Read the poem here | Read Issue 26 here

There are two stanzas of six lines each, and a lovely turn at the start of the second stanza that’s signalled by the poet’s use of the word ‘But.’ This is a purposeful choice in poetic craft that tells the reader that there’s more here than just the image of a Steller’s Jay sprawled out on the lawn. There’s a quiet invitation to see beyond the superficial image of bird on grass, a nudge to think about how the bird fits into the bigger picture of things.

I hadn’t heard about anting prior to reading Kleinberg’s poem, so the science statement sent me off on a fascinating internet quest for more information. I’ve written about birds for most of my own poetic career, and my fourth book was titled These Wings, so editing for this issue of Consilience was a real joy for me as both poet and editor.

The notion of there being two types of anting—active and passive—was intriguing to me as a reader, as well. Isn’t there always a burst of energy in something and then a rest? Doesn’t a lot of the natural world follow that pattern? I got to thinking about how this bird—’akimbo on the lawn,/head tilted to the side, beak wide,/crest nearly touching the grass, wings/spread’—is so still that it nearly seems dead to the poem’s speaker.

The presence of the cell phone, with its ever-constant camera, is key to how the poem works, too. How do we live in the world these days, turning as we do—so often—to try and capture images and beauty with camera phones? And, further, what do we miss when we do this? Have we given up living and witnessing the beauty in person for capturing it with a photo for our social media feeds? Or are we maybe just trying to ensure that the beauty doesn’t die or disappear, to remind ourselves that beauty lives even during difficult times?

In the move from first to second stanza, in the quick turn, the poet also asks the reader to stop and think more deeply about the notion of appearance versus reality. What appears to be a bird so still that it’s dead is actually just a bird at rest, after having been actively anting, with ‘the cobalt fan of him/showing himself off, showing the sky/how to be blue.’ As the speaker goes out to into the back yard, shifting from one setting to another, there’s an epiphany of sorts. In the beauty of the final few lines of the poem, with the well-crafted parallelism of that second last one, the blue of the bird’s feathers and the sky are compared.

In looking closely at the smallest parts of the natural world, at the feathered span of a bird’s brightly coloured wings, Kleinberg has the reader thinking about how everything is so closely interconnected. ‘Before he flew off’ reminds me of the work of Mary Oliver and Wendell Berry, poets who knew how to make things look simple through careful crafting. Perhaps part of the poem’s message is also, then, asking the reader to not discount elegance and simplicity in poetic structure and craft, but to instead take a breath—a beat— to let the poem move through the reader’s mind. And, perhaps it is also about learning to take a quiet pause in a world that is frequently rushing to catch up with itself, to observe mindfully rather than run past it all without noticing what’s going on around us in the natural world.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 26 here

We’ve collated opportunities such as competitions, journals and residencies which explore the intersection between the sciences and the arts. There’s also a section for events like conferences, workshops and open mics.

Please note:

• The date in brackets is the closing date (or the opening and closing dates, if a range).

• This list is international, so the closing date might differ by a day depending on your time zone. Don't get caught out!

Submissions: Poetry

River Margin (Spotlight: Ecologies) – poetry/fiction/essays about ecology; themes Urban Ecologies, Nocturnal Ecologies and Arctic Ecologies (1 October 2026)

Australian Network of Art & Technology Synapse Residency – for Australian research organisation and creative of any discipline to collaborate (14 October 2026)

River Margin (general submissions) – poetry/fiction/essays about ecology (1 November 2026)

(Edited to add) Molecules Unlimited – poetry related to chemical sciences (link can be subtle); theme Fruit. Email unpublished poems of any length to stephenwren62@gmail.com (25 November 2026)

ionosphere – poetry/essays about science, technology and society (30 November)

Journal of Literature and Science – essays about ‘literature’ (inc. poetry) and science (ongoing call)

Tamarind – poetry/fiction/essays about science, tech & society; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Scientific American – poetry about science; short pieces preferred (ongoing call)

Poets for Science – poetry about science; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – poetry/fiction/nonfiction about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Submissions: Visual Art

Please note: “Artwork” might include traditional or digital media, photography or hybrid genres like photopoetry. Check the eligibility criteria for individual opportunities.

River Margin (Spotlight: Ecologies) – artwork/photography about ecology; themes Urban Ecologies, Nocturnal Ecologies and Arctic Ecologies (1 October 2026)

Lenscratch Art + Science Competition – photography about science; theme States of Change (9 October 2026)

Australian Network of Art & Technology Synapse Residency – for Australian research organisation and creative of any discipline to collaborate (14 October 2026)

Wellcome Photography Prize – photography about health, or created using medical/scientific imaging (21 October 2026)

River Margin (general submissions) – artwork/photography about ecology (1 November 2026)

ionosphere – artwork about science, technology and society (30 November)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – artwork about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Events/Workshops

Consilience’s own Professor Sam Illingworth will again be running his ever-popular Science Communication through Poetry course starting 13 October 2026 (register by 30 September). The course is delivered over four online sessions, providing an overview of how sci-poetry can be used for education, research or simply your own enjoyment!

The next Science Art Summit will take place on 5 November 2026. This online event will feature several short talks by sci-artists from various disciplines, followed by a panel Q&A. Registration is free.

Stephen Paul Wren is running two exciting workshops for Creative Clinic on 11 and 18 November 2026, Weaving the Chemical Sciences into Poetry (scroll to the bottom of that page for ticket details).

Registration is still open for the first-ever Poets for Science Gathering which will take place in Kent, Ohio on 12–14 November 2026. This conference will bring together the sci-poetry community for readings, panels, workshops, a book fair and more.

For UK readers, there’s also the Chemistry spoken word night at the Chemic Tavern, Leeds. The open mic has an optional chemical element theme. Next up: Ni for Nickel on 27 November 2026.

If you'd like to suggest a submission opportunity or event for this list, feel free to leave a comment on this post, drop Laura a message (Substack: Laura Webb ) or email the team ( info@consilience-journal.com ).

Good luck!

Issue 26 - ‘Birds’

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 26 of Consilience.

This issue turns its attention to birds, the part of the world that is always overhead and always somewhere else. We share the air with them without ever quite sharing it. A bird crosses the garden and is gone before the sentence about it has finished. What stays is the song in the air, the feather in the gutter, the sense of something that did not wait for us.

We tend to think of birds as freedom. Wings, sky, the old dream of leaving. But most of what a bird does is fidelity. The swift finds the same crack in the same eave after most of a year on the wing. The albatross comes back to the one partner and the one ledge. A treecreeper may live out its whole life within reach of a single oak. Even the swallows that vanish each autumn were once imagined asleep beneath the ponds, because nobody could believe they had gone so far only to return. Flight is the least of it. What birds teach is the coming back.

Science has approached birds slowly and with humility. A spectrogram can split a wren’s song into its syllables and still not say why the wren sings it that way. We know now that a falcon will carry a burning branch to dry grass to flush out its prey, that magpies gather over a dead companion, that a flock turns not because of a leader but because each bird watches its nearest neighbours and edges towards the middle. Every answer arrives holding another question. The pellet coughed up by an owl is a census of a field. The scratches on a fossil skull are the signature of an eagle. Birds keep records we are only beginning to read.

Poetry and art have never needed an excuse to look up. The bird is the oldest figure we have for what cannot be held: the soul, the message, the season turning. A poem is a bird in this sense too. It arrives, makes its noise, and leaves you holding a shape rather than a body. Art does not cage the bird. It gives you the afterimage of the wing.

Birds are also a question of what we owe. They live in the gaps we leave them: the eaves, the hedge, the strip of rough grass along the field edge, the few seconds between a hook entering the water and sinking out of reach. Seal the crack and the swift does not come home. Weight the fishing line and the albatross does not drown. Small decisions, made by people who will never see the bird, decide whether there is a bird at all.

This is also the last issue that Sam Illingworth has led as editor. He founded Consilience in the first spring of the pandemic and has steered it since, and from the next issue a committee takes his place while he stays on among the editors, still reading. Think of it less as a departure than a moult. Something is shed so that the flock/parliament/conspiracy can fly further.

So we invite you, Reader, to look up. The works in this issue do not tame their subjects or pretend to have understood them. They watch, and in that watching there is a kind of care. A bird is not ours. It is the evidence that the world carries on without us, and the promise that, if we leave the space, it will still come back.

The Consilience Team

Read Issue 26 here

Read our latest articles

From Issue 27 the journal will be run by a committee. I founded Consilience in April 2020 and have led it since. I am stepping back from running it and staying on as an editor, which means I will still be reading your submissions. I will just no longer be the person deciding what happens next.

That was always the intention. A journal about the meeting of poetry and science should never have depended on one person’s reading, and for six years it has depended rather more on mine than I would like. A committee gives it what it has been missing, which is a plurality of voices at the point where the decisions are made.

We are also changing the frequency with which we publish Consilience.

A quarterly journal is a machine with a short cycle. Submissions open, a few weeks later they close, editors read at speed, the issue goes out, and the next window opens before anyone has sat down. It has worked, and twenty-six issues plus two special issues are the evidence that it worked. But it has meant editors reading to a deadline instead of to the poem, and poets given weeks for work that wanted months.

Two issues a year gives that time back. Longer submission windows. More space between a poem or artwork arriving and a decision being made. More room for the exchanges between editor and creator that turn a good science statement into a clear one. If you have submitted to us before, you will notice the difference in the reading rather than in the schedule.

Everything else stays as it is. No submission fee. No paywall. A Creative Commons licence on every poem, so the work stays yours and stays usable. Poets and artists published side by side from wherever they happen to live, on the strength of their work.

I am proud of what we have built. The first issue went out in April 2020 and was called ‘Connectivity’, which was not a subtle title for something made in the first weeks of a pandemic by people who could not leave their houses. Twenty-six issues later we have never charged a poet or an artist to submit, and a single issue can carry work from Doha, Colombo, Rotterdam, Ann Arbor, Kingston, Chennai and Exeter. That was done by editors who were never paid a penny for it, in the evenings, after their actual jobs.

I am also excited to see where the committee takes it. It will not be where I would have taken it, and that is rather the point.

Issue 26, ‘Birds’, is with the editors now. The committee will introduce itself shortly.

Au revoir, and not goodbye.

Sam

Sitting on the scaffold of a stainless steel device used to stack atoms, roughly 15 centimeters away from a small oven containing about 500 grams of arsenic, I started typing the introduction to my dissertation by asking myself if it was worth doing science at all.

As I reflected on the value and use of the years spent doing research, and wondering about the foundations of the world around me in general, I realized I was writing something I had always wanted to read: the explanation as to why people -at least me- decide to do science, and how they go about it. I forged a way to use my voice to communicate while wearing my laboratory coat.

Sitting next to that molecular beam epitaxy system, the warmth of those small ovens evaporating metals at scorching temperatures brought me back to my first year of university: a faint smell of burning crops filled the crisp September air the night I first set up my telescope to look for Jupiter.

When it finally rose above the horizon, I was not actually ready: no amount of encyclopedia reading, YouTube videos, dynamics equations, or lucid dreaming prepared me for the absolute majesty of observing the giant planet –11 times as wide, and 318 times the mass of the Earth – hanging in the void of space seemingly untethered to anything else in the universe; somehow not falling towards me.

As I reflect on my journey I realize that the first Jupiter sighting, and the epiphany I had while writing my dissertation, were the first two knocks poetry made on my door: I have been trying to answer the call ever since by writing science poetry. Focused on the processes, results, experiences, and feelings of science and scientists, science poetry digs deep into a seemingly jargony discipline and aims to make it more accessible.

Many people and experiences have contributed to my search for a deeper meaning, which has since been rooted in what can be both perceived by the senses and only subtly detected by the marriage of intellect and feelings.

One such moment was the first time I calculated the possibility of an electron crossing a potential barrier (14%?!). What the equations revealed was essentially seeing a marble come out of a ceramic bowl through its walls, rather than over the top. It is this amalgam of reason and emotion that inspires my poetry.

As a practicing scientist, I recognize not everyone wants to be engaged in science and yet, everyone should be invited to participate. This is where science communication shines the brightest: by showcasing the excitement, the drama, the challenges, and the triumphs of the endeavor. As more people can see past the jargon, they might consider joining in.

How can I make my science an enticing invitation? During graduate school I had the opportunity to participate in events focused on telling stories: the Three Minute Thesis competition, the Story Collider, and several local slam poetry shows. While I found those forms of expression entertaining and engaging, the effort required to memorize could be better used to craft the ideas themselves. Despite this realization, I don’t think I wrote a single intentional line of poetry for about six years.

In my last semester, as the world slowly recovered from the effects of the pandemic isolation, I was also notified that my relationship was terminated effective on a particular Thursday night. I carried the turmoil, disquiet, and profound sadness of that evening for 5 months, as I landed my first real job and moved to a smaller city in the middle of November. The combination of short, dark days, new environments, and general anxiety for what was next made me turn my eyes to the forgotten section of my bookshelves: poetry.

In allowing myself to feel the emotions I wanted to bury in work, I recognized the pressure they exerted on my mind and heart. By writing a particularly disheveled collection of poetry, I felt the presence of a familiar feeling hiding in the versification of my emotional thoughts: once again, I could feel the warmth of poetry reaching for my hand.

It was this third knock on the door that made me finally want to answer the call: a passion for learning, for sharing, for helping myself understand through helping others do the same– poetry of science managed to address my longing for understanding, for aesthetic pleasure, and for communication.

Shortly after I started to work on my book (a collection of poems on the fundamental questions of physics), I discovered Consilience, and the many other authors and publishers with similar sensibilities to mine. The work of science poetry has continued to challenge the assumptions in my practice, and enabled me to leave a record of the questions I ask as I continue with my research.

For us lovers of poetry, the recent uptick in science poetry publications is a blessing: as more scientists dare to pick up a pen and write their feelings on the corner of a lab notebook, and as more poets dare to look into the dazzling ideas of cutting-edge research, the field grows and flourishes.

I am not afraid of all the good ideas “getting taken” by more skilled poets; there are zones of hidden beauty in every forgotten lab bench and vacuum chamber. It is my hope that as our understanding of the universe and our minds increases, new metaphors will make the aesthetic record of the practice of science shine just as brightly.

Author Biography

K. D. Vallejo, originally from the Ciudad Juárez/El Paso border community, now resides in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He explores the aesthetic space where science, philosophy, and language intersect. Kevin is a member of the editorial team of Consilience, and his work has been featured in The Marbled Sigh, Beyond Queer Words, The Closed Eye Open, as well as the technical journals Physical Review B, Reports of Progress in Physics, and ACS Nano. He is the author of the collection “Energy and Nothingness: Poems for the First One Hundred Years of Quantum Mechanics” (The Poetry Box, 2025). During the day he works as a vacuum scientist finding new ways to stack atoms.

We’ve collated opportunities such as competitions, journals and residencies which explore the intersection between the sciences and the arts. There’s also a section for events like conferences and open mics.

Please note:

• The date in brackets is the closing date (or the opening and closing dates, if a range).

• This list is international, so the closing date might differ by a day depending on your time zone. Don't get caught out!

Submissions: Poetry

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Rewild – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about conservation and ecological restoration (applications still open, but be quick - starts 10 August!)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia foray – retreat/field trip for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi in Ontario, Canada (9 August 2026)

Creature Conserve Curatorial Fellowship – fellowship for a creative of any discipline to help with curation/public engagement for an exhibition in Washington, D.C. focusing on conservation of winged creatures. For further information, contact: artscurator@creatureconserve.com (10 August 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mortem – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about death and mourning rituals in nature (23 August 2026)

The Conversation Climate Poetry Award – poetry by UK academics about climate change research (1 September 2026)

ANAT Bespoke – support and funding for collaborations between Australian creatives and partners in science/tech industry (1 September 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia webinars – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi (5 September 2026)

Journal of Literature and Science – essays about ‘literature’ (inc. poetry) and science (ongoing call)

Tamarind – poetry/fiction/essays about science, tech & society; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Scientific American – poetry about science; short pieces preferred (ongoing call)

Poets for Science – poetry about science; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – poetry/fiction/nonfiction about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Submissions: Visual Art

Please note: “Artwork” might include traditional or digital media, photography or hybrid genres like photopoetry. Check the eligibility criteria for individual opportunities.

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Rewild – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about conservation and ecological restoration (applications still open, but be quick - starts 10 August!)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia foray – retreat/field trip for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi in Ontario, Canada (9 August 2026)

Creature Conserve Curatorial Fellowship – fellowship for a creative of any discipline to help with curation/public engagement for an exhibition in Washington, D.C. focusing on conservation of winged creatures. For further information, contact: artscurator@creatureconserve.com (10 August 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mortem – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about death and mourning rituals in nature (23 August 2026)

ANAT Bespoke – support and funding for collaborations between Australian creatives and partners in science/tech industry (1 September 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia webinars – online residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi (5 September 2026)

Journal of Literature and Science – essays about ‘literature’ (inc. visual art) and science (ongoing call)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – artwork about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Events/Courses

Consilience’s own Professor Sam Illingworth will again be running his ever-popular Science Communication through Poetry course starting 13 October 2026 (register by 30 September). The course is delivered over four online sessions, providing an overview of how sci-poetry can be used for education, research or simply your own enjoyment!

Registration is still open for the first-ever Poets for Science Gathering which will take place in Kent, Ohio on 12–14 November 2026. This conference will bring together the sci-poetry community for readings, panels, workshops, a book fair and more.

For UK readers, there’s also the Chemistry spoken word night at the Chemic Tavern, Leeds. The open mic has an optional chemical element theme. Next up: Co for Cobalt on 25 September 2026.

If you'd like to suggest a submission opportunity or event for this list, feel free to leave a comment on this post, drop Laura a message (Substack: Laura Webb ) or email the team ( info@consilience-journal.com ).

Good luck!

Mulholland introduces this idea in the first stanza, describing lichen as a “lasting / relationship” that becomes “more / than the sum of its parts,” blurring the idea of being “individual.” As the poem unfolds, what initially appears to be a biology lesson gradually becomes something much more personal.

The poem is written in three stanzas, with each new idea building on the one before it. The first stanza begins with observation and establishes the chronology of a personal loss, only we don’t know that yet: “Afterwards I see lichen everywhere, / learn how it answers to many names: / gold dust, reindeer-moss.”

The second stanza uses the language of science to deepen our understanding of how lichen forms through collaboration: “Alga, fungus – symbiotic, giving / and taking—autotroph, heterotroph.”

In the final stanza, we are given the emotional context. The speaker arrives at the memory of her sister, brought to mind by the image of her sister’s garden where “lichen veils / the birch tree where we scattered / her ashes” and “laces the stone
wall / where she fed robins and bluetits / with crumbs from her toaster.” Here, lichen becomes more than an organism; it becomes a metaphor for understanding loss.

From a scientific perspective, lichens challenge our ideas about individuality. They are partnerships between a fungus and an alga (or sometimes cyanobacteria) that live so closely together that they become something that neither could become on its own. Mulholland’s poem suggests that perhaps our closest human relationships work that way, too.

As I sat with this poem, I started to consider the countless ways we are made by one another, especially by those closest to us. How, over time, we absorb one another’s habits, memories, perspectives, and ways of seeing until the boundaries between “you” and “me” become blurred by the shared life that we make together.

So what does it mean to lose someone whose presence in your life helped shape you?

That question lingers in the poem’s final line: “Too / late, how little I knew,” sentiments that express regret for a sister now gone and remind us how easy it is to underestimate the interdependence of the relationships closest to us.

The speaker learned the names of lichens, their biology, and their ecological significance, and, in the process, gained a new understanding of her relationship with her sister. For me, this is what makes “Lichen” such a powerful poem. It shows how collaboration between science and poetry can lead to a deeper understanding of ourselves and our relationships with one another.

Ellen Brown is a science writer and bird artist based in Duluth, Minnesota, who combines fine art and nature writing to support bird conservation. She holds a BA in Environmental Studies from the University of Minnesota and an MA in Science Writing from Johns Hopkins University. She previously served as nonfiction editor for Delmarva Review and currently reviews science poetry for Consilience. Learn more at www.EllenBrownArts.com

Read the poem here | Read Issue 25 here

I had the feeling that I had become a ghost, merely accompanying the story of this lake, its aging and its illness. When the poem describes the lake as “blue-green as a bruise” and speaks of “thinning skin” after the search for blood, we see a transformation: the lake becomes a body — a fragile body marked by repeated attempts at intervention. The poem constructs a powerful metaphor: the system of rivers and pipes that feeds the lake becomes a circulatory and respiratory system, and environmental monitoring takes on the tense rhythm of an Intensive Care Unit (ICU).

In a poetic way, Alan Kennedy-Asser explores a narrative that transcends time and space. The subtlety of the writing that evokes such an important theme makes this poem unforgettable. There is no explicit speech, only careful witnessing of the agony of a lake that is treated with the same delicacy as a human body in palliative care.

It’s hard not to think of childhood. Holidays in places with grass, lakes, play, rest, a simple experience of existing in the midst of nature. ‘Lough’ took me back in time while throwing me into a state of shock at this lake’s life course. What, in many memories, is a symbol of fun, life and peace appears here as a tired, intoxicated organism, slowly losing its ability to breathe.

A lake that means so much to a community is not just aging; it is fighting a long and arduous battle against a heartless enemy. Diffuse, chemical, silent pollution. The poem reflects the absence of concrete responses in the face of real environmental crises, in which public policies arrive late and scientific surveillance is not enough.

‘Lough’ is a poem that represents the small stories swallowed by pollution: lakes, fish, birds, communities… Nothing improves, nothing is resolved, promises are shallow. The lake is left at the mercy of events, and we are left to believe that one day, perhaps, it will resist and persevere. Or, perhaps, to accept that our belief does not replace concrete action.

I could speak about the poem’s structural beauty: lines creating the sense of continuous vigil, a slowing rhythm with images in sequence that guide us without rupture. But, I want to go further. Kennedy-Asser manages, with grace and rigor, to convey an arresting and thought-provoking ecopoem that weaves clinical and environmental language together.

More than that, Kennedy-Asser transports us to that lake and invites us to reflect on natural balance and on how human intervention pollutes what is beautiful. Pollution appears not only in the water that changes color, but also in the absence of interventions to prevent this fatal outcome. ‘Lough’ is not just a lament for the lake; it is a silent plea for us to look at these bodies of water with the same care we devote to human bodies, and, perhaps, to admit that our responsibility does not end when the pain goes “ever on.”

Dr Lavínia Romera is a scientist and writer who currently works as a senior analyst at PreScouter. She specializes in science communication and uses fictional literature and poetry as tools to make scientific concepts more accessible. She writes the Substack newsletter “entre ciência e poesia”, where she explores the intersections between literature, poetry, and science. As part of her work in scientific literacy, she published the illustrated book “O Soldadinho Defensor e Vacina.” You can explore more of her work here.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 25 here

It wasn’t a question I expected while reading ‘Asterix and the Black Gold’ with my six-year-old. Obelix had accidentally spilled oil from a flask into the sea, and for the little one, since there is oil in the water, someone must have been the first to put it there. This question stayed with me long after we had closed the book.

As adults, we often look for beginnings in much the same way. We like stories to have a clear starting point, scientific knowledge to provide definitive answers, and environmental problems to have clear, identifiable causes. Reading Isabel Carmen Johnson’s ‘Savior and Sin’ reminded me that neither science, ecosystems nor knowledge tend to unfold so neatly.

At first glance, the poem appears to tell a story about oil pollution and one of its unexpected allies: the water hyacinth, a species that was dismissed as a pest for many years and now, suddenly, becomes part of the solution. There is something quietly beautiful about that reversal. The poem embraces this duality, inviting us to reconsider easy distinctions between harm and healing, between saviour and sinner.

Its form reinforces this idea. Shaped like an oil spill, the poem first encouraged me to read from top to bottom. But then I found myself wondering what might happen if I read it differently. What if I moved in another direction? Unexpected phrases emerged, new relationships formed between words, and meanings shifted.

I don’t know whether every possible reading was intentionally designed by the poet. In a way, it doesn’t matter. The poem invites exploration. Like the natural world itself, it resists the idea that there is only one correct path and encourages readers to question our first interpretation and remain open to discovering another. Science asks us to do much the same. Observations accumulate, evidence is reassessed, explanations evolve, and our understanding deepens.

Complex systems demand multiple perspectives. An oil spill is not simply pollution. It is simultaneously a biological, economic, political and social matter. Its effects ripple through habitats, species and communities in ways that no single explanation can fully capture, and each one can be explained depending on the context in which we choose to look. Perhaps that is what ‘Savior and Sin’ mirrors so elegantly through both its subject and its form.

As science communicators, we often strive to make knowledge clearer and more accessible. That is an important goal. But sometimes accessibility comes not from simplifying complexity, but from encouraging people to question their initial assumptions and recognise that understanding a poem, an ecosystem, or the scientific process itself is rarely achieved through a single reading, but through a willingness to look again.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 25 here

Noise pollution—like light pollution, perhaps—is less concrete in its essence than visible oil spills or plastic islands in the oceans. It travels through air, is invisible, but weighs heavy as it just adds to the clamour we already deal with via mass media.

In Clark’s piece, ‘Cars drive through my bed all night’ and ‘slip over my pillows,’ only to later reappear at midday the next day, as ‘Cars drive through my soup at lunch,’ splashing the speaker with ‘vegetable broth / and pulses.’ The repetition of the metaphor carries on as ‘One driver gets stuck. / Engine revving’ so that ‘Greasy slicks form / on the surface of my soup.’ Even that noise is made more frustrating as another driver ‘ploughs through / a shallower part of the bowl’ as that second driver rants about where the first driver ought not to park. Conflict is noise, too.

Both the speaker’s bed, and the lunch hour break to eat their soup, are spaces within which a person should be able to rest and find quiet, but neither space is given that right. Instead, even though the tone is quirky and whimsical, the message that Clark is conveying is that there will soon be no respite from noise pollution.

The metaphor, of car drivers being in places where they ought not to be, is circled around to again at the end of the poem when the speaker declares that their stomach has turned with all the upset and noise. The reference to the ‘breakdown lorry’ coming into view in the final line reminds the reader that this noise pollution is as common as traffic jams or breakdowns on a motorway or highway.

Perhaps all this noise has become so common that we have become desensitized to it. The beauty of this poem is that it’s a reminder to readers to listen more carefully, more actively, and perhaps to be more still in our observations of the world around us. Too, it might be that we could work on reducing our own noise pollution, learn to be calm and quiet rather than creating a clamour.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 25 here

The theme for Issue 26 is ‘Birds’. Poetry and art submissions will open on Monday 29th June 2026 09:00 BST and close on Sunday 5th July 2026 12:00 BST.

Submit to Consilience

Spring migration has brought soaring raptors, waterfowl, and the melodies of songbirds echo in the distance. Cardinals have been snacking on service berries. Robins hop around building their nests. As I write, a Song Sparrow trills and buzzes alongside the chatter of traffic and a gentle breeze in the trees.

Bird watching in the backyard was one of my first memories of noticing nature. My dad has always had a bird feeder, even to this day. Among the suburban landscape, American Goldfinches, House Sparrows, Chickadees, and Blue Jays, would perch on the feeder, with their delicate beauty.

We mark the changing of the seasons through witnessing the buds developing into blooms; the falling of deciduous leaves; and the migratory paths of birds. We navigate the passing of time alongside the birds that nest in parks, wetlands, and forests, across rural and urban spaces. I know spring by the sound of the Red-wing Black bird chirp.

As I experience the changing of the years, birding is not just a summer hobby - it is a political act. Birding allows us to be active observers of the world. In a time where every corporation is fighting for our attention, the act of lingering with birds in nature is a rebellion. This act of contemplation allows us to experience the world with our senses, rather than being pulled away into the metallic textures and robotic reflections of modern day.

As David George Haskell reminds us, “We create wonderful places by giving them our attention, not by finding ‘pristine’ places that will bring wonder to us.”

Bird Inspired Writing Prompts

• Bird eye view: Look outside your window, or carry your notebook to a park. Write from the point of view of the bird(s) you see. What are they looking at? How do they communicate? How do they move in the air and on the ground? What do they choose to touch or avoid?

• In melody: Listen to the runs of notes and different types of sound that make up birdsong. What questions does the bird have for you? How would you respond?

• Migration: Write a story about your journey of migration. Let it be physical or spiritual.

• Reflection: Write about your most fond memory of birds.

We would love to hear your birding stories below in the comment section, or submit it to issue 26.

Submit your science-inspired poetry and artwork from Monday 29th June 2026 09:00 BST until Sunday 5th July 2026 12:00 BST.

Submit to Issue 26 'Birds'

Issue 25 - ‘Pollution’

Hello, Dear Reader, and welcome to Issue 25 of Consilience.

This issue turns its attention to residue, the part of everything that refuses to leave. Whatever we burn, build, release, or love leaves a remainder behind. The fire goes out and the air still carries it. The factory closes and the soil keeps the ledger. Residue is the world’s long memory, the proof that nothing simply ends.

We tend to think of waste as a departure. We throw something away and imagine an elsewhere that will hold it for us. There is no elsewhere. What we discard travels, settles, and waits. It comes back in the water, in the lungs, in the slow arithmetic of the years. To live is to leave a mark we cannot fully see.

Science has known this for a long time. Matter is conserved. Energy scatters but never vanishes. An isotope decays on a clock indifferent to us, and a fleck of smoke can cross an ocean to settle where it was never meant to be. Lichen reads the air and records it without complaint. The deep keeps its sediment in patient layers, a diary written by gravity. Measure anything closely enough and you find the trace of something earlier.

Poetry and art have always worked in residue. A poem is what remains of a feeling once the feeling has moved on. A painting is the dried evidence of a gesture. The line you still hear weeks later was never kept on the page. It was left in you. Art does not save the moment. It saves the stain the moment made.

Residue is also a moral question. It asks who inherits what we let go of, and whether we are willing to answer to people and places we will never meet. The honest reply is humility. We are not the end of any process. We are a middle link, handing forward more than we mean to.

So we invite you, Reader, to sit with what lingers. The works in this issue do not tidy the world or pretend it can be scrubbed clean. They attend to what stays, and in that attention there is a kind of care. Residue is not failure. It is the evidence that we were here, and the quiet promise that something always follows.

The Consilience Team

Read Issue 25 here

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The loss of my cat was a sudden accident. The kind of accident that divides time into before and after. One moment, a familiar presence is part of your everyday life and the next, there is an absence. An impossible to measure absence.

In the days that followed, I found myself revisiting habits, routines and memories, wondering if I could somehow arrive at to a different ending of the story. Then I read the poem and, perhaps, that is why it lingered with me.

God’s Cat is a poem about quantum mechanics. It draws on Schrödinger’s famous thought experiment, in which a cat inside a box is simultaneously alive and dead until observation determines an outcome. But what struck me the most was not the science itself, but the poem’s ability to encapsule uncertainty through words.

As a creative science communicator, I spend much of my time translating complex ideas into stories, images and experiences that help people connect with abstract scientific ideas. But, some of the most complex scientific ideas become meaningful to non-experts not through technical understanding, but through their connection to how we perceive and experience the world.

The poem opens with ‘a sharp knock on the door’, a tangible image that immediately grounds the reader before leading them into a world of possibility and doubt. It is this knock that becomes a sound in the reader’s mind. A moment that collapses into a single reality. Then, again, ‘a sharp knock on the door’. The line returns at the end of the poem, creating a circular structure that feels almost inescapable. Infinity and endless possibility.

Could grief follow a similar process? We always replay countless alternative versions of events. The mind generates possibility after possibility. Of course, Nazneen may not have intended quantum mechanics to become a metaphor for loss. The science remains the science.

But poetry allows ideas to resonate beyond their original context, uses scientific concepts not as explanations, but as a mode of communication through which larger questions and feelings can be explored. In the end, ‘God’s Cat’ is a great piece to encourage one to ponder about infinite potentiality. And sometimes, just like uncertainty and loss, infinite potentiality is something to be experienced and carried.

Dr Daphne Ioanna Giannoulatou is a Creative Science Communicator. Her current research and practice focus on Science and Research Engagement and Communication through the use of arts-based methods and is addressed to experts and non-experts of all ages, for educational and enrichment purposes. Visit her website to learn more.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 24 here

As such, the poem ‘Shoelaces’ by Susan Gordon Byron reminds us of the very goals of science and math – namely, to satiate our human desire to make sense of the real world by using imagined ideas, which in theory are unlimited in number. Paradoxically, one can argue that infinity doesn’t explicitly exist in our finite physical world; it is but a human-created concept that facilitates our understanding of reality. And yet, like all concepts – and, more broadly, models – in science, its fictitious nature is precisely how it derives its power – and how it demands creativity among scientists and mathematicians.

Byron engages with these ideas in so many playful ways. She creatively evokes the idea of infinity from finite objects in space and time, be they via physical shapes that loop back on themselves, cycles of birth, or even cycles of ideas. But importantly, she artfully keeps these examples small in number and open-ended enough for us to experiment with the subjectivity of our own interpretations of an infinity we can never explicitly access in our own finite reality. This mere suggestiveness highlights – through the discovering eyes of a precocious and curious girl – the simultaneous powers and limitations of our own minds.

This duality is further explored by her sudden yet apt mention of an ancient belief about weasels giving birth through the mouth, thus framing science – and learning in general – as an unending journey of which misunderstandings are a crucial part. Indeed, though the young girl excitedly saw science as static ‘facts’ to absorb, the poem actually casts science as an infinite process whose goal transcends mere facts to include a more powerful cycle of understanding – ideally even one of whimsy, creativity, and joy.

Most delightfully, this poem educated me about the rich word ‘lemniscate’. Through Byron’s clever connection to a finite and constrained snake, it shows how a naïve but intuitive mispronunciation of the word – supposedly based on mere historical and linguistic convention – can paradoxically create a barrier to its intuitive conceptual understanding. The poem vividly celebrates the word’s Latin origins (meaning ‘decorated with ribbons’) as yet another mental model of cycling endlessness. It is especially fitting that we likely all imagine ribbons and shoelaces in our mind’s eye as we engage with this poem, as these shared mental models metaphorically tie us together as we work toward a better understanding of our world and our connection to it.

… A better understanding of our world and our connection to it – perhaps that’s something that results from both good science and good poetry.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 24 here

Mala Radhakrishnan is a Professor and the current Chair of Chemistry at Wellesley College, Massachusetts, USA. In addition to publishing articles in the field of computational biophysical chemistry, she is a poet who uses verse, rhyme and humor to bridge concepts in chemistry to our everyday life. She has published two poetry books, described more here.

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We’ve collated opportunities such as competitions and journals which explore the intersection between the sciences and the arts. There’s also a section for events like conferences and open mics.

Please note:

• The date in brackets is the closing date (or the opening and closing dates, if a range).

• This list is international, so the closing date might differ by a day depending on your time zone. Don't get caught out!

Submissions: Poetry

ionosphere – poetry/essays about science, tech & society (31 May 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi (1 June 2026)

Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest – poetry/prose/spoken word about marine science and conservation; students aged 11–18 only (8 June 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Rewild – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about conservation and ecological restoration (14 June 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mortem – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about death and mourning rituals in nature (15 June 2026)

Consilience – poetry about science; theme Birds (29 June – 5 July 2026)

Molecules Unlimited – poetry related to chemical sciences (link can be subtle); theme Heart. Email unpublished poems of any length to stephenwren62@gmail.com (15 July 2026)

The Arctic Circle Residency 2027 – for scientists, activists and creatives to go to Svalbard (15 July 2026)

PhysiOdyssey – poetry/fiction/essays about physiology; novice writers, students and recent grads only (31 July 2026)

Journal of Literature and Science – essays about ‘literature’ (inc. poetry) and science (ongoing call)

Tamarind – poetry/fiction/essays about science, tech & society; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Ars Medica – poetry/fiction/essays about medicine (ongoing call)

Scientific American – poetry about science; short pieces preferred (ongoing call)

Poets for Science – poetry about science; can be previously-published (ongoing call)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – poetry/fiction/nonfiction about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Submissions: Visual Art

Please note: “Artwork” might include traditional or digital media, photography or hybrid genres like photopoetry. Check the eligibility criteria for individual opportunities.

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mycophilia – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about fungi (1 June 2026)

Bow Seat Ocean Awareness Contest – artwork/video about marine science and conservation; students aged 11–18 only (8 June 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Rewild – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about conservation and ecological restoration (14 June 2026)

Biophilium Science School for Artists: Mortem – residency for creatives of any discipline to learn about death and mourning rituals in nature (15 June 2026)

Consilience (ConsiliARTe) – artwork/hybrid work/short-form video about science; theme Birds (29 June – 12 July 2026)

The Arctic Circle Residency 2027 – for scientists, activists and creatives to go to Svalbard (15 July 2026)

PhysiOdyssey – artwork/graphic narratives about physiology; novice writers, students and recent grads only (31 July 2026)

Journal of Literature and Science – essays about ‘literature’ (inc. visual art) and science (ongoing call)

Ars Medica – artwork about medicine (ongoing call)

Creature Conserve Wildlife Spotlight – artwork about conservation of a specific animal (ongoing call)

Events

Registration is open for the first-ever Poets for Science Gathering which will take place in Kent, Ohio on 12–14 November 2026. This conference will bring together the sci-poetry community for readings, panels, workshops, a book fair and more.

For UK readers, there’s also the Chemistry spoken word night at the Chemic Tavern, Leeds. The open mic has an optional chemical element theme. Next up: Mn for Manganese on 29 May 2026, then Fe for Iron on 31 July 2026.

If you'd like to suggest a submission opportunity or event for this list, feel free to leave a comment on this post, drop Laura a message (Substack: Laura Webb ) or email the team ( info@consilience-journal.com ).

Good luck!

‘The Big Dipper’ is beautifully constructed in three sentences, each moving from the quotidian to the eternal. The first takes us from a “front porch” to the infinitude of the “night sky” and of the death – infinite indeed – indicated by the “funeral.” The second takes us from the vibrant flight of an oriole to the abstract tracing of the familiar shape of the Big Dipper, but along an unfamiliar, lazy-eight lemniscate route.

Infinity again, but not the unending void of space and death. Instead, a cyclical infinity that somehow feels more comforting. Implicitly mirrored in the year-round rotation of the circumpolar Dipper and the seasonal nocturnal migration of the oriole, this cyclical infinity hints at the promise of life from death. It is reflected, too, in the sinuous shape of the poem along the page, and in the cleverly repeated ampersands of near figure-eights.

It is the precise infinity-symbol tracing of stars in their Arabic names that points to an additional science-poetry layer. It was (as I learned) the Arabic astronomer Abd al-Rahman al-Sufi who wrote and illustrated the comprehensive Book of Fixed Stars (c. 964 CE), integrating Greek and Arabic knowledge in a combined astronomical and cultural mapping. And it was his son, poet Abu Ali Husayn ibn al-Sufi, who composed the ‘Poem on the Stars’ (c. 1010), a rhyming mnemonic based on his father’s scientific writings and illustrations.

In its second stanza ‘Poem on the Stars’ describes the Dipper (Carey 2009):

In the bear’s body, there are four stars
They form a square

It turns around the [North] Pole like a wheel
The Arabs call it the Bier (nash)

Three stars are in a line
At dusk they appear to the eye

The Arabs call them the Daughters (al-banāt)
This follows the traditional narrators

The three star-daughters of the dipper’s handle are in a funeral procession following the four corners of their father’s bier as they slowly, endlessly, circle the North star. This thousand-year old star-naming found poem is an intercultural, interdisciplinary, intergenerational mashup of science-art communication.

Returning to the ‘The Big Dipper’, the final sentence takes us again from the mortal to the immortal, from the insomniac’s “senescent cells” to the averred need for “…poets wandering / with pastors, physicists, / & astronomers late at night / searching among the stars.” Here the Geskey seems to speak directly, delightfully, to the despondent Whitman who on hearing “the learn’d astronomer,” departed alone into the night to recover, “… and from time to time, / Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.” Reconsider, Geskey seems to say, kindly, for do we not need an eternal confluence of wandering nocturnal philosophers of all kinds?

An Editor’s Pick, ‘The Big Dipper’ imagines a crepuscular moment in which pondering the all-too finite human condition leads us to a vision of infinity that brings solace and conviction. This shift is mediated by a steady naming of stars underpinned by a millenium-old fusion of science and poetry, situating us all, poet and readers, in a rich intertextual lineage.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 24 here

Sources:

Carey, Moya. 2009. Al-Sufi and Son: Ibn al-Sufi’s Poem on the Stars and Its Prose Parent. Muqarnas: An Annual on the Visual Culture of the Islamic World XXVI: 181-204.

Constellation Guide: https://www.constellation-guide.com/big-dipper/#Big_Dipper_stars

The plate “Ursa Major” in the 1825 star chart set Urania’s Mirror is labeled the Arabic star names (Benetnasch was another name for Alkaid). Engraved by Sidney Hall based on illustrations in Alexander Jamieson’s A Celestial Atlas. Source: Wikipedia (public domain).

A crop of the illustration of Ursa Major in Al Sufi’s Book of Fixed Stars. The mirror image orientation depicts the constellation as it would be shown on a celestial globe.

Source: https://womensliteracysudan.blog/2023/12/30/the-mourning-maidens/ (image in public domain, per Wikipedia).

A guest post by Marjorie Wonham: https://fish.uw.edu/faculty/marjorie-wonham/

I am a PhD student in clinical-community psychology, and in my clinical training I have witnessed this ongoing battle. When the object of scientific inquiry is a person - one you form a therapeutic relationship with, the humanity of it all becomes difficult to partition.

Despite our occasional philosophical differences, the sage advice of my clinical supervisor rings true to me: learn everything you can about therapy, mental disorders, and research - then forget it and be a human with the client in front of you.

There is a balance to be struck between rigorously-evidenced practice and free creativity.

My specific question is this:

If the experience of practicing therapy and writing poetry feels similar to me, are the structures of each analogous?

The Structure of Poetry and its Therapeutic Equivalents

The poet orchestrates the poem’s structural elements to develop it. Creativity with these structural elements allows for play with sound, grammar, emotion, and meaning, and their elegant interplay with content make for a good poem. If you subscribe, as I do, to a philosophy that the poem is a locus of communication between the poetic speaker and the reader - mediated through interpretive frames - then the structural elements can be used to convey the speaker’s emotion and meaning to the reader, which is the ultimate goal of poetry.

Similarly, the therapist orchestrates (as much as the mental health system will allow) the structural elements of therapy. Creativity in the structure, as well as its interplay with the content of therapy, enhances the desired therapeutic effects in the client, which is the ultimate goal of therapy.

Good therapists identify ways that the novel arrangement of elements can be leveraged to engage the client in healing processes - emotional experiencing, examination of beliefs, exploring the effects of the past on the present, and so on.

In both cases the content is not restricted by the structure. Just like a course of therapy can be about anything a client brings to the room, so too can a poem be about anything in the world. Structure can enhance the content in both cases, but it never restricts it.

The Poetic Form

The poetic form is the ultimate governor of all of the above. I think it is roughly equivalent to the genre of other narrative arts: the horror movie, or the telenovela, or the bildungsroman. It determines the rules and expectancies of a poem.

The ghazal is a poem consisting of couplets with a pattern of rhyme/refrain often dealing with spiritual and romantic love. The anima methodi is a 16-lined poem comprising two stanzas of eight lines, requiring continuity through words or phrases repeated across the stanza break.

Poetic forms can have a weighty history (of its use), or sometimes even of an entire culture.

I see the therapeutic orientation as the poetic form’s equivalent. You can read this brief primer from my own personal Substack on the mainstream therapy orientations. Therapeutic orientations (like ACT, CPT, psychodynamic, etc.) are similarly determinative of every other feature of the structure. They provide the rules and expectancies for the what, how, when, and why of the therapist–client interaction. They carry the weight of a history of that therapeutic orientation - e.g., tracing psychodynamic therapy back to Jung and Freud. Breaking the rules is often seen as taboo by practitioners of the orientation, and there is sometimes a stubbornness among adherents that their way is the only way to do good therapy.

The Line

The poetic line - and, in prose poetry, the sentence - serves as the basic organizing unit of a poem. It organizes the sound of language - and, as James Longenbach says, it “distinguishes our experience of poetry as poetry, rather than some other kind of writing”. Lineation gives the poem its visual horizontal shape and influences its rhythm. And, in my view, poems are often most memorable for their powerful lines.

I see the therapy session as the line’s equivalent. The therapy session is the organizing unit of the course of therapy (typically between 12–16, which is coincidentally the length of many short poems). The therapy session is versatile: it can be focused on a single topic or span many; it can be standalone or be part of an ordered sequence; and it can pack a lot of power within. Sometimes, I can trace the beginning of my clients’ therapeutic growth to a powerful single breakthrough session - where the therapy (and the poem) really gets into its stride.

The Stanza

The stanza (Italian: room) is a higher level of organization. It demarcates the vertical shape of the poem. It also often serves as a unit of meaning, functionally equivalent to the story arc. Depending on the poetic form, each stanza often contains similar amounts of content (“line counts”) as other stanzas.

I see the therapeutic module as the stanza’s equivalent. Some therapies are formally modularized in the same fashion as stanzas - manualized Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) comes to mind, which organizes its content into modules (e.g., Distress Tolerance, Mindfulness, etc.) with set topics or approaches. In other cases, therapeutic journeys often resemble a series of narrative arcs: working on their presenting problem; pivoting to the underlying causes and exacerbating circumstances; discussing their history and how it informs their self-understanding; identifying how they want to live in the present - and so on.

The Metre

The metre is the rhythm of the poem, based on syllables or stress on syllables within a line. It resembles the time signature of a music piece, governing the starts, stops, and lengths of the sounds. These restrictions on rhythm demand that the poet choose words that fit them. It can set the tone of a poem, provide a flow to it, and establish a pattern to be (intentionally) broken.

I see the session schedule/rhythm as the metre’s equivalent. In standardized therapies, therapists follow a set schedule for what is done when during the session.

For example, Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT) for Trauma sets an agenda for every single session - in Session 3, you (1) provide a measure for trauma (2) have the client complete worksheets on thoughts and feelings about traumatic events, (3) provide new practice assignments. In more flexible therapies, sessions tend to follow a certain rhythm.

When I practice Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), sessions typically involve flexibly shifting between (A) discussion of the client’s experiences and their responses to them (B) discussion of the client’s experiences in session and the process as it occurs (C) identifying unhelpful patterns of functional responses (D) working through exercises to practice more helpful patterns of functional responses. In both cases, the therapist–client dyad is restricted by these rhythms in what they include in the sessions.

But like with metre, we can choose to creatively break the rhythm for a good reason - perhaps to highlight a therapeutically significant moment, or break a client out of “stagnancy”.

The Rhyming Scheme

Rhyme generates sonic connections between lines, reflecting thought patterns and hinting at semantic connections. In the poems I enjoy most, rhyming schemes are effective at demonstrating the underlying design and meaning of the poem. Take my favorite last two lines from T. S. Eliot’s Rhapsody on a Windy Night:

Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.

The last twist of the knife.

Setting aside the indelible impact of that last line, the rhyme with the previous line stamps the last line’s meaning very clearly: it is the realization of the mundanity of life that is the most existentially painful.

I see the therapeutic use of metaphor as the closest equivalent to rhyming scheme. This one is tricky, because some therapies frown on using metaphors as a therapeutic tool. But in therapies that I practice - such as ACT or psychodynamic therapy - metaphors are extremely useful.

In ACT, metaphors are created and referenced between therapist and client to provide perspective on problems. These metaphors are then often referenced when similar problems appear. A common metaphor in ACT for the problem of fusion is playing tug-of-war against a relentless monster across a bottomless pit, representing the way we struggle against our minds.

In psychodynamic therapy, the psychodynamic therapist can probe novel metaphors that clients generate to explain their feelings and narratives for flexibility.

In both cases, because they can be recalled across sessions, they serve as a shared reference between client and therapist, linking the different “lines”.

Therapy, as Currently Practiced, Looks A Lot Like an Art

The good therapist shapes their therapy practice adopting the good poet’s mind: why this structural element was chosen and what purpose it serves. A master poet/therapist knows all the rules and is creative in how they break them.

The science of therapy appears to be pushing us ever closer to an algorithmic approach, but I suspect that the best therapy experiences are poetically orchestrated. Maybe therapists have something to learn from poets after all!

Author Bio: Dylan Randall Wong is a PhD student in Clinical-Community Psychology at the University of South Carolina. Alongside his therapy training, his research focuses on implementation and evaluation science applications to community-based prevention programs. He is also a poet who has published both within and beyond the Consilience Journal. In his spare time, he serves as a volunteer editor for Consilience Journal. He also writes a Substack blog, in which he attempts to build on the consilience of disparate fields, ideas, and media across arts and science. You can subscribe here: The Zone of Analogical Development!

Literature and the creative world more broadly has a wonderful tradition of imagining alternative worlds. What if the Axis powers had won World War II (Fatherland; The man in the high castle)? What if the USA had joined the Axis powers instead (The plot against America)? (Ok, I see a theme here, perhaps I read too many modern history-inspired novels).

I spend too long thinking about my personal “what ifs”: what if I had studied a different subject, or not moved to the UK, or not taken this job or that job? What would my life look like today?

With “Everything is Simple”, Evangeline Beeching goes a bit bigger. Way bigger (or dare I say, infinitely bigger). What if the concept of infinity had never been ‘invented’? What would a world without infinity look like?

The beauty of this particular thought experiment is that the impact of a world without the concept of infinity is actually quite hard to grasp, for me at least. Infinity is itself difficult to understand, and yet a world without it is just as challenging.

As I write this post, and think about the thought experiment, I ask Gemini: Is a world without infinity too hard to imagine? It tells me that it’s actually much easier to imagine because everything is finite and there is no longer the unthinkable. Although apparently there is a finite number of songs and books and films that could ever be made. That surely is unthinkable.

These are some of the ideas that Beeching plays with; a world without mysteries and surprises. A simple, predictable world, with no complexity and nothing to discover. Everything fits neatly into boxes, everything makes sense, “every rung is visible”, so we have no need for anyone looking to discover and uncover. “The end is only the end”.

Is this world easier to imagine? Personally, I’m still struggling with it, but maybe that’s just me. Or the difference between us and computers.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 24 here

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The form matters here. Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter with a consistent rhyme scheme create a sense of precision and control. The structure feels like the census it interrogates: tidy, bounded, confident in its categories. But the poem pushes against that scaffolding from within. The volta arrives as a question rather than a statement (‘Did “any” plant all day, then nurse all night’) and the neat categories start to buckle under the weight of lived experience.

What strikes me most is the final couplet. ‘Who are we / to measure once and cut infinity?’ In prosody, a masculine ending places the stress on the final syllable of a line, landing with a sense of closure; a feminine ending lets an unstressed syllable trail after it, leaving the line open. Throughout the poem, the line endings tend to close firmly. But ‘infinity’ is a feminine ending. The stress falls on the third syllable and the word drifts past it, unresolved. The poem’s tight frame cracks open at the exact moment it names what it cannot hold.

The attention to language as a sorting mechanism is similarly sharp. ‘Any’ and ‘only’ are both absolutes, but they produce wildly different pictures of the same reality. The poem makes us feel how much disappears in the gap between those two words. A 56% and a 9% can describe the same women on the same farms, and yet tell entirely different stories.

‘Uncountable’ uses the tightest possible form to argue for what form cannot capture. For me, it is that tension that gives it its power.

Read the poem here | Read Issue 24 here

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