
I ran into James Thornton’s The Feynman Challenge at Book Culture in NYC. The conceit of the collection is what grabbed me. Thornton is responding to a challenge that Feynman issued to poets in his Lectures on Physics.
Poets say science takes away from the beauty of the stars–mere globs of gas atoms. I too can see the stars on a desert night, and feel them. But do I see less or more? The vastness of the heavens stretches my imagination–stuck on this carousel my little eye can catch one-million-year-old light. A vast pattern–of which I am a part… What is the pattern, or the meaning, or the why? It does not do harm to the mystery to know a little about it. For far more marvelous is the truth than any artists of the past imagined it. Why do the poets of the present not speak of it? What men are poets who can speak of Jupiter if he were a man, but if he is an immense spinning sphere of methane and ammonia must be silent?
I recorded James in his home in Santa Monica. The poems are wonderful, and overall sound is good, except for the late appearance of a circular saw coming from some nearby workmen.
Listen to all recordings at So I Have Heard