Does poetry help you understand a difficult scientific article? Campus poet Theis Kirsten attempts to investigate this matter in the form of a poetry collection. This collection, which will be his final project as the 2023-2024 Campus Poet, will be released at the end of this year.
At the end of this year, campus poet Thijs Kirsten will publish a poetry collection in collaboration with Radboud University (RU), in which he turns a number of scholarly articles into poetry. To understand the articles in the best possible way, he collaborates with researchers from all seven colleges. Simone Bauhuis will provide illustrations for the collection.
The researcher talks Kirsten into sending him an article to read, and later to write a poem about it. “Some colleges are of course a little outside my scope.” Comfort Zone“But I want to involve them in my research,” he says. “If I only wrote poetry for my arts college projects, I would be finished in a month, so to speak.” He also wants to break the stereotype that beautiful language is just something from the Faculty of Arts: “Poetry can be found everywhere.” Some mathematicians even find poetry in programming languages like Python.
The final project
Each year, the elected Campus Poet Laureate is expected to create a final project, for which he receives a certain budget. Previous campus poets have chosen to create a podcast or glossy, for example. Kirsten takes a more scholarly approach to his final project: “I started thinking about what I like as a campus poet,” he says. “I thought: I'm the campus poet, but I'm actually primarily a poet and not really the campus.” That's why he decided to dive into science.
Kirsten saw how difficult it was to access a great deal of science communication. For this reason he then wondered whether this difficulty of access could be reduced through poetry. “I perform a lot on stage myself, so that's why my poetry has to have a fairly direct message. It shouldn't get stuck in the previous sentence, so to speak, while the next sentence has already been said,” he explains. Kersten also takes up meter and rhythm. In mind, making the text flow better.
Partly because of this rhythm, it is believed that poetry can help in better understanding and remembering scientific texts. “Take songs by artists like Taylor Swift as an example,” he explains. “She uses rhyme and the rhythm of her music also creates a kind of rhythm, just like in poetry. As a result, people in… no time The ability to memorize her songs.
Kersten and Bauhuis will be busy designing the collection in September and October. The group's presentation will take place in November. The package will be released shortly thereafter.
