The Oct/Nov 2001 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle had an interview with a poet I hadn’t read before, Katherine Coles. Her credits include a recent stint as poet laureate of Utah and director of the Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute at the Poetry Foundation. I was intrigued by Ms. Coles’ background in science and mathematics, and admired her explanation about how the scientific method informs her poetry. Much modern American poetry seems to eschew any critical analysis of the ways we make sense of the world. Perhaps this is reflective of a broader American zeitgeist (starkly evident in national politics) that disdains reason and nuance in favor of intuition and inherited beliefs. Many poets seem to reject logical clarity and rational narrative (and basic sentence structure!) to get closer to the unadorned “feelings” that occasion a poem’s conception, but too often, such tactics come across as simply sloppy and imprecise. Worthwhile poetry must combine intuition and a sense of tradition with a willingness to question generally accepted tenets and a desire to fill in the blanks in our understanding and experience of the world—the same qualities that might well motivate good science. In the interview, Ms. Coles notes that “The uncreative scientist is a technician; the undisciplined poet merely a flake. Neither will produce much that matters beyond the moment.” Well said. (Note to the magazine editors: a semicolon should separate related but independent clauses, not sentence fragments.)

The interview concludes with a few selections from Ms. Coles’s work, and here, I must confess to some disappointment with the formal structure of the poems. Many of the rhymes are simply too slanted to qualify. For example, the line endings in the first stanza of “2000” set an expectation for a familiar abba rhyme scheme: arbitrary–this–kiss–obituary. So far, so good. But the line endings in the next stanza already undermine the expectation: years–heaven–gone–numbered. If it were just one stanza, we might just let it go. But Ms. Coles continues to push the boundaries of what me might consider rhyme—and ultimately pushes them too far. It’s really a stretch to rhyme “passion” with “insist on,” “something else” and “quarrels,” and “violence” and “voice,” as Ms. Coles does in this poem. Similarly, the poem “Anthropomorphism” pairs “film” with “unknown,” “rebuilding” with “unstrung,” and “heart” with “comfort.” One wonders why the poet would bother establishing a rhyme scheme only to ignore it as often as not—or, as Frost might’ve said, why bring the net to the tennis court but never string it up? One of the true virtues of rhyme is that it forces the poet to concede that his first word choice might not be the best, forces an openness to other possibilities, forces and analysis of alternatives. Surely, these are qualities that any researcher would recognize as essential. It’s bad science to fudge your data; it’s bad poetry to fudge your rhymes. Of course, in these same poems, Ms. Coles manages a few surprises—she rhymes “squirrel” with “barrel” and makes the pairing seem completely natural, even inevitable. The magazine only presented a small sample of her work, and I’ve no idea how representative that sample is—but I’d have liked to see more of that scientific rigor in the formal vehicle of the poems.