“One metaphor most vivid for poetic inspiration: /
The spark of creativity in supersaturation. /
A sudden-seen assembly: solute’s newly found formation /
Yields crystallizing product from excessive concentration.”
The 10 April 2025 Bluesky poem built on a marvelous quote from renowned author Margaret Atwood in The Paris Review in 1990, as she commented on her creative process: “The genesis of a poem for me is usually a cluster of words. The only good metaphor I can think of is a scientific one: dipping a thread into a supersaturated solution to induce crystal formation.”
“One metaphor most vivid for poetic inspiration: /
The spark of creativity in supersaturation..”
Atwood alludes in her quote to a reliably fun chemistry demonstration. A solution consists of a solute (what’s present in lesser quantity; typically a solid) in a solvent (what’s present in greater quantity; typically a liquid). An aqueous solution is something dissolved in water.
When a solution is supersaturated, more solute has been dissolved in the solvent that would be expected from the solution’s equilibrium behavior. (This can be achieved by manipulating temperature: solutes are typically more soluble at higher temperatures, so if you prepare a heated solution and then take care as you cool it down, you can generate a supersaturated solution.) However the solution is prepared, it then only takes a small disturbance to seed a sudden, dramatic crystallization process.
In that last link’s video, the author uses a small crystal, but as Atwood notes, a thread can accomplish the same thing.
“A sudden-seen assembly: solute’s newly found formation /
Yields crystallizing product from excessive concentration.”
The use of “formation” here is slightly imprecise, as the solute is always there; it’s just in solution initially. The “sudden-seen assembly” of the crystallization process is a great metaphor for a moment of inspiration. When I encountered Atwood’s quote, I was particularly reminded of Graham Wallas’s model of creative cognition, where illumination follows as an abrupt moment, after the longer steps of preparation and incubation.
I liked “excessive concentration” as a closing phrase here, both in terms of how a chemist would quantitatively describe their supersaturated solution in a lab setting and how a poet would qualitatively describe the writing process necessary to achieve their draft.
Chemphasis 