Quantum Poetics

“…Catanzano’s poetics exists side by side with her poems in which the intersection between poetry & science plays itself out in a contemporary, even futuristic form….For a further take on the poetry-science connection as it first came into a radical poetics, [see] Goethe, Shelley, & others—a dissolution of boundaries that continues into the present….”

—Jerome Rothenberg

POETRY IN SUPERPOSITION:
AN ESSAY-POEM IN QUANTUM POETICS

THE POSITRON PASSPORT:
AN ESSAY-POEM IN QUANTUM POETICS

An extended work of poetry and poetics that explores Amy Catanzano’s research at CERN and beyond, “The Positron Passport: An Essay-Poem in Quantum Poetics,” appears in CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary in a Special Issue on Poetry Elsewhere, Elsewhere Poetry, guest edited by Ming-Qian Ma. Other contributors are Will Alexander, Rae Armantrout, Joseph Donahue, Andrew Dorkin, João Paulo Guimarães, Steve McCaffery, Ariana Nadia Nash, Jed Rasula, Sasha Steensen, and Henry Sussman. CounterText, informed by perspectives derived from literary criticism, cultural criticism, philosophy, and political theory, with a particular interest in studying technology’s reshaping of literary and post-literary cultures, is edited by Ivan Callus and James Corby and published by Edinburgh University Press.

QUANTUM POETICS: A SERIALIZED ESSAY

(2009-2012)

Appearing in Poems and Poetics
Editor, Jerome Rothenberg

Read the early versions of the essay that appeared in Poems and Poetics from 2009 to 2012: Quantum Poetics (Part 1), Quantum Poetics (Part 2), Quantum Poetics (Part 3), Quantum Poetics (Part 4).

Jerome Rothenberg’s early support of my work in quantum poetics came about from our participation in a panel on the topic of “wilderness” during Naropa University’s Summer Writing Program. When I suggested that the concept of wilderness should include subatomic and cosmological environments, he shared his collection, The Book of Concealments (Chax Press, 2004), a follow-up to A Book of Witness: Spells & Gris-Gris (New Directions, 2003), which suppresses the first-person pronoun toward an “intimation…of an imagined world embedded into the real one.” We considered his literary constraint as an expression of dark matter and dark energy, which comprise approximately 96 percent of the known universe. When I shared my initial essays in quantum poetics, he offered to publish them in Poems and Poetics and continued to publish installments over the following years. This support motivated me to maximize the creative and scholarly potential of the essays as a poetic theory, which led to my development of quantum poetics as a larger critical-creative practice. 

QUANTUM POETICS: from “BOREALIS: TIME SIGNATURES”

(2017 Spanish edition, 2019 English edition)

Appearing in #Nodes: Entangling Sciences and Humanities
Editors, Gustavo Ariel Schwartz and Víctor Bermúdez

Published by Next Door Publishers in Spain and Intellect Press in the U.K., and in affiliation with the Mestizajes Programme at the Donostia International Physics Center in San Sebastián, Spain.

Amy Catanzano’s contribution to #Nodes: Entangling Sciences and Humanities, published in Spanish and English editions, is a poem from “Borealis: Time Signatures,” and an essay using quantum poetics in the chapter, #Chaos and Complexity. She discusses the poem in relation to quantum mechanics, Alice Fulton on John Holland, N. Katherine Hayles on chaos, higher-dimensional tesseracts, Lucretius’ clinamen, and Emily Grosholz on Bas van Fraassen. An essay on her contributions by #Nodes editor Gustavo A. Schwartz is also included. #Nodes editor Víctor Bermúdez translated Catanzano’s contributions for the collection’s Spanish edition.

QUANTUM POETICS: A COMMENTARY SERIES

(2014-2015)

Appearing in Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania)
Editors, Julia Bloch and Michael S. Hennessey

A Commentary Series on Quantum Poetics by Amy Catanzano at Jacket2, the online journal for modern and contemporary poetry and poetics at the University of Pennsylvania, features 18 short essays by Catanzano about authors who work from concepts in quantum mechanics and related physics. The series reprinted M. NourbeSe Philip’s essay, “Black W/Holes: A History of Brief Time,” on race, poetry, and science and a conversation on poetry and science between Catanzano and Andrew Joron.

Poets, artists, philosophers, scientists, and topics discussed include: Werner Heisenberg, nanopoetry, S.S. Prassad, Rampike Magazine, Crispin Glover, Ghim Wei Ho, Demetrius Oliver, Jena Osman, Allison Cobb, The Print Center, The Andy Warhol Museum, R.U. Sirius, Nathaniel Mackey, Shanxing Wang, Brian Lucas, Jerome Rothenberg, Leigh Kotsilidis, Lila Zemborain, Lina Romona Vitkauskas, Marcella Durand, Matthew Tierney, the uncertainty principle, Ken Hunt, the moon landing, NASA, Adam Cornford, William Blake, Stephen Hawking, M. NourbeSe Philip, Andrew Joron, Fuse Magazine, conceptual writing, language writing, Benoit Mandelbrot, Frederick Seidel, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Christian Bök, Will Alexander, quantum computing, Alfred Jarry and ’pataphysics, Lisa Randall, Lyn Hejinian, Diane Samuels, Isaac Newton, Stephen Collins, Jordan Scott, Bhanu Kapil, mIEKAL aND, tesseracts, wormwriting, Charles Darwin, Andrew McEwan, Rae Armantrout, Richard Feynman, Brian Keating, Margaret Cavendish, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Louis Zukofsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Lucretius, Leonard Shlain, Kim Goldberg, matrix mechanics, Erwin Schrödinger, Andrew Topel, visual poetry, Christine Wertheim, derek beaulieu, Jennifer K. Dick, Brian Greene, Maria Damon, Ira Livingston, Dmitri Mendeleev, Michael Leong, Evelyn Rilley, Adam Dickinson, Craig Dworkin, Alice Fulton and fractal poetics, Karen Barad, Abigail Child, Rosmarie Waldrop, Adam Cornford, Matthew Tierney, infinity, Klein bottles, and surrealism.

LIKE A METAPHOR: ON POETRY AND SCIENCE

(2012)

Appearing in Jacket2 (University of Pennsylvania)
Feature Editor, Gilbert Adair for Jacket2

Like a Metaphor: On Poetry and Science, Gilbert Adair’s feature at Jacket2 on poetry and science, is a response to Al Filreis’ PoemTalk #22, a talk conducted by Filreis, Charles Bernstein, Bob Perelman, and Wystan Curnow as part of the PoemTalk podcast series sponsored by the Poetry Foundation, the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania, and PennSound, on Louis Zukofsky’s Anew. Collecting poems, critiques, and dialogues between eleven poets who share an interest in science—Rae Armantrout, Amy Catanzano, John Cayley, Tina Darragh, Marcella Durand, Allen Fisher, James Harvey, Peter Middleton, Evelyn Reilly, and Joan Retallack—this feature explores how scientific discourse might be incorporated by poets not simply as a source of metaphor but as an independent discipline. The contributions broadly address how poetry can serve science no less than how science can serve poetry as well as the degree of discursive integrity each should or can enjoy in the interplay.