Mimicking the seasons (and our observation of their rhythms) the curricular themes in As Poetry Recycles Neurons: Flocks Of Words, Tracks Of Letters, have shifted, evolved and recycled. The work in this anthology traces that movement from fall through winter quarter.The essays in Part I: Science As A Conversation were written during the fall when we spent time at The Evergreen State College’s Organic Farm. We observed ourselves being drawn to a plant through a method of science known as the Phenomenology of Knowing. This method was introduced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1832), a German poet, artist and naturalist.
We explored the slippage between art and science and the border between heart and mind while writing research papers that mixed prose and poetry. The form of our research papers followed Craig Holdrege’s Doing Goethean Science and our peppering of poetry throughout mirrored that in Stephan Buhner’s The Secret Teachings of Plants: The Intelligence of the Heart in the Direct Perception of Nature. The section headings in Part I are from Holdrege’s essay and serve as an umbrella for each of our individual voices. Part II: Poetry Of Passions, presents poetry from our winter quarter field studies during which we applied the Goethean method in a month long immersion in a particular passion. Our assignment was to make poetry evoke the experience of our immersion within a passion, as E.L. Doctorow said “Good writing is supposed to evoke sensations in the reader–not the fact that it is raining, but the feeling of being rained upon.”

This anthology aims to render into language our individual experiences within the shared context of the program, to create for those of us who desire the intimacy of turning a page something tactile: a textured memory of a point in time, kept alive in the body of a book.

See full Anthology here

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