The project centers around the author's proposed visit to Palmer Station, which will serve as the location for obtaining the raw material to produce a series of poems--called Natural Curiosities--the purpose of which is to bring to readers a sense of the continent and its creatures as well as to represent and consider the mind at work on what it sees, in the acts of exploration and passionate thinking related to Antarctica.
The writer considers Palmer Station, with its remote and dramatic geographical setting, the length and nature of the journey required to get there, the richness of its animal life, and the nature of the research being conducted there, to be an ideal venue for the project.
The artist?s goal is to explore and to reveal the sense in which science, like all artifacts of culture and intelligence, is a fundamentally human endeavor, driven by the humanity and passion of its practitioners.
The author also hopes to contribute to the increase of scientific literacy by bringing the wonders of Antarctica and Palmer Long-term Ecologial Research project site there to as wide a public as possible, including especially the literary public, which generally that may see science and its practice as somehow alienating or off-limits.
The goal of this project was to travel to Palmer Station, Antarctica, to interact with the community there and experience the landscape and wildlife, and to write a collection of poems out of this experience. On November 25th, 2010, I embarked on the Lawrence M. Gould from Punta Arenas, Chile, arriving at Palmer Station on November 29th. For the next three weeks, I experienced station life and culture, going out onto the water with oceanographers and biologists studying everything from viruses to algae to bird populations. I assisted (in my inexpert way) in conducting experiments both in the field and in the lab. I also engaged enthusiastically with station culture, taking every opportunity to join in meals and social events, hikes on the glacier, and recreational boating (including wonderful whale- and bird-watching excursions). I also read early Antarctic explorers, including Shackleton, Amundsen, Scott, Cherry-Girard, and others. I engaged works by previous artists involved in the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, as well as numerous works on Antarctic biology, geology, etc. On station, I spent as much time as possible outside and/or with scientists and staff. I spent at least an hour a day writing, consolidating my impressions and generating first drafts of a number of poems. Unlike most scientists, I did not travel to Antarctica with a hypothesis, beyond a hope that, given sufficient preparation, I would find ways to express the place, in all its vastness, on the page What I found: that Antarctica is a better subject for poems even than I had expected. On the back of my forthcoming collection from the project, The Earth Is Not Flat, biologist James McClintock says, "I have always felt poetry is the only way to capture the essence of Antarctica." I believe this is correct, not, as many might think, because poetry is vague or squishy, but because it works through tremendous precision. It lends itself, therefore, to evocations of landscapes and perceptions that seem to be inexpressible, by finding the language that explores the shadowy territory between inner life and the very real external world the inner life is trying to accommodate. I began, then, with the place, and also with the observations of others who had experienced the place in a more scientific way. As I’d hoped, the science led me into the poems. When I was trying to figure out why Antarctica seemed so otherworldly, Shackleton and others explained to me about reflection, refraction, and mirage. An oceanographer talking about how he identifies viruses that are unlike any he’s seen before gave me a way to talk about the experience of being in such an unfamiliar place. A glossary assembled by a journalist of the names for different kinds of ice gave me a way to talk about the ineffable. And a mathematician talking about ice permeability provided the opportunity to meditate on different ways of using language to describe things that have never been described before. Station culture—especially the constantly innovative use of language among residents—gave me ways to think about how people live and thrive in such a remote environment. And, perhaps most amusingly, the formalities of requesting (the proposal) and reporting (the exit interview) allowed me to play again with the distance between a poetic and an administrative vocabulary as well as with the difference between what a poem and what an administrative document values. I also worked to find forms and modes of expression I hadn’t used before that arose as responses to the unique landscape and experience confronting me.
