Synthetic form and deviant transcendence: interfaces between 21st c. poetry & science; & In the crocodile gardens: poems|诗歌创作数据集|科学与文学数据集

""Synthetic Form & Deviant Transcendence: Interfaces Between Science & 21st Century Poetry"" is a collection of essays on contemporary writers whose particular engagement with science in their poems transcends the topical or superficial approach. This trend toward the structural use of science, in radically artificial ways, has created poems that enact synthetic rather than organic experiences by cleaving form from content, appealing to a hyperdimensional sensibility encouraged by the nascence of the digital age. The argument examines how poetry and science interact within this dynamic, and demonstrates in a case study of two books, that their connection is a product of the digital age, that it is synthetic, that it is structural rather than topical and derived from science’s now tertiary degree of removal from the world it studies. It examines how discussions of poetry and theories of poetics have interacted to allow a difference between form and content to enable this interplay of science in poetry, exploring ideas of form and of lyrical content to establish that they are separate, but connected, concepts. It examines how the digital age and the role of science and technology in our society have affected our cultural consciousness, enabled this distinction between form and content and its alliance with poetry and science to emerge, or at least, welcomed it into our reading experience. And finally, it explores how a number of poets writing for the page and a selection of some poets writing for new media have composed works affected by the interplay of these diverse ideas. The included case studies discuss Srikanth Reddy’s Facts for Visitors and Shanxing Wang’s Mad Science in Imperial City and the project will expand in the future to cover those books discussed in the concluding chapter, as well. ❧ ""In the Crocodile Gardens"", a collection of poems, is situated at the point of unraveling of familiar storytelling threads. The poems bloom out of the dissolution of inherited tales. Little Red Riding Hood dances a strip tease for the wolf. Melusine recasts her origin and creates herself a tail. Michelangelo’s ex-lover seeks revenge against him. Cyndi Lauper, the Marquis de Sade, Skinny Puppy, and Sappho speak as kindred voices. In other poems, the bones and corpses left behind in a battle speak through the sound of drums, maps open into dictionaries to interpret the connection between language and nation, demons and nature spirits speak to lovers about skin, science fictional worlds split open, fairytales speak through nightmare and burst their own conventions. This collection of poems explores the nature of transgression in emotionally contractual situations that have not retained their structural integrity. Through a landscape of amputated branches and swaying human limbs, echoes of body, place, and voice, through debate with fossils and jungles and the natural cycle of life, the characters in these poems confront the nature of acceptance and failure, interrogating just what constitutes an outside force and what can be contained within a promise without losing the self.