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iographer who writes novels, an artist working at
the SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence)
Institute, and a Brandeis graduate student who is
writing a canon-defying dissertation on Victorian science
fiction. “We’re going for a seminar feel from 60
people,” said John Plotz RI ’12, a professor of English
at Brandeis University. (He and the University of
Toronto astrophysicist Ray Jayawardhana RI ’12 were
the day’s moderators.) “We want this to be a freefloating
conversation.” By the end of the day, Plotz
hoped, a multidisciplinary sense of creative breakthrough
might emerge.
The many voices at “Breakthroughs” whirled
around Radcliffe Gymnasium like comets, writing on
the sky this taxonomy of creativity:
SCALE VARIES. Crafting a poem involves
private discoveries, said Ferry. “Every new line, in a
sense, feels like a breakthrough.” And those discoveries
are often oblique—even removed from agency.
“Creativity is what the work does while it is doing
it,” he said. As the poet works with his pencil, Spiropulu
analyzes data from a $10 billion Large Hadron
Collider—thousands of bus-sized superconducting
magnets in a ring 17 miles long.
RUPTURE HAPPENS. The prose-poet
and literary critic Maureen McLane called poetry
a tool for rupturing the everyday. “Poetic break-
The day
proved a
gathering of
breakneck
verve for
the eclectic—all
in
two panels,
a musical
interlude,
and a
keynote
address.
throughs,” she said, “are not about progress.” The
workshop’s humanists, including the Harvard art
historian Maria Gough, liked the term “rupture.”
Breakthroughs are not always “extremely positive,”
Gough said, but may occasion the “break, breach, tear”
of disruption. She offered as examples Andy Warhol’s
break from advertising to art in 1960 and Picasso’s
provocatively intimate Les Demoiselles d’Avignon in
1907.
RAPTURE HAPPENS TOO. Richard
Wagner gave the world “a breakthrough in the language
of music,” said music critic Alex Ross—one that
in the following decades inspired French symbolist
poets and pioneers of modernist prose such as Eliot
and Joyce. (He called Wagner a genius, despite his
political views and despite attracting “Hitler’s catastrophic
love.”) Wagner’s 1850 Lohengrin was so radical
that it “obliterated opera as it existed,” said Ross,
and is so emotionally attuned that it still “activates
the inner passion.” The science biographer Richard
Holmes liked the notion of creative rupture but added
Wagnerian “rapture” to the mix.
TOGETHERNESS CAN HELP.
Poets may not exactly collaborate, but they maintain
“communities of recognition,” said McLane, who
ruminated on the storied Robert Lowell–Elizabeth
Bishop correspondence. But sometimes, she admit-
16 radcliffe magazine Summer 2013