2015 Honorable Mention – Darian Razdar

Cosmological Questions

The type of poem I wrote came to me when I first saw the advertisement for this art competition.   I decided to focus on the questions that abound in life, and in our cosmos, which arise out of the mere existence of human minds.   I looked, indirectly, into the emergence of scientific and artistic questions—those that I believe make this universe a beautiful one.  Thus, I used scientific and artistic language throughout the poem.  I also combined the artistic form of expression of poetry with the scientific principle of the Fibonacci sequence.  

As for the scientific principle used, the Fibonacci sequence, I was able to incorporate the first integers of the sequence into the lines of each of the poem’s stanzas.  For instance, the order of the syllables progressed positively, as: 0-1-1-2-3-5-8-13.  Instead of beginning a new stanza at the end of that positive sequence, I chose to style the poem in an even more symmetrical way—by reversing the sequence after the 13-syllable line of the stanza.  What I found interesting was that the 0 syllable would serve as a line-break: differentiating the stanzas.  Like the essence of this poem—or at least what I was working towards—the text unfolded naturally such as in this organic line break. 

When it comes to the language I used, I worked to delineate the feeling of the correspondence and intersection of art and science.  Specifically, I expressed the nature of questions as being the mother of artistic and scientific explorations for humans.  Hence, the two fields must be interrelated, in my view, by the very fact that they are born from the same source: human questioning of the cosmos.  I believe this is both an artistic and scientific concept.