Friday, August 12, 2011

(RE-POST) "Fluid Mechanics" - Opinions, Critique and Feedback are most welcome?

Your poem took me back to a point in time when I was 18 as you are now and was studying partial differential equations at university. It was there that I first encountered the hydrodynamic equations that underlie the diverse fields you mention; for shame sir, you forgot to mention meteorological modeling! LOL Your poem is chock full of names familiar to me and other scientifically-trained readers of poetry, but may be lost on others; it stands equally as a wonder-fed tribute to those seminal figures and a catalog of the many ways that the field of fluid mechanics underlies things as apparently diverse as aerodynamics ('the force of the air / Which can propel an aircraft') and hemodynamics ('bio-bluids'). What happens too often when we write a poem like this is that we end up cataloging and not using these wonders metaphorically. There seems to be entirely too much listing here and that takes the emphasis off making meaning poetically. I also know that from trying to write poems with scientific terms and names I struggle with meter; darn 'em, why couldn't they all have had iambic names, I ask you? LOL If you rework this, why not focus on one natural phenomenon and let your scientific diction speak obliquely to the great divide between our rapturous wonder at the glory of the natural world and the cold, hard world of differential equations we use to embrace it, which paradoxically pushes us away from that rapturous wonder even as we come to a more mechanistically exacting understanding of its nuances. Your poem would be an oblique meditation in the spirit of Walt Whitman's 'When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer.' Think it over... oh, and have a lovely day for everything is fine here, as I hope it is there.

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