Inventions

“I once thought I was / my own geometry, / my own geocentric planet,” writes Paul Tran in their poem “Copernicus,” one in a series of poems titled after inventors and scientific concepts. In many of the poems, the theory or invention is used as a metaphor for a given speaker’s emotional struggle, such as in “Hypothesis,” in which Tran writes: “I could survive knowing / that not everything has a reason” and in the first lines of “Galileo”: “I thought I could stop / time by taking apart / the clock.” This week, write a poem named after an inventor or theory. How can you personalize a scientific subject and cast it through a lyrical light?