Sparks splendiferous turned to song,
in this farmhouse where I was born.
Releasing the energy, recreating the heat
that Prometheus among the leaves
stole so long before from the sun.

Joe: Dot read in one of her science magazines that "every atom in the human body was
at one time processed by a star," so naturally she wrote a poem about it. "WE COME IN FROM THE STARS":
Life emerging from heat vents,
deep beneath the sea? Or
before that, from a larger charge?
A sexy lark, a blast wave
from an ancient exploding star
bullet-streaked across the heavens
at more than three million miles an hour,
to startle and hurtle us forward toward
these complex matters of the heart.
Smashed into a pocket of gas,
heating it to a fiery glow.

These shock waves racing the universe
distributed elements that made heavenly
and earthly bodies - the planets and us.
She birthed a nurseryful of stars.
Fusion of hydrogen and helium,
heat and light, self luminous.
The star burns, creates new elements
through nuclear synthesis, pressure and heat,

enriching the gas already there
with heavier elements: nickel, copper,
zinc and lead, the raw materials
from which we're made. The iron particles
that build our bridges and our blood.
Our nourishing mother, the universe:
Every atom in the human body
at one time processed by a star.

Dot: When planetary geologist Eugene Shoemaker (of Shoemaker / Levy fame) was killed in a car accident in Australia a couple of years ago, astronomer Carolyn Porco of U. of Arizona, arranged that this brief excerpt from Juliet's speech in "Romeo and Juliet" would be sent into space with his ashes. Another science / literary connection.
". . . . and when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun."

Joe: We end our program tonight with another of Dot's poems, this one celebrating our close kinship with all creation, that there is less than 1% difference in DNA between all the peoples of the world, less than 2% difference between humans and chimps, and so on down the animal chain; and that we even share DNA with plants. This last poem is called "THESE MY KISSIN' COUSIN KIN":

Open the family scrapbook to find
DNA as paradigm
shaping our place in the scheme of things,
tracing back the trail we've come,

sibling to humans all over the globe,
and to all humans down through time:
Black, pale, ruddy, brown. . .
including Jesus and Attila the Hun.

First cousin to our simian friends.
Second cousin to reptiles and birds,
insects, spiders, fish, and worms.
Third cousin to plants and fungi,

protozoan, bacterium.
"Kissin' cousins" was the term
we used for these more distant ones.
We gather around Thanksgiving table

of elements we descended from,
these my kissin' cousin kin,
this our extended family,
extending further than we'd ever dreamed.