BANGKOK, Thailand

2012 Joint International Tropical Medicine Meeting

December 13, 2012

I opened with a guided meditation where I asked all in attendance to close their eyes and to imagine a woman lying on the floor in an African village. She’s wrapped in blankets, dying. As the room pulsed with silence I read a poem from “Malaria: Poems” that filled in any gaps their imagination may have left. I then delivered the following speech, albeit with some ad-libs. Two additional poems from the forthcoming book concluded the presentation. I hope poets, scientists and those not part of either field can find something useful here.

Mahidol University. Professor Nick Day. Joint International Tropical Medicine Meeting committee members and staff. Those of you in attendance today. Thank you.

I began studying and writing poetry six years ago. Back in 2006, I remember whisperings of how some poets were diving into the hard sciences for material. Of course, history shows that poets have always used whatever knowledge base was available at the time. But now, in light of the deep chasm that existed between art and science, between many artists and scientists, and with the two in constant competition at universities for funding, well, this was a pretty cool new thing, a seemingly unexplored terrain. A gesture of peace even.

Mixing science with poetry was described as “interesting.” In a poem about watching an animal’s last breath, for example, there’d be a glimpse into the physiology of breath itself, or, in a poem about the lives of bees there’d be a passing mention of how the parasitic phorid fly, apocephalus borealis, later termed the “zombie bee parasite,” threatens their hives. It was at once illuminating and alienating. At once grounded in the hard sciences and perched on the elitist ivory tower. If indeed it did open any new doors in the genre of poetry it surely shut just as many in terms of readership. But it was new. And sometimes that’s all it takes to spark a revolution.

In 2009 the NY Times released an article titled “The Poetry of Science” that showcased Kimiko Hahn’s book “Toxic Flora,” a collection of poems all inspired by articles in the Science Times.

Now the blending of science into poetry was becoming more nuanced and complex. Or so I had read. Still only three years into my study of poetry, everything, to me, seemed to be getting more nuanced and more complex.

It did seem, however, that there were more mentions of “science poets” and that these particular poets were garnering all sorts of awards.

In 2008 and 2009, there I was, a poetry graduate student, sitting across the table from my professor, Alison Deming. She was one of these “science poets” raking in major awards. Her poetry books were some of my absolute favorite, books that still stick with me to this day for their ability to use science not just plop it in, their ability to make every poem actually feel more accessible because of the grounding in science.

A somewhat-related side note: There are forever-famous poets like Allen Ginsberg, who I idolize for his mixture of poetic ability and activism, and then there are poets like Alison Deming, who do not have the wild character or the luck of being born into a certain time period or place, but who I believe are the true masters of the page, poets whose poems shine not only as good poems in this time period or that one, but good poems in general. I learned far more about poetry through studying Allen Ginsberg’s life than I did through studying his poetry. If someone asked me if Alison Deming was a better poet than Allen Ginsberg would I answer yes? I sure would. And I’d probably be slapped for it. So you can imagine my thrill when I learned that science has something similar – the best scientists, the true masters, aren’t always the ones we hear the most about.

And then, to close out 2011, The Guardian released a piece titled “The Science of Poetry, the Poetry of Science,” in which they highlighted some poets and beautifully linked some of the parallels – such as the intense observation crucial to both poetic and scientific discovery – between the two fields.

This is all a preface to say that when I moved from the United States to Thailand nearly two years ago for a cultural experience that I had, somewhere within me, an interest in using science with my poetry. As luck would have it, I met Professor Nick Day of MORU (Mahidol-Oxford Tropical Medicine Research Unit) and soon realized that Thailand was perhaps the world’s best location to study tropical medicine. A few weeks later I knew malaria was it, it was what I had to write about. Here was a global, historical slayer of human beings and here I was an empathetic poet in the perfect location to begin my research.

All the research was fascinating when I first embarked on the book “Malaria: Poems.” Consider that I knew only that mosquitoes gave people malaria, and that it usually happens in Africa. I knew nothing more. I didn’t know how and I didn’t know the history. I was reading huge tropical medicine textbooks and even learning that malaria was the disease most mentioned by Shakespeare. I was visiting shelters and laboratories in Thailand and Bangladesh, and even visited the US to visit Sanaria – the world’s only facility entirely dedicated to creating a malaria vaccine. I watched countless documentaries and, as I’ve not yet been to Africa, I found images of mothers in Africa cradling their dying child and I meditated for hours in an attempt to inhabit her entire range of emotions.

These techniques of hard work and meditation had proved successful in the past for my previous books but, as the months passed, I found myself only with page after page of malaria notes. I simply couldn’t write a poem about it. For starters, I was scared. How do I write about this topic in a way that is informative, that pays homage to the researchers and, especially, to the millions who have died because of it? And how do I do all this is still make it poetry? Do I mention names of researchers? If so, which ones? How do I bring the science of malaria into the work without the work becoming boring or pedantic? These were just a few of the questions that served as barriers. My first few serious attempts to write a poem about malaria were total failures – clouded in fear and lack of knowledge and an inability to find a style suitable for the topic.

I realized that though the science itself was fascinating, the way in which text presented it was a total buzzkill to my creativity. I felt entirely incapable of having fun, of moving organically on the page, of letting my mind make associative leaps and then figuring out which leaps might be worth keeping. Another month passed and I still had nothing except for piles of notes. Then, while rereading “The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men: Inspiration, Vision, and Purpose in the Quest to End Malaria” I stumbled across this little gem:

“Doctors who specialize in tropical medicine went through the same rigors of medical training and accumulated the same amount of medical-school debt as their colleagues who chose pediatrics, oncology, cardiology, or neurology. But when they chose different diseases, they chose different patients.”

In essence, those working in tropical medicine were total outcasts. Many were brilliant doctors who could have made loads more money and achieved far more notoriety had they studied a different field of medicine and worked with different patients. This mattered to me, greatly. I was told during my final year in graduate school that I would be the University of Arizona’s final poet-in-residence. There had been major cuts to the arts all throughout Arizona and they simply couldn’t afford to continue the tradition, no matter how historic and meaningful it was to the community. When I returned home that same day my landlord was celebrating. He was a scientist at the university and had just been awarded a huge grant. I mean huge. Oh yes, he was going to study which brand of baby diapers truly holds the most urine.

So although though I felt in my bones how being a poet in the 21st Century, in this time of instant everythings, was a total act of rebellion, I had never entertained the idea that a scientist may have felt something similar in their own field of study. Right around this realization I came down with the flu and had a relentless fever for a few days. The high of this fever allowed me to meditate deeper on malaria and while doing so I began re-reading some crazy books renowned for their sheer creativity – most notably Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs.

When the fever subsided I felt fully recovered. Recovered from the illness and recovered from the fear to write. For the next three weeks you could say I wrote “feverishly.” Ideas I’d been kicking around in my head during sleepless nights began to melt onto the page and merge with my notes. I was finally inside the book and from there everything became so much easier. The barriers of not-understanding and of misunderstanding were removed and creativity finally had space to move.

Click here to learn more about “Malaria: Poems.”

Click here to learn more about the 2012 Joint International Tropical Medicine Meeting.

Article originally published here on Examiner.com.