Abstract

This manuscript of poetry uses the ginkgo tree (Ginkgo biloba) as a thresh-hold from which to open up a discourse between the biological sciences and poetry. The ginkgo tree is an important outlier to tree taxonomy, one that complicates and provides elusive clues towards the origins of flowering plants out of gymnosperms. It is a motif in Japanese and Chinese art forms of painting, gardens and bonsai, and its extract is a popular folk remedy for poor memory and low cognitive function. The poems take on many forms (found poetry, erasure, sonnet, and cento among them) to express different cross-sections of the relationships between science, poetry, society and the arts. The poems show how scientific language can be beautiful, and conversely how it can intrude upon the lyrical. They attempt to communicate how evocative the conceptual backdrop for the biological sciences can be, and they juxtapose the lyrical to the scientific eye, arguing that these two stances are far from diametrically opposed. The figures used as organic section markers pace the thesis and signal changes between modes of writing or thinking—allowing different experiments with language to coexist in close proximity but remain in different timbres—while providing, themselves, a commentary on visual forms of scientific communication. This thesis draws techniques from poets such as Christopher Dewdney, Mari-Lou Rowley and Adam Dickinson.