At a time when the Humanities are under threat, this book offers a defense of poetry within the context of growing interest in mindfulness in business, health care, and education. The book argues that the benefits and insights mindfulness provides are also cultivated by the study of poetry. These benefits include a focus on the present, the ability to see through scripts and habits, a rethinking of subjectivity, and the development of ecological or systems thinking. Bryan Walpert employs close readings of traditional and experimental poetry and draws on scientific studies of the effects of mindfulness or reading literature on the brain. It argues the skills that poetry, like mindfulness, cultivates are useful beyond the page or classroom and ultimately are necessary to engage with such global issues as the environmental crisis.

This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist arguments (inherited from Eliot and Pound, arguments influenced in part by relativity and quantum theory), and postmodernist arguments (arguments informed by post-structuralist theory, e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, with affinities to arguments for the limitations of science in the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science). Some of these poems reveal the discursive ideologies of scientific language-reveal, in other words, the performativity of scientific language. In doing so, these poems themselves can also be read as performative acts and, therefore, as forms of intervention rather than representation. Reading Retallack alongside science studies scholar Karen Barad, the book concludes by proposing that viewing knowledge as a form of intervention, rather than representation, offers a bridge between contemporary poetry and science.

This book examines types of resistance in contemporary poetry to the authority of scientific knowledge, tracing the source of these resistances to both their literary precedents and the scientific zeitgeists that helped to produce them. Walpert argues that contemporary poetry offers a palimpsest of resistance, using as case studies the poets Alison Hawthorne Deming, Pattiann Rogers, Albert Goldbarth, and Joan Retallack to trace the recapitulation of romantic arguments (inherited from Keats, Shelly, and Coleridge, which in turn were produced in part in response to Newtonian physics), modernist arguments (inherited from Eliot and Pound, arguments influenced in part by relativity and quantum theory), and postmodernist arguments (arguments informed by post-structuralist theory, e.g. Barthes, Derrida, Foucault, with affinities to arguments for the limitations of science in the philosophy, sociology, and rhetoric of science). Some of these poems reveal the discursive ideologies of scientific language?reveal, in other words, the performativity of scientific language. In doing so, these poems themselves can also be read as performative acts and, therefore, as forms of intervention rather than representation. Reading Retallack alongside science studies scholar Karen Barad, the book concludes by proposing that viewing knowledge as a form of intervention, rather than representation, offers a bridge between contemporary poetry and science.

"So many poems articulate either certainty or its opposite, nihilism. What I love...is that the speaker takes the time to change his or her mind; this is a poem that thinks...And what thoughts: goats, lutes, and shot glasses abound, as do intelligence and sly humor."--David Kirby, judge, James Wright Poetry Award
"I imagine it was a matter of the sheer control, the precision of the descriptive language, the beautiful cadences. We are participants...standing at the shoulder of the poet in the deeper darkness before dawn as description gives way to meditation and thence to the more personal conversation we overhear. It is a beautifully measured poem which deepens even as the day lightens."--James Norcliffe, judge, New Zealand Poetry Society International Poetry Competition