POTPOURRI
Prose-Poetry Paired Peripatetic
Perspectives
My family home was in a multi-ethnic urban setting—Brooklyn’s Bensonhurst neighborhood. Later,scientific, career, and “service” moves took me to Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Germany, Honduras, Italy, Mexico, North Carolina, Spain, and Uruguay, destinations that were more than mere vacation or conference sites. So peripatetic appears in the book subtitle—adding (happily for me, at least) to an alliterative alignment. In all places I tried to communicate scientific objectives and conclusions using poetry/doggerel mostly as a teaching/entertainment tool.
At the University of Missouri Department of Biochemistry, my target audiences were faculty colleagues and students. Poetic efforts home and abroad were usually well received.
Nonscientists tend not to appreciate the importance of writing to a successful scientific career: from explaining the “why” of proposed experiments to reporting results and conclusions. The audience is funding agencies and fellow scientists, but ultimately the public in general. Though I was not reared in a Jesuit environment, I cherish this quote from Dr. Anthony Fauci: “I credit very much the Jesuit training in precision of thought and economy of expression in solving and expressing a problem and in the presentationof a solution in a very succinct, accurate way.” We all should strive for such linguistic and mental clarity.
Please don’t judge me too harshly. Professional and travel experiences informed my (peripatetic) perspectives and strengthened my skills in a second language—beyond those in Bensonhurst. Before my college freshman year, I found myself in the Catskills (Yiddish Alps/Borscht Belt) and in Las Vegas. I was exposed to other dialects in both places. With this collection, I present a variety of prose and poetry forms, including a few Spanish-language rhymes to pair with an English version. Why two genres? Yoking up both prose and poetry conveys a clearer, deeper message, which I compare to opposing stage lights giving a better image of the subject’s three-dimensionality. Perhaps, poetry best fits in the ill-defined space between experience and understanding.
Poetry at its best is a condensed, meaning-filled message of imagery, emotion, and sentimentality, driven by musical wording and captivating tempo. I dare not try to challenge your patience, dear reader, with epic or narrative poems. Rather, in this collection succinct poems of various styles capture numerous aspects of the accompanying prose. In several cases, I aim to use poetry as a comic device—no, I did not say that my poetic efforts are laughable, though at times humor is intentional. Why two languages? The easy answer is that I’m a show-off, but I did have opportunities to compose poetry (and letters to the editor) in Spanish. So, the following from a poetry reading during Hispanic Heritage Month in Columbia, MO (October 25, 2003).