biopoetics in laboratory setting

These ekphrastic visual poems are part of a larger body of work, based on the artworks of Japanese artist Atsuko Yamagata. Her oeuvre highlights the beauty of symbiosis among human and nonhuman organisms. During our Zoom call back in 2023, Yamagata elucidated her intent of exploring the scientific structures of life in relation to human emotions. Hence, I have been striving to do the same—the mechanisms of inheritance, often measured through scientific knowledge and quantitative methods, are reimagined through poetic lines that curve/swirl/intersect/overlap, thereby forming the architecture of cells.

Bio art and bio poetry inspire “a visual language” of “thought, imagination, and questioning — actions that also ground the creative work of scientists in the laboratory” (Mecham). Given this endeavor, the format of some of the poems are similar to research articles and textbook exercises, the familiar avenues of knowledge dissemination. I formulated my theoretical and conceptual methodologies from poets who have encouraged alternative and unconventional ways of reading and writing about the natural world, namely Christian Bök, Juliana Spahr, and Harryette Mullen. Marjorie Perloff describes these methods as “new exploratory poetry,” exemplified through aleatoric techniques, translation, bioengineering, and the like (Dickinson).

In particular, I utilized aleatoric techniques to create this poetry collection. While I didn’t have the resources or software to streamline the chance operations, I did it manually, collecting words related to biology, epigenetics, and ecocriticism in a database. From there, my lexicon served as building blocks to create the poems. My last poem, “Biome from Bird’s Eye View I,” is an amalgamation of my body of work, a series of poetic lines drawn from the existing pool of words found in the previous poems. I arranged and rearranged the words to illustrate new patterns, much like the ever-changing macroscale biomes of our natural world.