Creative Recognitions: Science, Writing and the Creative Academy
by David Morley
'... several things dovetailed in my mind and at once it struck me, what quality went to form ... Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - ...'
John Keats
'When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images'.
Neils Bohr
I. Icebergs, Space
Think of an empty page as open space. It possesses no dimension. Human time makes no claim. Everything is possible, at this point endlessly possible. Anything can grow in it. Anybody, real or imaginary, can travel there, stay put, or move on. There is no constraint, except the honesty of the writer and the scope of imagination-qualities with which we are born and characteristics that we can develop. Writers are born and made.
We could shape a whole world into that space, or even fit several worlds, their latitudes and longitudes, the parallel universes. Equally, we could place very few words there, but just enough of them to show a presence of the life of language. If we can think of the page as an open space, even as a space in which to play, we will understand that it is also Space itself. By choosing to act, by writing on that page, we are creating another version of time; we are playing out a new version of existence, of life even. We are creating an entirely fresh piece of space-time, and another version of yourself.
The Iceberg
Space-time is a four-dimensional space used to represent the Universe in the theory of relativity, with three dimensions corresponding to ordinary space and the fourth as time. I mean the same when thinking about creative writing. Writing a poem, a story, or a piece of creative nonfiction, is to catalyze the creation of a four-dimensional fabric that is the result when space and time become one.
Every event in the universe can be located in the four-dimensional plane of space and time. Writing can create personal universes in which this system of events within space-time operates for the reader; the reader is its co-creator. Writing and reading are collaborative acts in the making and performance of space-time. Readers participate; they become, partly, writers. They will take part, consciously and unconsciously, in a literary creation, and live their life in that moment and that speed-while they are reading.
The reader lives their reading-time in a kind of psychological fifth dimension, where the book takes them, where the reader places themselves. A novel or poem is the visible part of an iceberg. As Ernest Hemingway put it, the knowledge a writer brings to the creation of that novel or poem is the unrevealed submerged section of that same iceberg. Here are some cards; here is my table. I think creative writing can be taught most effectively when its students have some talent and vocation for it. If a teacher can shape the talent and steer that vocation, and the students enjoy the shaping and steering-then I think creative writing should be taught as a craft.
The whole point of teaching creative writing, however, is that students must learn to make and guide themselves, for writing is mostly a solitary pursuit, even when written collaboratively using electronic media. I also believe creative writing could be taught within other disciplines, as an option alongside science and social science, if students of those disciplines have some desire to try it, and can take the practice of creative writing for what it is, a possible second string, or a second chance at something from which they gain pleasure.
It does not have to contribute to the pursuit of their profession, so long as the pleasure principle is foremost. It might contribute at some point through creative nonfiction. The role of popular science in raising the public's awareness of science and technology is a delightful benefit we consider in this piece. The pleasure of creativity illuminates aspects of knowledge that we regard as non-literary, especially if we begin to accept the arguments of cognitive science: that 'the literary mind is the fundamental mind', not a separate kind of mind.
Alongside many other neuroscientists, Mark Turner contends, 'Story is a basic principle of mind', and 'the parable is the root of the human mind-of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly of speaking' (1996: 1). Writing is an extreme act of attention and memory; it pleads with your brain-cells to make new connections. As neuroscientists put it, neurons that fire together wire together, and inspiration could be more natural to and more nurtured in a writer because he or she simply read the world (and the world of literature) a little closer when they were children. Your brain interacts with itself: hearing words, seeing words, speaking words and generating verbs. These functions occur in widely spaced sections of the brain.
Creative writing 'commands' these different departments of self to start co-operating, and they will, by stretching out synapses over relatively huge neural distances, wiring up. What else are they going to connect with along the way? What monsters or angels might be imagined into being? This is how writers are made, how the nanotechnology of your imagination is intricately (and provisionally) constructed. We are capable of developing complementary senses-sight with sound, taste with touch, time with hearing; or all senses simultaneously transmitted through the medium of one line of poetry, or one paragraph of description.
This is how your imagination talks to itself, talks across itself even, and becomes ever more versatile. Writing rewires our brains-from our tongue to our eye to our hands. It encourages synaesthesia: one sense triggers an image or a sensation in another. When we stop paying attention to the world we do ourselves great harm. It is like a slow suicide of thought with the senses. The imaginative gains of synaptic complication are always provisional. We are neurologically changed by our experience of writing as much as we are by reading.
For a writer, metaphor is an art of attention seeking, of asking you to perceive some thing afresh. Creative writing is the art of defamiliarisation: an act of stripping familiarity from the world about us, allowing us to see what custom has blinded us to. It is no less than an act of revivification. Metaphor has power and permutation, almost like a magic force. Metaphor is 'a transfer of meaning in which one thing is explained by being changed either into another thing or into an emotion or idea' (Kinzie, 435).
As Shelley wrote of poetry, it 'lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as they were not familiar'. In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson contend 'Metaphorical thought is normal and ubiquitous in our mental life, both conscious and unconscious. The same mechanisms of metaphorical thought used throughout poetry are present in our most common concepts: time, events, causation, emotion, ethics, and business, to name but a few' (244).
Scientific, philosophical and artistic breakthroughs often go through four stages of cognitive and creative process: attention to detail (of a problem) * translation to metaphor * defamiliarisation * receiving something at a different angle; in effect, perceiving it anew, as a child does. We now know a little more about the physiological and neural states that certain types of creativity take, as well as those phases which acts of creativity and metaphor engender in readers.
The making of creative language and story is natural, and part of everybody's potential world. "Inspiration" and fluency are aspects of our neural flexibility, and practice, endeavour and good perception make them so. As Flaubert claimed to Van Gogh, 'Talent is long patience, and originality an effort of will and of intense observation' (Oliver, 1994: 121). A Play of Mind. So: is the literary mind the fundamental mind? Are we all born storytellers and metaphor-makers?
In The Seven Basic Plots, Christopher Booker argues that there are seven standard storylines in the world that all fiction uses and recycles. He believes, 'The very fact that they follow such identifiable patterns and are shaped by such consistent rules indicates that the unconscious is thus using them for a purpose: to convey to the conscious level of our mind a particular picture of human nature and how it works' (553). This creates an interesting picture of the power and purpose of story, but is an impossible point either to prove or falsify.
It is important not to lie about creative writing. It is not in its nature. Yet, what is its nature-what is our nature?-if not in the making of fictions and metaphors? What are our lives but stories we constantly rewrite? What are metaphors but fictions, doppelgangers, sculpted otherness? Voice, for example, sings within a writer's poems or stories. The poems and stories possess that voice, or are possessed by it. A writer's voice is a metaphor for spoken voice, but is not the voice of the poet or novelist.
We need to travel back in time. If we go back to the plausible origin of creative writing as a taught discipline, we open Aristotle's Poetics, and read that 'the standard of rightness is not the same in poetry as it is in social morality or indeed in any other art' (that is poetry as an art of fiction and drama). We might conclude that same oscillating standard holds within creative writing. We could reason that it depends upon the position of the player; on a writer as player of language; on their play of mind on mind, and mind in mind. The craft of writing lies in the way the cards of language are played; the voice in how the cards become your choices.
II. Hedgerows, Trees
Most of the ways we express ourselves in prose and in speech are imprecise; tangential at best to what we intend to say and mean. We all know the frustration of not having said what we intended; of not having communicated what you felt was your version of a truth. However, writing gives you time for rehearsal, and time to get your words as right as possible. Clarity is the-I mean the-desirable quality in writing.
As Strunk and White declare, 'Although there is no substitute for merit in writing, clarity comes closest to being one' (2000: 79). Clarity is of the first importance. When we use words, we have to use the right words and the right words in the best order. When we examine and fossick the world for material for our writing, we must be precise about what we really see, hear, touch, smell and taste. The garden of language is the same; so much language claims our attention and thought, that we must be precise in what we choose, in where we place it and in the overall and particular correspondences of those placings.
Our perceptions and apprehensions are, of course, partial and particular, but we can train ourselves to perceive more imaginatively and empathically through practice. Knowing that the world is wider than our thought leaves people with a choice either to find out more about that world or to find the worlds inside you. Both are positive choices since they are active. An easier life is available through a wilful ignorance of the self and the world around you. This option is not available to us as writers.
A writer will want to balance these choices but pursue them both simultaneously. There are various ways to get out of oneself and into the world. Experience plays a part, and our notebooks allow us to arrest the motion of experience and record it for our use, but engagement with knowledge plays a part also.
Forms of knowledge carry their cargoes through language. We can borrow these languages, we can burrow into these forms of knowledge, but it is our duty to do so honestly, and learn their precision and, with that, their power. Raiding the Languages of Science.Names have great power, and here we encompass not only the names of people, places and countries, but also the scientific and local names for fauna and flora.
We might learn the terms for natural phenomena created by geography, geology, astronomy and oceanography, and the terminologies of the synthetic world from fields of architecture, information technology and engineering. Moreover, we need not stop at names and terms; by entering into an engagement with traditionally non-literary fields of knowledge, we open their languages (and even their sometimes-opaque jargon) for our use as writers. By doing so, we release fresh themes and subjects for our imagination to scrutinize, turn over and play with.
The American poet, Marianne Moore, wrote poems the design of which depended mostly on syllabic count and intricate judgments concerning space and line-breaks. The language and subject of her poetry almost seemed to spring from the language and subject of a clear scientific paper. As William Logan puts it, 'Moore found the poetry lying asleep within prose, in manuals and monographs, advertisements and government reports' (2005: 89).
Here is the opening of 'The Icosasphere' (1968: 143):
"In Buckinghamshire hedgerowsthe birds nesting in the merged green density,
weave little bits of string and moths and feathers
and thistledown,
in parabolic concentric curves"
and, working for concavity, leave spherical feats
of rare efficiency...
A reading of Moore's 'Notes' to her poems reveals a scrupulous regard for recording the source of her creations. They illuminate the extent of her library, the compendiousness and open-mindedness of her reading, her voracity for knowledge, the polyvalence of which appeals to a writer. With regard to the poem above, the sources throw light on not only the subject of the poem, but also on the geometrical design of her work.
Try writing a story or poem that contains her finding that 'a steel globe of twenty equilateral triangles-the greatest number of regular sides geometrically possible-could be grouped into five parallelograms and cut from rectangular sheets with negligible scrap loss' (1968: 281). You can discover precise, clear language of this type easily, and a good creative exercise is to "find" such material and transform it into something of your own.
Take any good field guide you have to hand and open it at random. You will find precise, and sometimes magically incisive, description, and names that seem to fall from fairytales, and a language as precise as it is strange to the ear. In the following example, I have broken some scientific prose verbatim into counted syllabic lines; I have placed episodes of linked description into stanzas, and indented lines in a way which forces the eye to move around the page to find connections, puzzlements and answers. Nevertheless, it could also stand as prose given the right context; little has been changed; the italics are in the original text, The Collins Guide to Trees:
Found Poem: 'The European Larch' [1]
The Alps-replaced by Norway Spruce in colder, wetter areas-with ranges in the Tatra and Sudetan plains and mountains of Poland. Long cultivated and abundant: in older plantations, shelter beds and parks, away from cities and the driest, drabbest areas. Timber tough and rot-resistant; Tatra and Sudetan forms make the finest variety plantation trees. Variants: 'Pendula', that broad and depressed-looking tree displays exaggeratedly weeping shoots; most rare; even rarer, spectacularly weeping cultivars. Shape: spire-like, on a trunk straight up only in the finest, sheltered trees; often broad and characterful in age in arid or exposed sites. The fine shoots hang under the branches. Blond in winter. More finely, spikily twiggy-set against, say, the Ginkgo or, say, a Swamp Cypress. Saplings grow wildly twisting trunks. They unbend with maturity. Leaves: vividgreen, two pale bands beneath. Cones: soon brown: egg-shaped when ripe, their scales not or scarcely not curving. Female flowers: bright as rubies in mid-Spring among new green needles. They are easily overlooked. Precision and Science.
The right names and terms give your writing greater power and shows you have done your work. Precise language wakes or re-wakes the world and replicates it more immediately than a film ever could. Moreover, clarity finds its equal in simplicity-the hardest skill for a writer to master. The other property in writing that comes out of precision, clarity and simplicity is a natural 'sound' or voice to the writing (Raymond Carver and Robert Frost are exemplary in this respect). The "ear" of the writer becomes unmuffled, and the language carries that quality too; in doing so it feels natural, it feels of the world rather than an artifice made from the world.
As an example for possible imitation, read this extract from "A Cold Spring" by Elizabeth Bishop: 'The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak. Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer... Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies begin to rise: up, then down, then up again: lit on the ascending flight, drifting simultaneously to the same height, -exactly like the bubbles in champagne' (Bishop, 1979: 56). Swung through the sober oak. Song-sparrows were wound up for summer. Fireflies lit on the ascending flight.
The trained field biologist in me wants to shout, exactly! and then discover what 'the same height' for fireflies is. Alert, evocative, precise writing of this standard is not too far from the best observational nature writing, or writing that arises from scientific enquiry. Obviously, an ethologist would not reach for the simile of 'exactly like the bubbles in champagne' while writing a scientific paper, but they might were they writing a popular nonfictional book on the life of fireflies. You may wish to learn this precision too: by observation of the world, and making translations from the natural world into your own creative writing.
III. Midges, Bees
I began my working life as a scientist, one who also wrote creatively, and I would say that if what you do requires you at best to write clearly, then we are all writers. The Two Cultures, the division of knowledge systems into Arts and Science, was a splintering of the processes by which knowledge and language move and grow.
There are no Two Cultures, and there never were. The debate between science and arts was based largely on prejudice, fear, and a kind of snobbery-a class war between disciplines, their teachers and their students. We might as well say there are a Million Cultures for all the illumination such a debate brings. Creative writing as a discipline may help to shift the debate into a more constructive set of engagements. Reading nonfiction is as vital as reading fiction or poetry.
Popular science provides you with research material for creative nonfiction, fiction and poetry. Reading science, or biographies of scientists, will present you with ideas, characters, and situations. It will also give you new language: the terminology of science is gravid with metaphor, and is constantly inventing new usages. In my own university, undergraduate students take a three-year honours degree in creative writing, balancing the study of literature with its practice.
In their second and third year, students tend to specialize in a genre, such as poetry, fiction, drama or creative nonfiction. Specialization is a necessary prison, given the structures of the academy, but it is a falsification of how writers work in the world: it prizes focus above experience. This open prison needs to become open space. Therefore, these students are also encouraged to take or audit courses outside Humanities and creative writing, for example in philosophy or psychology, but also in medicine, physics, mathematics, biology, chemistry or information technology.
Obviously, they need to have some interest and experience of these subjects first, but what they are doing is ploughing a subject for language and material they might use later in creative writing. They are also developing a more rounded profile of qualifications that they can take usefully into the real world. And they are acting as ambassadors for creative thought and practice among students of science and social science; they gain experience of people and ideas they otherwise may not encounter. There is two-way traffic.
Some of the most enthusiastic students of creative writing at my own university come from physics, computing and mathematics. They borrow the concision and play of poetic technique to understand and communicate the concision and play of the languages of their own subjects. They use narrative fiction to tell science-based stories. Are these 'practitioners' writers? Some of them become part-time writers while carrying out research in their disciplines. Most go on to become teachers of physics, computing and mathematics. They use creative Writing Games as a means to teach their subject.
Entrepreneurial students from our business school have done the same. They understand that the industry of "business games" as icebreakers, creativity exercises and meeting energizers is close in approach to that of the generative writing workshop or Writing Game. They parachute into our courses; steal ideas; and parachute out. Just like writers. Creative Writing with Science. It is a fair, if flawed, perception that somehow, the hypothesis-making part of the scientific process is creative; and the testing and experimental stage draws away from art. The act of drawing away is not entirely the case for those of us who have lived by science.
Repeated experimentation and the process of scientific dissemination are precisely analogous to the processes of rewriting, publication, and criticism. Some litterateurs like to live their lives in terminology; scientists leave it behind them in the lab; good writers leave it to the theorists. What writers call workshops, scientists call coffee-break discussions. Furthermore, it is not enough now for a talented scientist to be content with publication in an internationally refereed journal.
Popular science writing requires the same creative and technical skill as the writing of creative nonfiction. In fact, it is creative nonfiction, and the skill with which it is composed has been responsible for melting many of the falsehoods that have iced-up between the arts and sciences, not least the idea that scientists cannot write. Scientists, such as the popular science writers Margaret Boden, Max Perutz, Steven Rose, Steven Pinker and Richard Dawkins, are creative writers. They learned technique, and found a voice.
They prize imagination, energy of expression, style, and understand their own process of creativity. They show how the same processes underlie the ways in which science proceeds. An example: writing on the discoverers of DNA, Max Perutz observed: 'Like Leonardo, Crick and Watson... achieved most when they seemed to be working least... engaged in argument and apparently idle... attacking a problem that could be solved only by a tremendous leap of the imagination... Imagination comes first in both artistic and scientific creations' (2003: 204).
Can the study and practice of creative writing make you a better scientist? Courses in creative writing may encompass writing popular science; courses in science may encompass writing creative nonfiction. Popular science is, after all, the art of creative nonfiction. Just as many writing students do not become serious writers, so not all students who sign up for science degrees become scientists, but many could become clearer and more energetic communicators of their disciplines, as journalists, or as mediators between the public and scientific endeavour.
In the same way that many of our best creative writers have also been among the more insightful critics, many of our best scientists are its best communicators and critical exponents of science. The use of creative writing in science courses might contribute to a greater public understanding of science and technology. At my own university, creative writers and their students now work directly with undergraduate students and postgraduate researchers in the departments of medicine, business, biology, computing, engineering and physics.
Their presence is partly predicated on the need to help new scientists and business people write more clearly and engagingly. We do not teach composition or generic skills; we build on them, and work with exceptionally gifted students. However, one underlying principle, agreed with departmental heads beforehand, is to help these students begin to think more laterally in language-even more wildly-and to conceive of ideas and paradigms via the unusual route of Writing Games and thought experiments based on the creation of poems and fictions.
What is striking is that although some initial scepticism about these experiments in teaching and learning came from the scientists, they quickly realized that students were doing better in their writing, communicating their findings more clearly, and benefiting from human contact and creative play as researchers. Any residual scepticism was much more likely to reside within students and faculty within the Humanities. Our work was informed by an important movement called "Writing Across the Curriculum". This movement grew in response to a perceived deficiency in literacy among university students in the 1980s. It is now widespread. Its advocates think of writing as a learning tool.
Writing helps students synthesize, analyze, and apply course content. Students often use logbooks and journals; the idea, as in creative writing, is to become an active participant in your subject; and that practice can create fluency. All this is coterminous with the discipline of creative writing although it has to be said that, at some institutions, creative writing occupies a much more privileged position in terms of the status of both students and faculty. "Writing in the Disciplines" is part of the movement of Writing Across the Curriculum.
It is based on the understanding that each discipline has its own conventions of language and style and that these conventions must be taught to students so that they might successfully participate in academic discourse. Reports, article reviews, and research papers are the most commonly used assignments. At my own university, we experimented with using many creative writers and creative Writing Games to deliver these parts of the curriculum, and to do so with creative panache, teaching them as though they were performance art.
External teaching tests have shown real progress, and a side-benefit of increased recruitment at a time when science is suffering in this respect. In Britain in the early twenty-first century, The Royal Literary Fund went even further, and organized residencies for hundreds of creative writers to work at many UK universities. This imaginative enterprise was funded from royalties the author of Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne, had left to the Fund. The "bear of little brain" bequeathed more than what might have been expected of him, for in this way creative writing and the teaching of advanced rhetoric rejoined each other through a bold experiment. The purpose was not to teach creative writing, but to work with students on their academic and expository writing.
The thinking was rooted in the notion of not burning up the creative energy of creative writers on teaching poetry and fiction, but on focusing their skills of clear language and argument. The presence and work of these novelists, dramatists and poets were utilized as much by students from Science, Medicine and Social Science as they were by students of Humanities. The discipline crossed over quite harmoniously into other forms of knowledge, for it helped to tell the story of those forms of knowledge.
It is arguable that creative writing began finding some new, unusual, maybe historical, rooms of its own. However, although the uses of creative language and creative reading are important for these new open spaces, sometimes we reach a space where language runs out. Creative Recognitions offer only two examples from personal experience as an environmental scientist working on freshwater insects in The Lake District of England.
My research focused on a family of lake midges whose species number in their thousands, and new sub-species and variants evolve regularly like minute but dynamic elements of a lake's language. You identify these species by a carapace deposited on a lake surface on emergence as winged adults; and use a "key", a book that explores and relates what you see under a powerful microscope to what has been seen by others in your field. This key represents current knowledge.
Occasionally, you reach a zone where the current knowledge simply tapers to nothing, for the variant is completely new, unrecognizable. You stare at it, or part of it, not seen before by the human eye, and not described or drawn by the human mind. With the key, you reach the point where its lake runs dry. When scientists reach this point, this moving edge of knowledge, they surf forwards by a combination of previous knowledge, guesswork, and intuition. With a species, you describe and classify it according to its likeness to something already described: you use simile to compare it, and you use metaphor to name it. The Latin names of insects are a spectrum of metaphoric and descriptive acuity.
They are little, related images which represent an entire life form, a species, however temporary its moment of evolved presence. Its unseen worlds are metaphorized into recognition; its invisibility released by simile. I always regarded science at this level as a form of creative and collaborative writing. The physicist Neils Bohr observed, 'When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry. The poet, too, is not nearly so concerned with describing facts as with creating images'.
My second example of a creative recognition: the concentration of attention required for identifying species is heightened even further when the numerical presence of these species is factored alongside other data, such as oxygen level, acidity, and thirty or more other physico-chemical variants, all of which make up the natural, but invisible, world of that species. The final piece of data would be time itself, the measure of a season, say. To make any kind of testable judgement about these creatures required these data to be scrunched by powerful multivariate statistical programmes.
Depictions of correlation would unfold; thousands of permutations of relatable factors would be played against each other; and the significance of any connectivity (for example, the surface area of a lake and the diversity of species) might feed out. You begin to see the world is wider than your thought. The creative magic of numbers, not words, is the language of the natural world. When such data are swung across time, they seem to swarm like bees in a moving rope of migration. You hypothesize there must be a common purpose somewhere, but you would have to be a bee to understand the language of the movement, in this case the dance, noise and destination of the data. What you have to do is think yourself inside a natural ballroom of numbers, its walls and ceilings made up of moving and sliding microelements. Max Perutz names imagination as the first element of scientific creation.
In understanding the multivariate nature of an invisible world, an intuition, strongly informed by practice, played a part that sometime seemed as strong as the role given to statistical significance. I have never felt closer to that balance of perception and imagination than when I am writing creatively, or watching students in a creative writing class making discoveries for themselves among the swarm, noise and dance of language.
When I claimed earlier that in the discipline of creative writing we are all beginners, some of that tone of mind informs the natural process of scientific discovery: the design and making of pattern; the neural raveling of understanding and perception. As the immunologist and poet Miroslav Holub wrote, 'The emotional, aesthetic and existential value is the same ... when looking into a microscope... and when looking into the nascent organism of the poem' (1990: 143).
Reading that quotation, you can see that scientists can play the scientiste just as much as artists can play the artiste. The pleasure of creativity might illuminate aspects of knowledge that are apparently non-literary, and the findings of neuroscientists that 'Story is a basic principle of mind', that 'parable is the root of the human mind-of thinking, knowing, acting, creating, and plausibly of speaking' (Turner, 1996: 1). The literary mind may prove to be the fundamental mind. The repercussions for the role of creative writing as a discipline speaking across disciplines could be tremendous.
[1] Grateful acknowledgements to The Rialto where this poem appeared in Autumn 2006; and to Carcanet Press: this poem appeared in The Invisible Kings (2007).
References
Bishop, Elizabeth, The Complete Poems, New York: The Noonday Press, 1979.
Booker, Christopher, The Seven Basic Plots, London: Continuum, 2005.
Holub, Miroslav, The Dimension of the Present Moment, London: Faber and Faber, 1990.
Kinzie, Mary, A Poet's Guide to Writing Poetry, Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1999.
Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.
Logan, William, The Undiscovered Country: Poetry in the Age of Tin, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Moore, Marianne, Complete Poems, London: Faber and Faber, 1968.
Perutz, Max, I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier, New York: Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2003.
Strunk, William and White, E.B., The Elements of Style, Massachusetts: Allyn and Bacon, 2000.
Turner, Mark, The Literary Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Biographical Note
David Morley studied Zoology at Bristol University before going on to perform research on acid rain in The Lake District. He now develops and teaches new practices in scientific and creative writing at The University of Warwick. His poetry collections include Scientific Papers and The Invisible Kings (Carcanet, 2002; 2007). He was recently awarded a National Teaching Fellowship by the Higher Education Academy.