Poet recounts time with scientists in Antarctica
Not only was Katharine Coles willing to write poems about science, she traveled to Antarctica to observe scientists in one of their most exotic habitats, Coles said.
Coles, a former Utah poet laureate, spoke on fostering understanding between science and art disciplines in an address to the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters at the academy’s annual conference Friday, held at USU’s Eccles Conference Center.
“I am not a scientist – I don’t pretend to be a scientist,” Coles said to the crowd of scientific and arts researchers, before she read poems written during an expedition to Antarctica with the National Science Foundation as a poet in residence.
Coles said she drew from her experience traveling with scientists among research stations and observing the frozen world to write a book of poetry entitled Reckless.
She often felt like an object of scientific observation during the journey, Coles said, and she described sitting next to an oceanographer on a bus through Chile on the way to their ship.
“He was the first of many people who said, ‘Oh, you’re the poet,'” Coles said.
Coles said she wrote a proposal to the National Science Foundation, asking it to send her to the world’s least-inhabited continent. Such a proposal is different for a poet than it is for a scientist, she said.
“It’s another matter entirely to pitch yourself as a poet or photographer or painter to a group mostly comprising of scientists – to persuade them they should send you down to Antarctica to hang out with the scientists there,” Coles said.
Her proposal to the NSF was not in poetic form, but Coles said she later wrote a poetic version in which she wrote symbolically about feeding animals out of the palm of her hand. Coles said in reality, treaties forbid feeding the animals in Antarctica.
After her lecture, an audience member asked Coles, “What creatures did you feed?”
“I fed no real creatures, but the creatures I was feeding in the proposal were the ones on the edge of the old maps where they say ‘There be monsters,'” Coles said. “You’re not allowed to feed the creatures, and I was quite obedient to the treaty.”
When people heard about Coles’ planned trip to Antarctica, she said she discovered there are two kinds of people in the world: “The kind of person that says, ‘Oh, that’s a wonderful thing. I’m jealous, I would love to go with her,’ and the kind of person who says, ‘Of course I support her, but is she out of her mind?'”
Made possible by a grant from the NSF’s Antarctic Artists and Writers Program, Coles sailed to Antarctica in 2010. To get there, the boat crossed the Drake Passage, which Coles said is a rough passage because it is where the Pacific and Atlantic oceans meet.
“This is the best thing ever,” she read from her poem “Sailing to Antarctica,” attributing her stomach of steel to spending summers riding in the back of her father’s Jeep.
Coles talked about the differences between poets and scientists. A poet tries to find one word that could mean many things, and a scientist uses a word with the intent that it can mean only one thing, she said.
However, her goal in Antarctica was also to describe what she saw for the rest of the world, even if she had to be careful in what she said to comply with international rules and treaties, Coles said.
Visitors to Terra Lab – one of the places Coles visited – have to gain security clearance and sign a waiver saying they won’t reveal any secrets about the instruments housed there, Coles said.
She wrote a poem about the instruments being able to hear lightning strikes and tell when a nuclear bomb goes off anywhere in the world. The lab has highly sensitive machines measuring weather, seismic and other phenomena, she said.
“This, I believe I’m allowed to tell you. I’m not allowed to show you how it’s done,” she read from the poem about her visit.
The academy presented Coles with the John and Olga Gardner Prize in the Humanities at the conference. Erin O’Brien, the academy’s president-elect, introduced Coles to the group.
“(Coles) is the epitome of the interdisciplinary nature of the Utah Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters,” O’Brien said.
Academy President Nichole Ortega said the academy creates an environment of support and mutual understanding.
“The Utah Academy promotes distribution of knowledge across all disciplines, allowing members to strengthen their academic scholarship and individual roles in society,” Ortega said.
– la.stewart@aggiemail.usu.edu