Scientific American Reflects on Monthly Poetry Column, 'Meter'

At Scientific American Dava Sobel considers the first year of the magazine's monthly poetry column: "Meter," which Sobel edits. The column, writes Sobel, "debuted in January 2020, the start of Scientific American’s 175th anniversary year, with a poem by Diane Ackerman about 17th-century scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian." More: 

Diane first introduced me to scientific poetry in the 1970s, when I was science writer in the Cornell University News Bureau and she was a graduate student conferring daily with astronomy professor Carl Sagan to create a cycle of scientifically accurate poems about the solar system. Diane published her collection The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral in 1976, on the heels of her doctoral dissertation about scientific poetry over the centuries. It seemed fitting to invite her to serve as Meter’s inaugural poet.

The column presents one new (or at least, previously unpublished) poem per month. At the beginning I reached out to a few poets and poets’ friends, and within a short time the column’s existence motivated still more poets to submit their work for consideration. Meter’s first year of poems treated a gratifying variety of science fields, from mathematics and mycology to astronomy, geology, pathology, physics, chemistry and climate change. Meter poets to date include a Pulitzer Prize–winner in poetry, a Nobel Prize–winner in physics, and the current National Poet Laureate of the U.K. As many women as men have been featured, some well-known and some just becoming so.

Read on at Scientific American.