I'm very glad my comments were useful, Gerald.

Candice, I'll be more than happy to take a look at your poem whenever
it's ready to be looked at. But don't expect too much - it's a long time
since I studied physics properly, so my knowledge is somewhat rusty. I
bet you know more about neutrinos than I do at the moment.

As for good stuff, the book I was most recently impressed by was Neil
Rollinson's "Spanish Fly", which contains several poems that use
scientific imagery effectively and accurately. Mario Petrucci and Danny
Abse both know what they're talking about when they use science. The
grand-daddy of science poets is Miroslav Holub, of course, but you
probably knew that.

But I was meaning more that there seem to be fewer scientific blunders
in poems that aren't principally scientific in intent, but stumble
across some science along the way. I playfully have a "S.T. Coleridge
Horned Moon Award" [1] that I mentally present to poems that drop a
scientific clanger, and I seem to be dishing it out less frequently of
late. Poets seem to be more careful and/or better informed these days.

As for Sokal, I don't agree that:

>his
>_Social Text_ hoax began with his own inability to penetrate the language of
>critical theory and his assumption on the basis of his own limitations there
>that it wasn't comprehensible or substantive at all.

He specifically says: "We are not attacking philosophy, the humanities
or the social sciences *in general*; on the contrary, we feel that these
fields are of the utmost importance..." His main target isn't the
language of critical theory per se, but those occasions when it imports
the language of physics or mathematics and doesn't use it properly. You
might argue that critical theory has a perfect right to appropriate
physics or maths language and use it for its own purposes; after all,
those two disciplines are particularly noted for pinching their
vocabulary from other sources (energy, force, set, charm, flavour etc.
Physics nicked "quark" from Joyce.) But when the grammar as well as the
vocabulary has the same look and feel, there's a stronger expectation
of a similarity in meaning. Wittgenstein [2] aside, is it very likely
that a sentence that looks to have some relevance to one field of
discourse, but is written in the context of another, isn't making some
sort of reference to the first? At the very least, when Jean Baudrillard
(quoted by Sokal in Intellectual Impostures) says: "It is a sign that
the space of the event has become a hyperspace with multiple
refractivity, and that the space of war has become definitively non-
Euclidean." then even if this has a precise meaning within the discourse
of critical theory, can you seriously expect anyone with any knowledge
of science or mathematics (and who is unaware of the meaning in the
discourse of critical theory) not to snigger?

Best,

Peter

[1] "The horned Moon, with one bright star/Within the nether tip." -
Within the moon's crescent is the rest of the moon, in shadow. It would
therefore block out the light from any star behind it. This is the most
notorious scientific blunder in poetry.

[2] I included this because a reference to Wittgenstein always gives a
post a bit of intellectual élan, don't you think? I was thinking of the
references to Wittgenstein in Tom Stoppard's [3] "Dogg's Hamlet,
Cahoot's MacBeth."

[3] And if you're going to mention a playwright in a post, you can't do
better than Tom Stoppard, especially if the reference is to one of his
more recondite works.[4]

[4] That's enough footnotes, ed.