WELCOME TO ISSUE 4. SCI, LIT: A CABINET OF CURIOSITIES. FEATURING.

ALEXANDRA SASHE
ALISON STRUB
AMBER NELSON
ARKAVA DAS
CHRISTIAN BÖK
ED CURTIS
FELICIA SHENKER
J MICHAEL WAHLGREN
KAZ MASLANKA
MARIO PETRUCCI

One does not need to imagine that lemon; one needs to discover it.
– Jack Spicer, Letter to Lorca

Maybe what connects poetry and science most essentially is a kind of fierce curiosity, a certain focusing in of the eye, that particular quest to rend vertical the components of the surrounding world and peer inside.

Or maybe: it's language. For whether it be the ATCG of the genome, the elements of the periodic table, the template of an algorithm or the monolithic glossary of a 1st year textbook on neurobiology, it's obvious that as language composes poetry so does it science – and the relationship is not asymmetrical.

Ranging from very subtle instances as Sashe’s use of the coinage “hourbone” to more tenacious manifestations as Bök’s excerpts from the Xenotext Experiment, one can see that science also composes, even that considered language's most aesthetic embodiment: poetry. As Adelaide Morris writes in her essay included in the anthology Contemporary Poetry and Contemporary Science, "Poetry and science co-evolve in intricate reciprocities. Just as Newtonian physics developed in tandem with Augustan poetics, relativity and quantum physics accompanied modernist poetry." Perhaps this co-evolution can be physically realized in the form of a room, the Kunstkammer, where objects of scientific inquiry were intertwined with relics of a more fantastical nature. In tribute –

issue 4 of Dear Sir, showcases an upgraded cabinet of curiosities where extra-ordinary creatures and rare minerals are replaced by computer generated metaphors, architecture, genetics, ecology, physics, kinematics and geometry, while still giving credit to the original’s du jour fetish for encyclopedic categorization as in Strub’s “Numismatically Worthless Coinage Found In A Trunk.”

Diverse faculties of science and technology are changing the face of poetry. This is where I say: it remains to be seen how poetry is changing the face of contemporary science.