Let me admit: I was an indifferent biology student many years ago. Not that I was indifferent to biology itself; I simply wasn't able to do nearly as well in bio classes as I was in, say, English or French or Latin or History or...well, you get the idea. I got Bs in 10th-grade bio when I took it in 11th grade. Because I took both French and Latin, my science classes got pushed one year back, so I consistently took science classes with fellow students both younger and better than I was at the subjects. Not that I retain any rancor about this, mind you, merely a sense of well-reinforced humility.
Indeed, in college I took freshman bio as my obligatory two-semester lab science sequence because I "wanted to learn about life." Unfortunately, freshman bio was the "gateway course" to weed out pre-med students who were not likely to make the grade, so I was in a class filled with cut-throat, would-be medical students. Boy, did I learn about life!
However, two of the students who have taken my Drexel creative writing course, one a biology major and one a biomedical engineering major, and who have channeled their biological awareness through poetic forms have delighted me with long and complex poems—I won’t vouch for the scientific validity of the information presented therein—on biological topics. One of them, Amber Rose Stiles, was studying hematology when I entered the class one day, and with great reluctance she put away her studies when I started the class. We were doing the pantoum, which is a form in which the second and fourth lines of one stanza become the first and third lines of the next stanza, and so on down the line.
To get the class inspired to write, I took them through a guided visualization. I had them close their eyes and relax parts of their body in sequence, breathing steadily, and then had them set to writing. Rose had the opposite reaction to the visualization than I had expected, because her mother is a meditator, and personal reactions to that activity set Rose's blood "boiling," as she put it. Here is her pantoum, obviously inflected by the hematology exam in the near future:
Vasoconstriction to Injury
Hemostasis is a blood clotting party,
Platelets aggregate, the guests
Exposed Tissue and Collagen acting smartly,
At a sick, injured pad, platelets collaborate best.
Many platelets aggregate, they are the guests
They signal their friends, inviting more platelets
At a sick, injured party pad platelets collaborate best
Factors III and VII most definitely won't be late!
Local signals inviting more platelets
Fashionably late is Coagulation Cascade
Factors III and VII will not be late
Big T Thrombin showed up, now the party is made!
Fashionably late was Cascade Coagulation,
And he got in a tangle with Thrombin for sure
Big T Thrombin showed up, ready for confrontation
They tried to take it outside, but got stuck in the door!
Coagulation pissed off Thrombin for sure,
Fibrinogen, a skinny bloke, can't resist a fight.
The Coag-Thrombin mess was stuck in the door
Fibrinogen added his two cents, Big T socked him right.
Fibrinogen, a scrawny guy, couldn't resist the fight
He rubbed his face, swollen it was
He had added his two cents and got socked right
Fibrinogen started to feel funny because
He rubbed his face, swollen it was
A pretty girl sat down, asked, "What's your name?"
Fibrinogen started to feel funny because
His mouth was swollen, his speech was lame.
"What is your name?" The pretty girl asked.
"Fibrin" came out with a slue of drool
His mouth was swollen, he wiped the drool fast
Her touch, affectionate, her hands cool
"Fibrin," he thought, slobbering drool,
"I'm Plasmin," she said, "let me get you some ice!"
Her touch affectionate, her hands felt cool,
The ice felt good, and she was so nice!
Plasmin fetched Fibrin a bag of ice
And sat with him until the swelling went down
The ice felt good, and she was so nice!
A healing relationship, he may have found.
Somehow, it makes me feel like my body is a focal point for constant celebration, with this portrayal of the circulatory system as an ongoing party!
Sravanthi Dama, a biology major, responded to my assignment to write an ode, which I described as "an address to something or someone that/who either will not or cannot respond," with another kind of inward gaze:
Ode to My Liver
Oh liver, you poor bulbous mass
Of brown and pale green.
You sleep in my body
Resting next to my engorged tummy,
Full of the slimy green bile
That keeps us alive.
You are always neglected
By the writers of today
They choose to wax poetically
Over hearts instead.
But liver, you are our unsung hero.
You are scarred
As much as I am full of lard.
Every time I ate my feelings
Be it, in vats of ice-cream
Or bouts of incessant drinking,
Your bile salts went to work tirelessly
Broke down every bit
Of garbage that I consumed, fearlessly.
And after all of that!
You went and did the unthinkable
Filtered my blood!
Without my asking.
Our precious little cardiac sacs
Would NEVER
Deal with all our high-fat snacks.
Its delicate little arteries
Would get clogged up.
And then what would we be left with?
A godforsaken heart attack!
But liver, you will never let me down.
The only organ that I
Will forever count on.
Crusader for clean blood.
Marauder of fats and crud.
Liver, you understand my agony
In all its totality.
Full of impalpable stoicism.
Functional til the end.
Liver, you truly are
A girl’s best friend
This poem, by the way, won first place in the Week of Writing contest, sponsored by the Department of English and Philosophy this past March! Rose and Sravanthi join a long and distinguished tradition of science poets, starting at least as early as Hesiod, insofar as his descriptions of the creation and evolution of the universe can be considered science. The science connection continues through Lucretius’ De rerum natura, or "Concerning the Nature of Things," in ancient Rome, medieval bestiaries, lapidaries, and herbals; even Erasmus Darwin’s Temple of Nature, published posthumously in 1803, which anticipated Erasmus’s grandson Charles Darwin’s exposition of a theory of evolution in heroic couplets, combines the natures of science and literature. Who knows, perhaps such compositions will even help me fill in my biological lacunae.
Don Riggs studied myth as an undergraduate, the Middle Ages as a grad student (MA, PhD, UNC-Chapel Hill), taught French on the college level, worked as a massage therapist in a holistic health center, and has been teaching English in various places for the last decade and a half.