Slowing the Two Cultures continental drift. The humanities are drifting further and further away from the realities of science and technology.Their marginalization should worry us all. I survey the current state of affairs 50 years after CP Snow's talk, and suggest how poets should retool.

1. Poetry and Science
Slowing theTwo Cultures
Continental Drift

2. Premises

3. Why It Matters
• Metaphor and analogy drawn from
science and technology are a
powerful source of inspiration
• Poets – and poems – should be
part of conversations about the
role humans play in creating and
living in a technology-enabled
society

4. Two Cultures @ 50+
“Two polar groups: at one pole
we have the literary intellectuals,
at the other scientists,
and as the most representative,
the physical scientists.
Between the two
a gulf of mutual incomprehension.”

5. A Survey of Poets
We will survey selected poets (and a few
critics) who labored at The Intersection

6. William Blake on Newton
Blake's opposition to the Enlightenment was
deeply rooted. He wrote in his annotations to the
Laocoon "Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the
Tree of Death."[4] Newton's theory of optics was
especially offensive to Blake, who made a clear
distinction between the vision of the "vegetative
eye" and spiritual vision. The deistic view of God
as a distant creator who played no role in daily
affairs was anathema to Blake, who regularly
experienced spiritual visions. He opposes his
"four-fold vision" to the "single vision" of Newton,
whose "natural religion" of scientific materialism
he characterized as sterile. Newton was
incorporated into Blake's infernal trinity along
with the philosophers Francis Bacon and John
Locke.[5] Wikipedia

7. Heaven, Hell, Both or ?
Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell:
Now the sneaking serpent walks
In mild humility,
And the just man rages in the wilds
Where lions roam.

8. “Incompatible”
“The aim of science is to make difficult
things understandable in a simpler way; the
aim of poetry is to state simple things in an
incomprehensible way. The two are
incompatible.” –Paul Dirac, physicist

9. Jorge Luis Borges:
Poetry and Epistemology
". . Borges style combines, and
sometimes wisely jams, usually
incompatible genres. A deep philosopher
of poetry and poet of philosophy, Borges
presents each of his writings as an
ontological riddle.“ – U of Pittsburgh
Borges Center
Related: S. M. Wilkins, "The infinitely iterated labyrinth: Conceivability and Higher-
Order knowledge," Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 1,
no. 03, pp. 509-516, 2015. [Online]. Available:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/apa.2015.15

10. Aldous Huxley:
Literature and Science (1963)
““From purification of language on the level
of structural anatomy we pass to
purification on what may be called the
cellular and molecular levels of the
paragraph, sentence and phrase. Here, for
example, is Dickinson writing in “A Light
Exists in Spring” about one of Nature’s
mysterious apocalypses and the sense of
desolation that follows a moment of vision:
A color stands abroad
On solitary hills
That science cannot overtaken,
But human nature feels.

11. Czeslaw Milosz
“Epiphany is an unveiling of
reality. . . Epiphany interrupts
the everyday flow of time and
enters as one privileged
moment when we intuitively
grasp a deeper, more essential
reality hidden in things or
persons. A poem-epiphany tells
about one moment-event and
this imposes a certain form.”

12. Loren Eiseley
. . . Perhaps it is thus in the end
that the dead
Withdraw to the bitter sources of the Holy Land
And find comfort in sharp nails, harsh wood and a
crown
Thorn-woven for penitence. I make the analogy
dubiously
wondering why mankind and the desert
share this ultimate passion for thorns unless flesh
is always a thing to be raked.
- From: “The Cacti Are Neutral”

13. Stanislaw Lem
Come, let us hasten to a higher plane,
Where dyads tred the fairy fields of Venn,
Their indices bedecked from one to _n_,
Commingled in an endless Markov chain!
Come, every frustrum longs to be a cone,
And every vector dreams of matrices.
Hark to the gentle gradient of the breeze
It whispers of a more ergodic zone.
From “Cyberiad” in tr.

14. Frederick Turner
The Abundant Tree
I wake at anchor in this bird-flocked cove.
It’s sixty years since I was given to see
Dawn on Ascension Island turn to milk,
Rose, lemon, pastel, all that fresh-made sea.
Did Darwin feel that ancient human chill
Of strange delight, after so many shores?
–Or rediscover what the genes all knew
Already, in their many metaphors
Of multibranching cactus, portulaca,
In lineages of iguana, seal,
Great tortoise, finch, and sea lion barking there,
Each species-vision vying to be real?
What in the vision of that nine-year-old
That I was then, survived to catch me now?
What essence was it in the branched nerve-cells
Could live and breed so long, and if so, how?

15. Metaphor and Analogy
“Art and poetry were seen, not as
products of reason, but as ‘the
spontaneous overflow of powerful
feelings.’ The result of [the] Romantic
view was the alienation of the artist and
poet from mainstream society” (p. 192).
Their choice: An “Experientialist
Synthesis” in which subjectivity and
objectivity are not our only choices.
Metaphor is imaginative rationality.

16. Seven Exercises
for Tomorrow’s Intersectionists
1. Seven stunning visualizations from science
2. Seven forecasts about “the posthuman”
3. Seven hyperplanes where technology forces
objective and subjective to confront one another
4. Seven poetic theses science later undermined
5. Seven technology-enabled modalities for poetry
6. Seven implications for learning and applying the
craft of writing poetry
7. Seven weather events that could bridge the two
cultures

17. Mark Underwood
Mark Underwood is CEO of Krypton Brothers LLC, a
consultancy specializing in Big Data security, rapid
intranet exploitation, digital forensics, software quality,
ontologies and domain-specific frameworks. He is an
advocate for patient-managed health information.
Founder or co-founder of five technology startups, he
co-designed one of the earliest ambulatory care health
information systems (IATROS). Underwood is the
founder of PoetryandScience.org, TwoCultures.net and
PoetryandTechnology. He writes poetry and performs
as a multimedia (music / poetry) artist as DarkViolin.
His book chapter on intranets appears in Harnessing
Social Media as a Knowledge Management Tool,
published in July 2016.

18. Contact
Mark Underwood
mark.underwood@kryptonbrothers.com
7 Birchwood Ave
Port Washington NY 11050
516.234.0076