Matthew Tierney Talks About Science and Poetry with Open Book: Toronto

In an interview with Open Book: Toronto, Matthew Tierney, author of The Hayflick Limit, discusses the sometimes hostile, sometimes intimate relationship between science and poetry. He also reveals the thematic material that motivates his forthcoming Coach House collection, Probably Inevitable.

Open Book: Tell us about your book, The Hayflick Limit.

Matthew Tierney: The poems in Hayflick roam freely from the cosmic to the quantum, but also touch on psychological limits (e.g. phobias) and intellectual limits (e.g. the Theory of Everything) and bodily limits (e.g. pain, aging). As a whole, it’s like one of those undergraduate science courses for humanities students — only the really interesting stuff, none of the math, and the promise of a bell-curved grade.

OB: What is the relationship between science and poetry?

MT: Friends, with benefits.

Science and poetry are said to get along poorly. Science appeals to our rational selves, poetry to our emotional ones. So the thinking goes.

However, the larger perspective is that both poetry and science are ways of knowing of the world. Experience is neither wholly objective nor wholly subjective but somewhere in between. We need both science and poetry for a full understanding, and we need them on friendly, non-committal terms, able to pursue their separate paths but also able to hook up now and then.

OB: What are you working on now?

MT: My third book is coming out in the fall. I’m making my wayward way through the first round of edits. These poems consider the science and philosophy of time from the point of view of someone who thinks a poem is a viable time machine. Not someone terribly smart, I’ve since learned, but likable enough in a “Look Ma, no hands!” kinda way.

Read the full interview here.