is it possible to be both a scientist and a poet? do i have enough life for these two lives? can i really keep up with the demands of a scientific career and still go as far as i want to with my poetry - which is as far as humanly possible? i'm already 27 and have wasted so many years. i haven't read or written nearly enough. now suddenly i feel what i believe is true drive and passion for the first time in my life and all i want to do is exist in a cocoon of words.
I could have written this myself. I know what it is to be torn between these two lives and not know how to reconcile them. Earlier this summer I told two separate friends working on graduate degrees in physics (like me) that I was going to begin trying to publish my poetry under my real name and in both cases their response was a confused why? I come home from work exhausted and brain-dead most days and I don’t have the energy to write. Or I go into the lab and sit at my desk all morning without accomplishing anything because I have so many words circling and unfurling in my head. One day last week I didn’t even make it into the lab because I stopped at the library and came home with twenty-odd books of poetry. Am I wasting my time because I can’t commit to either of these lives and wear myself out continually switching between them?
I’m sorry I can’t lift either of us out of this place. I’m sure we’re not alone in this. I don’t believe, though, that poetry exists in isolation. I don’t know how far I can go while holding onto a scientific career (and sometimes am not sure I want one) but even here I know what it is to write poetry. To write the poem that, even imperfect, even incomplete, captures something real – a voice you didn’t know was yours, saying something you’d forgotten how to say. The poems that have made me feel that way have come out of both these lives because they are mine, wholly and completely. One line after the other, rung by rung, we get a little closer to what it means to be a poet.
As tired as I am then, I can’t believe that these years are wasted. I don’t have the passion for my field that I have for poetry, and perhaps I can’t excel at both. I haven’t figured out what to do with that yet. I don’t divide myself into the poet and the scientist any more. When I write, I’m myself, whole. There’s never enough – I’m never finished. I think I could spend as long writing one poem as writing my entire thesis. Would that make me any more a poet? How can we go as far as humanly possible without taking time to be human? Poetry will always ask more than we can give it, but how else could it transcend us? How lucky we are to have found this insatiable hunger for poetry. More than anything else, it’s what has brought me to life.
