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Inventions [1]

Poetry [2]
12.21.21

“I once thought I was / my own geometry, / my own geocentric planet,” writes Paul Tran in their poem “Copernicus [3],” 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 [4],” in which Tran writes: “I could survive knowing / that not everything has a reason” and in the first lines of “Galileo [5]”: “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?


Source URL:https://www.pw.org/content/inventions

Links
[1] https://www.pw.org/content/inventions [2] https://www.pw.org/genre/poetry [3] https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/01/20/copernicus [4] https://poets.org/poem/hypothesis [5] https://poets.org/poem/galileo