Like most autistic people, I have special interests. Mine tend to be one of two types: making things (origami, Celtic art, crochet…) and learning about things. The first type will last about a year, and I will spend all my spare time making 1000 paper cranes, or designing my own knotwork tattoo, or crocheting Afghan blankets for everyone I know. I’ll buy all the tools and materials needed for spending a lifetime indulging in the particular craft, and then suddenly, after 11-12 months, I’ll lose all interest. The second type lasts longer, at its most intense for 3 or 4 years, and I never quite lose interest in the topics I am driven to learn about. There haven’t been many of these topics over my 50+ years (so far), I think the main ones have been bookbinding/illumination, Lundy Island, pop music (as a teenager), and quantum theory.
I first came across quantum theory when I was about 14, when my mum lent me Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics. It’s a pretty good overview of some of what was known then about quantum theory, as I remember it (i.e. very vaguely, I haven’t read it since). Lots of Feynman diagrams, all mingled up with bits and pieces of Eastern philosophy that supposedly made it all make sense.
“The Wu Li Master dances with his student. The Wu Li Master does not teach, but the student learns. The Wu Li Master always begins at the centre, the heart of the matter…”
Or something like that.
My overwhelming impression after reading the book was that quantum stuff is complicated, but to make up for that, it’s blissfully weird. And weird is just like me, therefore it must be worth investigating further… maybe I’d find something out about myself, you never know.
In around 2014, when I’d finished writing poems about Lundy, I cast around for my next project. I remembered Zukav’s book, and the glorious oddness of quantum theory, so I set out to understand it, and to explain it through my poetry. I’d tried to get my head round the maths of it, but that was way beyond me. I’d tried to explain it in prose, which also didn’t work. Clearly, poetry was the way to go.
Over the next few years I wrote many poems inspired by quantum theory, and the weird and wonderful concepts in the books I read. I am one of the few people I know who’s read Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time. And I don’t know anyone else who’s read it twice! I even hosted a Five Leaves Bookshop book group meeting about the book, which was less than successful, as the few people who came along had managed the first couple of chapters and expected me to explain it to them.
Anyway, the result of that project, with support from amazing mentor Sarah Hymas through Writing East Midlands’ mentoring scheme, was a series of poems that didn’t really explain quantum theory, but did explain me quite well. I submitted them to Soundswrite Press for their first New Poets collection, was thrilled that they chose my poems, and even more chuffed to see my poetry in print. In a real book, no less! Sadly, Take Three is now out of print (although I think Five Leaves has a couple of copies still), so I’ve added a few of the poems to this website.
(please note that for some of the poems the layout is important, and hard to reproduce in HTML, so those are presented as images with links to text versions for people using screen readers)
- Rebirth as a Quantum Mechanic (also published in Antiphon)
- Blackboard (also published in Ink, Sweat and Tears)
- Decay
- The Uncertainty Principle (also published in The Interpreter’s House)
- The Observer Effect (also published in The Interpreter’s House)
- Waltz
- Quantum Dating
- The Standard Model of Particle Physics (also published in Brittle Star)
- Jubilate Astra Ad Hominem (also published in Stride)