Doing Poetry with Science

Abstract

This chapter examines three models of relation between science and poetry that propose different strategies to overcome the two great divides of the modern world-system: the divide between natural and human sciences and that between Western “sciences” and non-Western knowledges and epistemologies. Focusing on the work of three Latin American poets—Severo Sarduy, Néstor Perlongher and Jorge Eduardo Eielson—and drawing on Bruno Latour’s reflection on “hybrids” (1991), the chapter analyzes three modes of “science diction”—appropriation, infiltration and mediation.