What’s the Matter

In writing, wrest wit from the chatter
As concepts reorder, blend, scatter.
The plotline is changing
With themes rearranging:
A book’s conservation of matter. 

This specific poem was not posted on Twitter first.  It was aligned along themes similar to those of the poems posted during National Library Week 2023, which I’ve been revisiting lately.  However, it had also seemed like it would benefit from more immediate context, so I postponed it entirely until this spring.

This limerick takes its inspiration from another famous writer’s quote in highlighting another chemistry theme.  Cormac McCarthy, who won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, among many others, stated in a 1992 interview: “Books are made out of books.”    

In writing, wrest wit from the chatter /
As concepts reorder, blend, scatter…

The first few lines acknowledge the combinatorial thought processes that accompany creative efforts.  I am personally most familiar with scientific journal articles.  These begin with discussions of previous literature, placing the original experimental work that will be discussed in the context of what’s come before. 

In starting to teach non-chem courses, moreover, it has been fascinating to learn more about how such efforts are widespread: both historically apparent, through such artifacts as commonplace books and florigelia, as well as currently evident, in the daily routines of artists across many fields.  I’ve also written previously about the power of juxtaposition: how new ideas emerge from considering “chance encounters” of past works or existing ideas.  

Thus, writing “reorders, blends, scatters” work that has come before, to ultimately generate new ideas and expressions, “wrest[ing] wit from the chatter.”     

The plotline is changing /
With themes rearranging: /
A book’s conservation of matter. 

Encountering McCarthy’s quote last spring, I was reminded of the themes communicated by a balanced chemical reaction. 

Part of Dalton’s atomic theory (a key idea in chemistry) is the statement that a balanced chemical reaction neither creates nor destroys matter, but instead rearranges it.  In a sample combustion reaction, for instance, none of the atoms in the reactant molecules of methane (CH₄) and oxygen (O₂) are lost. They are instead rearranged into the products of carbon dioxide (CO₂) and water (H₂O), shown below.

CH₄ + 2 O₂ → CO₂ + 2 H₂O

Likewise, as exemplified in the statement that “books are made of books,” rearrangement and conservation are evident in other combinatorially creative processes.