The author draws inspiration from looking at the sky in this northern part of the province, more than 750 kilometers away from Vancouver. “I feel connected. I feel like I’m part of something bigger than myself and I feel comforted by that. You look at the origin of the light when you’re laying there, looking up at the stars,” Kane said. . Kane’s thoughts about starlight in the night sky inspired her to write a poem that combines the scientific principles and human experience of reflecting light – a poem now appearing in a prestigious US science journal. The poem, On Visible Light, was published in the July edition of Scientific American magazine, alongside more traditional scientific research on the thermodynamic limit, the calculus of momentum, and interstellar space. For Kane, the inclusion of her poem is proof that literature and science are more closely connected than many people think. “I’ve always thought that science and art are very, very similar in trying to discover the mysteries of the world and the universe. They both have that drive,” Kane told CBC News.
“Poetry explores. Ideas can come from really good poems that maybe scientists hadn’t really thought about in the same way.” “Science and art are very, very similar because both disciplines try to explore the mysteries of the world and the universe,” said poet Donna Kane. (Submitted/Donna Kane) Kane’s poem is a villanelle, a structured type of poem with a refrain and strict rhyme scheme, a form that dates back hundreds of years. He combines science and imagery with lines like “Just a bit of electromagnetic/ the wavelength and sight is ours, a blindness gone/ at the end of the journey through our nights.” His appearance in the pages of Scientific American, which has more than eight million online readers worldwide each month, has brought Kane stratospheric exposure. “I’m sure I’m never going to get a bigger audience than that,” Kane said. “Usually the scope of poetry is very small.” Kane’s poem appears in the July issue of Scientific American. The magazine has an online readership of around eight million each month. (Submitted/Scientific American) Scientific American poetry editor Dava Sobel told CBC News that Kane’s poem is “wonderful.” “It’s emotionally evocative and yet scientifically informative. And it follows a very strict poetic form. So it’s hard to pull off. But it really did,” said Sobel, a former New York Times science writer who was a finalist. for the Pulitzer Prize. Sobel, who had astronaut Neil Armstrong write the frontispiece to one of her books and also has an asteroid named after her, believes poetry can illuminate science. “Creativity flows smoothly between these two,” he said. Dava Sobel, poetry editor of Scientific American, has previously published poetry written by Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and physics. (Submitted/Glen Allsop) Sobel said Scientific American published poetry in its first issue in 1845, but it rarely appeared since then, until she started a monthly science poetry column in the magazine in 2020. Since then, in addition to Kane’s villanelle, it has included poems written by Nobel Prize winners in chemistry and physics. “Poetry shouldn’t be off limits to anyone, and neither should science,” he said. Although an imaginative work, Kane’s poem still had to meet the bar of accuracy and was rigorously vetted by Scientific American before publication. “They’re very serious that … what you wrote is accurate. You can do playful things, but the poem has to live up to real science,” Kane said. Donna Kane’s face is reflected in a prototype of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft during a visit to the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC The BC poet is drawn to writing about science and space. (Submitted/Donna Kane) The poet said she has always liked science and has written other works about space. Her 2020 book, Orrery: Poems, featured a series of pieces about Pioneer 10, a spacecraft launched to study Jupiter’s moons. He was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for English Language Poetry. One of her space-themed poems will be included in a forthcoming anthology to be published by Cambridge University Press.