This is Science Friday. I'm Ira Flato. Later in the hour, mathematician Stephen Strogatz is here to talk about infinite powers, his new book about calculus. And trust me, this is the book he wish you had during high school math class. He might actually like calculus after this. But first, it was the poet T.SS. Eliot, who wrote that April is the cruelest month.

And as March wraps up and the new month begins, we want to take you, we want to take some time

this spring to consider poetry. Yes, poetry. April is National Poetry Month after all.

And it's a time of reading, outreach, and celebration in the literary community.

And plenty of those poems meditatedly somewhat on questions of science.

The late Mary Oliver famously incorporated observations of biology and ecology in her work,

while other poets have looked to astrophysics or even anthropomorphized the entire discipline.

As Edgar Allan Poe does in one sonnet, science, true daughter of time, thou art.

Wish I were better at reading poetry, but they have to wait for someone better.

And I have two of those people on the program right now.

Two poets join us today to help celebrate the intersection of poetry and science. First, the current U.S.

Poet Laureate, Tracy K. Smith. She's the author most recently of Wade in the Water.

And her previous book, The Pulitzer Prize winning life on Mars, touches on dark matter, the Hubble Space

Telescope, and the vastness of the universe. Welcome, Tracy. Thank you. And Raphael Campo is a poet and

physician. He's an associate professor of medicine in Harvard Medical School, editor of the Journal of

the American Medical Association's poetry section,

and his most recent book is Comfort Measures Only, new and selected poems.

Welcome, Dr. Campo to Science Friday.

Thanks so much.

I'm glad to be here.

Nice to have you.

And for our listeners, some further reading.

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