The Cosmos in Verse: An Interview with Joseph Conlon

There raged a thumping cosmic ballyhoo,
A manic dance – a rumpus to arouse
The universe: of Higgs and W,
Electrons, gluons, muons, Zs and taus…

For centuries, poetry and science have shared an unlikely journey of connection. Before turning to the arts, Keats was a doctor. Chaucer dabbled in astronomy. Continuing this tradition, New College Fellow of Physics, Joseph Conlon has recently published a new book of poetry, Origins: The Cosmos in Verse. Drawing on his scientific expertise, Conlon explores the origins of our universe in two long-form poems - 'Elements' and 'Galaxies'. 

Read Origins: The Cosmos in Verse here

To celebrate the launch of his new work, we spoke to Joseph about his inspirations, aspirations and writing process: 

How do you balance your roles as a professor of physics and a poet? 

The way I see it is that I am a physicist, and a core part of being a physicist is to communicate the wonder and glory of this subject. Although mathematics is the technical language of physics, relatively few people speak this particular language. The vernacular tongue is English and poetry is, in a sense, the highest form of this vernacular: so it is right and proper to translate the tale of the concepts, the discoveries and the heroes of physics into English poetry. I am a physicist who writes.

What first inspired you to explore the intersection between poetry and physics?

I've always enjoyed poetry as a reader and from an early age I learned a lot of poems by heart. 'Peak memorisation' was probably when I was about 30; I added up what I knew, and it came to about 2500 lines in total (sadly the brain loses sharpness as I get older!). At some point about 6 or 7 years ago I started trying to write poetry, originally for fun and entering the Spectator's weekly competition. Then I thought that, being a physicist,  I ought to write a longish (50 - 100 lines) poem on physics. This grew and grew, and as it did I developed this inner conviction that the story of the early universe is the creation epic of the modern world, that the subject deserves a book-length poem, it can only be written by someone who was a professional scientist, and that I was as qualified as anyone to try.

How do you see physics and poetry as related fields?

The best equations of physics are beautiful because they are both profound and compact; the logical consistency of physics makes them hard to modify, so that any small change can break them and render them either meaningless or with some ugly redundancy. I think the same is often true of poetry, especially formal poetry: poetry concentrates language and the best poetry also has the feature that changing even a single word disrupts both the meaning and rhythm. To me, my sense of beauty in physics and my sense of beauty in poetry are cognate.

There are two big differences to me. First, the way in which the equations of physics are universal across cultures and there is a single 'right' language of mathematics, whereas poetry is tied to the specificity of spoken language (e.g. the way most English poetry has stress based rhythm whereas classical Latin/Greek poetry is length-based). Second, the way the concepts of physics are often strange and unfamiliar whereas much canonical poetry involves 'what oft was thought, but ne'er so well expressed.'

Can you describe your writing process? How did you go about crafting the poems in Origins?

I wrote Origins mostly on the train between Didcot (where I live) and Oxford, so about 30 minutes there and 30 minutes back. This is a good length of time as it was clearly delineated from the rest of my day, but long enough to make progress.

Origins consists of two long poems, each about 1000 lines. On a good day I would write 3 to 4 lines. I had a rough sense of what I wanted to say and where each poem was going. The good thing about a long poem is that you can have various parts going at the same time, so if you feel stuck or uninspired at one place there are plenty of other bits to work on.

The poems are metrically tight, so I would start with rhyme pairs that approximately match the sense of where the text was, and then construct everything else around these so that the rhyme pairs became the natural words in the sentence.  Then, edit, read aloud, edit, read aloud, edit, read aloud, edit, etc.

What were some of the challenges you faced while writing this book?

Probably turning an idiosyncratic private project into an actual physical book.

The collegiate structure — and the collegiality that eating lunch in college provides — helped enormously here for what was, to be honest, a slightly crazy idea. I was fortunate to be able to share early drafts with Craig Raine, Will Poole and Hannah Sullivan. Hannah was also enormously helpful in putting me in touch with an agent (Luke Ingram) who was willing to take me on and then submit the work to publishers.

What are your aspirations for Origins?

The aspiration is to provide words that fit the subject, words appropriate for this tale of the origin of both cosmic structure and chemical elements in the very early universe. And to be read!