Workshop: Put your poetry where your mouth is

By Bauke Steenhuisen
13.30 14.30 hrs Room 217

Prose is the rule in all scientific journals and reports. Poetry is completely out of the question. But poetry is not forbidden either and, think about it, poetry has some remarkable advantages. 

It is brief! It includes emotions! It uses the musical quality of language! It plays with ambiguity! It activates readers to seek for meaning! It enables writers to raise a unique, deeply human voice! Last but not least, poetry somehow helps readers to memorize what has been said, until they die!

Edgar Allen Poe famously wrote about the classic conflict between science and poetry, with science as a vulture, a bird of prey. ‘Science!... Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart…?’

This workshop is designed to experience how wrong Poe was. How easy and universal it is to unlock the power of poetry. And how to utilize its power to understand science, our science.

Trust me, snapping your fingers is a bigger effort.

A famous Dutch line of poetry goes like this: ‘The Hague, you tap it and it starts to sing…’

Bauke Steenhuisen likes to believe he invented the scientific sonnet. After his well-received TEDxDelft performance about the power of poetry, he started to versify scientific theses and dissertations in the form of sonnets. His ‘Poetic Engineering’ collective had a great many stage performances and an even greater amount of spread out publications in the past five years.