In this essay, I consider the ways in which the landmark poetry anthology Beauty is a Verb accounts and doesn’t account for the work of three Canadian poets. The immediate backdrop to this writing was failing to write, because I was too taken up with Robert Sapolsky’s 2011 undergraduate lecture series. Stanford’s put the whole course on YouTube. If you’d sooner get side-tracked than read right now, you can find the first of twenty-odd lectures, “Introduction to Human Behavioural Biology,” at https://youtu.be/NNnIGh9g6fA. There’s a lot of gems in there.
Here’s one gem that informed the present work: at the beginning of one lecture, Sapolsky has a good scoff about the habit in scientific research of trashing everything that came before. Scientists are not alone: trashing everything that came before happens in a lot of fields. You’ve seen the process, surely: NEW appears in radiating lines to replace the old, down there, postlapsarian as the sidewalk. Trash. NEW stomps on you. Get off my boot. Sometimes the trashing is just a gesture, sometimes the trashing is ingenuine – the practitioner is building on what came before even as they play at disavowing it.
