Listen to a reading of “Slay” by Amy Catanzano
Slay
“O orzchis ecclesia ... es chorzta gemma”
– Sibyl of the Rhine
O measureless church ... you are a sparkling gem scored
from the lingua ignota, the language of the
unknown. Secret tongue of the sleepless alphabet.
You probe the lowest bass of body’s dark matter.
I swing my hips to your rebel science of spheres.
When you asked if your poem was controversial
I consulted a Penrose diagram made to
see the entirety of spacetime through a black
hole. Light rays at the beginning of everything
null infinity, the channel we now ignore.
So here I am, back at the counterculture, that
open tower in the sky. It travels through the
city within the floating city, wavering
like heat on flexed concrete. I dream of the fractal
fuel we used to turn into optimal stanzas.
I’m a good girl for you. Within the wounds of worlds.
You slay me, and I slay you, but we mean no harm.
Yes, I say we in the nuclear state, but how
can I not? We want to defeat the State, and we
know how! I CGI the clay you expertly
shape. It’s not anger you detect but the faery
fight you inspired! Orpheus carved his rock ring
to sparkle. Sweetened the lyre beats of his six-
stringed portal. Enchanted the hungry beasts at his
feet, offering the wild everlasting peace.
Hey. Your historical materialism,
while noble, is just too anthropic. I’d rather
SMILE as a Neoist at the Planck length, full
thigh, skirt pulled high, superpositioning into
a poem like a gift delivered from the dirt.
Resonance *
“It’s totally raining green, pouring Blue Flowers”
– Dr. Octagon/Kool Keith
before and beneath
the Planck length
at ℓP 10^-43
at the energy
frontier of physics
and poetry
where collisions
occur at the highest
luminosities
where the distance
between the subatomic
and the cosmological
dissolves
like the distance
between sound
and song
where the theory of
gravity and geometries
of spacetime fail
where the laws of
science and language
no longer apply
where words decay
into poems so they
resound
there is a setting
where the universe
contains nothing
but its definition
which is
everything
it can be
*
standing together
at the foot of the
blue flowers
at the two massive
New Small Wheels
a set of precision
tracking and trigger
detectors for new
particles of matter
upgrades to be placed
inside the muon
spectrometer
the outermost layer
of the ATLAS particle
detector
underground at CERN
here at the foot of the
blue flowers a new kind
of poem is discovered
like a new particle
both excited states
crafted by collisions
inside the particle collider
where superconducting
magnets colder
than outer space
bend proton particles
around a tunnel
protons that could be
encoded with a poem
that we will write
a rondeau with
repeating lines of refrain
joining two rhymes
made to sustain
its closed curve like
the circular tunnel
it will someday travel
before colliding as
proton particles
triggering signals
electric labyrinths
rebuilt as data
producing visible traces
like wave patterns
read anew
the collided poem a
particle of matter
in an active state
of poiesis
which happens
at the moment
of observation
its quantum
wave function
collapsing
moving out of all
possible configurations
no longer
in simultaneous
states of quantum
superposition
but taking on form
like a poem
resounding
through a collider
a particle poem as
resonance
a response to vibrating
signals with similar
frequencies
like physics and poetry
where a new
resonance
will be fleeting
like a short-lived particle
in an excited state
of stable matter
or like a poem
in an occulted state
of language
both particle and
poem composed
in bunches
in swarms
like syllables
in sound
mutable sonatas
of new matter
the particle poem
a translated
resonance
of the protons
in which it is
encoded
unpredictable
indeterminate
pulsing like open
and closed
subatomic
strings
resonating
toward a future
that is the beginning
and the past that is
the prism of now
where a particle poem
decays after reaching
the inner chambers
of its blue flower
that infinite hue
of horizons
and the new flowers
it will bloom
and the seeds
from where
they will rise
with energy
that increases
through not only size
but density
like a black hole
inside a diamond
adorning the center
of a flower’s eye
*
the rendered
resonance
will be a long-lived
particle poem
enduring in spacetime
expanding with
the universe at an
accelerating rate
filling colliders
resonating
its persistence
toward regions
where it may be
unrecoverable
at magnitudes
below and beneath
discernible physics
and language
the particle poem
a quantum wormhole
at a Planck collider
compressed into the
lowest volume and
highest frequency
like words on a
page of a poem
where two distances
cannot be closer
where the momentum
of the particle poem
will be so large
that the uncertainty
of its energy
could make it
indistinguishable
from a quantum
singularity
a subatomic black hole
bending spacetime
its surface an event horizon
once only glimpsed
its circular boundary
a four-dimensional
edge rounding like
the tunnel rounded
underground
below and beneath
what was once
called Earth
like the beginning
and end and
beginning
again
of particles
of poems
that turn as protons
turn in tunnels
yet each collided
proton mostly
empty space
with some matter but
little material volume
particles not combining
but meeting then
passing through
each other
which releases their
quarks and gluons
that then interact
by vibrating at the
same frequencies
a property known as
resonating
which activates dormant
fields that also
resonate
in direct response
and the replying
resonances
of these fields creating
new particles of matter
which can briefly exist
in machines built by
physicists and poets
taking dual paths
wave and particle
paths powering
a new kind of collider
around the solar system
made to navigate
the depths of the
Planck length
which will superconduct
particles as poetic matter
the new particle poem
writing clockwise and
counterclockwise
at the same time
in space at the same
space in time
*
the circular rondeau
we will write
in a straight path
like this poem
and like the straight
paths that the protons
traveling the tunnel
naturally take
at nearly the speed of light
will be bent by the physics
of poetic vision
and massive
superconducting
magnets
by magnetic force
moving to greater
and greater frequencies
creating quantum
waves of language
and matter
an event horizon
at the entrance
not to knowledge
or experience but
something else
*
the particle poem
that will come
and those already
written without
language
in the alloys of the
Large Hadron Collider
alter what is first
dreamed by making
visible the unseen
through patterns
of waves carrying
material evidence
processed by
cognition
reaching outward
to perceive inward
entangled particles
rousing intimacy
beneath and below
cosmic inflation
time zero
the particle poem
reaching a scale
so deep
it cannot be
measured
yet
*
out of quantum
superposition
while decaying
which in physics
is transformation
while decaying
into multiple final
states of being
the epic
resonance
is made by poets
and physicists
composing an
alternative mechanics
for physics and poetry
for those who cipher
the familiar to
pursue what is not
in a continuing rotation
intrinsic to existence
like the spin of a
subatomic quark
its angular momentum
tunneling across barriers
by borrowing energy
which is information
by borrowing energy
like a reader of a poem
by writing this scrolling
message in a bottle
for the deepest
of seas
and voyaging those waves
and traveling what could be
near the shores of ℓP
where we turn and turn
toward an ordinary flower
resounding
its condition
as the passing bloom
of a rounding song
* Author’s Note
I wrote “Resonance” for my collaborative project with particle physicist James Beacham of the Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire, or European Council for Nuclear Research, known as CERN, the world’s center for particle physics. Conducting scientific research outside of commercial and military aims, CERN operates the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world’s most powerful particle accelerator under parts of Switzerland and France, to search for new forms of matter. The LHC led scientists to discover the Higgs boson particle in 2012. This discovery verified the existence of the Higgs field, an invisible quantum field that exists everywhere and with which all matter must interact to gain mass. James, who has a background in film and lectures worldwide on the intersections of art and science, is part of Duke University’s team in the ATLAS Experiment, one of two particle detectors in the collider that led scientists to discover the Higgs boson.
I first met James during my second visit to CERN in 2019, when I was there as a research artist funded by the ATLAS Experiment’s U.S. Outreach initiative, led then by particle physicist Mark C. Kruse. Mark, a professor of physics at Duke, was part of the team that discovered the Higgs boson. He leads interdisciplinary projects and has co-taught courses with literary theorist N. Katherine Hayles. I first met him when I was invited to speak in one of their courses.
At CERN I was invited on three VIP tours, two of which brought me underground to the LHC, which was offline for upgrades. We took pressurized elevators to the ATLAS and CMS detectors, where the particle collisions occur. Designed in layers of wheel-shaped metal overlaid with filigrees of braided tubes, the detectors look like kaleidoscopic mosaics in motion, a complex interplay of the fluid and the fixed, the artificial and the organic. The bright colors threaded throughout—red is for steel, green is for scaffolding, blue is for wires—are childlike, providing contrast to their functional seriousness. The center portal of the CMS detector was open due to work being done. I was close enough to the collision chamber that I could see inside. My experiments across poetry and science had taken me, a poet, directly to where the Higgs boson was discovered and where other new particles of matter could someday exist.
James brought me to see new upgrades being built for the ATLAS detector, the giant New Small Wheels, which awed me as wondrous sculptures of science. They resembled blue flowers woven with mint-green veins squared under futuristic silver spokes. Being near them made me feel like anything was possible in both physics and poetry. James and I spent hours in front of one flower talking about an idea I had in 2008, when the LHC launched, that would encode a poem inside the protons of the collider. To my surprise, he said the idea may be technically possible to enact.
We began brainstorming this physics-poetry experiment. Under the spell of the blue flowers, and through the fortuitous circumstance of shared vision, our idea grew, as poems do. James and I envision the possibility of encoding a poem we will co-write into a proton bunch sequence in the LHC. In support of this project, we have written individual poems and developed a co-written scientific paper that explores how the experiment could work. We imagine future poems being collided in future colliders that will get even more powerful in accessing the subatomic systems that comprise matter. James has suggested a collider someday could circle the solar system. This collider, he told me, might be able to access the Planck length (ℓP), a unit of measurement written as 10^-43 (ten to the minus forty-three). In “Resonance,” I explore the possibility of a particle poem traveling such a collider reaching the Planck length, a scale of physical reality so deep that it would answer all questions that scientists today have about the known universe. However, I pursue my studies of the Planck length and other physics not in an attempt to seek ultimate knowledge, a reductive concept to be challenged, but to investigate new modes of reality in the open field of imagination.