Don’t Ask the Questions You’ve Been Taught by Science’: Rebecca Elson’s Astronomical Poetry

摘要

Rebecca Elson was a poet and an observational astronomer studying globular clustersand stellar evolution. Her only poetry collection, A Responsibility to Awe, waspublished posthumously in 2001 and offers a glimpse into the intersections andrelationships between her poetry and her science. In cosmological and astronomicalresearch, invisible and often highly mathematical and abstract objects like darkmatter, gravity, and dark energy require similes and metaphors before even specialistscan understand and begin to study them. This article argues that Elson used her poetryas a creative ground to explore such metaphors: in her short and condensed poems shetried out and developed various images or models for cosmological phenomena. Inparticular, her poems challenge conventional models of dark matter, as this articledemonstrates through close readings of some of her poems.