At the Intersection of Science and Poetry: Francis Crick on Michael McClure

Whenever Lucie Chou stops by the Beat Museum, the conversations we have are always enlightening. Lucie is both a scientist at UC Berkeley, as well as a poet—two disciplines, she acknowledges, most people probably don’t see as related. But they really should. After all, it’s one thing to understand scientific processes and comprehend the meaning of datasets, but to articulate that understanding, particularly to people without a scientific vocabulary—that’s a job for language. Last week, Lucie told me she’d discovered this interesting example (a proof, if you will) involving molecular biologist Francis Crick, part of the team awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology and Medicine in 1962 for their discovery of the double helix structure of DNA.

In 1959, while working at the UC Berkeley Virus Laboratory, he and his wife, Odile, “…would put on our jeans and motor over the Bay Bridge to North Beach.” It was on one such visit that he found in the basement of City Lights a copy of Michael McClure’s “Peyote Poem,” (published as Wallace Berman’s Semina #3). At the time, Crick did not yet know what peyote was, but bought the broadside on impulse, and pinned it up in the hall, where he looked at it often, and as the years passed, grew ever more enamored with it. 

“What I did not know, or even guess, at that time was Michael’s profound and very personal interest in science. … Almost all poets writing today are rather ignorant of science; most are hostile as well,” writes Crick:

“This situation leaves the scientist in a cultural desert, at least as far as poetry is concerned. I hope nobody still thinks that scientists are dull, unimaginative people, forever measuring things in cold blood. Every profession has its dullies but good scientists are, if anything, romantically attached to their subject and often passionately involved in its pursuit. It is almost true that science itself is poetry enough for them. But there is no effective substitute for the subtle interplay of words and from time to time one becomes wearied by the exact formulations of science and longs for a poetry which speaks to one’s bones.”

You can read the rest of Crick’s “The Poetry of Michael McClure: A Scientist’s View” here.
McClure wrote “Moiré” for Crick in 1971.

Lucie Chou wrote her own “Peyote Poem, Part II” after McClure, channeling Francis Crick. Read it here: