Abstract

CERNING is a collection of poems that address the CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire) facility, a beloved other, and a beloved landscape. It investigates the process of personal meaning making — the narration of origin stories as they repeatedly return to and reframe the question: how did we get here? In contrasting the highly personal and lyric, with language from the facility, an encounter is created between the personal and the scientific. These poems identify cyclical habits of meaning making in the context of our intricate contemporary moment as it verges on newness, the unknown, or collapse. The speaker moves between addressing a beloved, a natural landscape, and the contours of her inner world as a form of research into situatedness and meditative observation. Structurally, CERNING is composed of five main parts: an introduction, and then four sections, each corresponding to one area on the diagram of the CERN facility at the Franco-Swiss border. The poem titles borrow the organizing principle of the physical site. Various poetic forms, from prose poems to the lyric, are used to ask questions about the impulse to render scientifically 'legible'. The sequencing of the poems is a response to the scientific architecture of meaning production that the facility represents: from understanding antimatter, to isolating the God Particle, to recreating the conditions prior to the Big Bang. Ultimately, the collection creates space for reflection and prompts the reader to consider their own connections to the cosmic, the routine, and the narration of life.