Thermodynamics in Verse: The Poetry of Heat
Lately I have been talking a lot about heat, and thinking about the language we use to describe heat. In a meeting with several senior professors of mechanical engineering, I learned that “heat exchanger” translates to intercambiador de calor, and stretched my brain to explain concentrated solar power technology in semi-intelligent Spanish. Slightly more sophisticated […]
Lately I have been talking a lot about heat, and thinking about the language we use to describe heat.
In a meeting with several senior professors of mechanical engineering, I learned that “heat exchanger” translates to intercambiador de calor, and stretched my brain to explain concentrated solar power technology in semi-intelligent Spanish.
Slightly more sophisticated than my explanation in Chinese: “mirror, mirror, mirror, mirror” [while gesturing a bunch of flat things on the table and finding a taller object like a beer bottle to place in the middle of the mirrors] “and then those mirrors point the heat into this machine thing and it makes electricity” [gesticulating the motion of a turbine; my hands are better at explaining mechanics than my childlike Chinese vocabulary.]
Amended 8.22.11: If you’re interested in real pictures and more technical descriptions of this technology, check out this photoessay from the Gunther Portfolio: Chevron BrightSource Solar-to-Steam Demonstration Plant Trials Underway.
Anyways, today I found some much more beautiful expressions of how heat affects people, in a New York Times feature called
Hot Type: Poems for Summer
These two poems are my favorites from the section.
COME LIVE WITH ME
Heat exists as energy in transit,
something spontaneous, volatile, elementary,
“something which may be transferred from one body
to another” (James Clerk Maxwell, “Theory of Heat”).
Notice how it moves from an object with a high
temperature to an object with a lower one,
a process of thermal contact, the sun
burning through the coldest morning sky.
Heat increases and flows across boundaries.
It is ancient, fluctuating, vibrational,
like these summer days that are so combustible
and these nights when stars enlighten the skies.
I remember the time you touched me near the stove
and the flames sparked in my body, love.
— EDWARD HIRSCH, author
of “The Living Fire: New and
Selected Poems”
I love how Edward Hirsch uses dictionary and textbook definitions of heat before jumping into a more intimate description of his own inner heat for his love.
I think the next poem is meant to be read out loud! I like the way it rhymes.
HEAT
When I was little, young men like my uncles would croon.
Walking on the street or doing chores, a baritone groan:
Blue Skies. The blue of the night meets the gold of the day.
Body and Soul, Ramona, Ballerina, Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.
I asked my mother, why did the uncles sing like that?
Her three-syllable answer puzzled me: They’re in heat.
I remember it today as the young guy driving his van
With sound system blasting stops at a light, windows down.
We want to sound hot and magnetic. Or warm and charming —
Even the folk singer singing a song about global warming.
Folk music? All music is folk music, said a great musician:
I never heard a horse sing. (But they do play percussion.)
The souls deepest in hell don’t burn, they’re frozen in ice.
You’re full of hot air is an insult. But hot breath can be nice.
Your mother, color, class, region all co-author your drama:
Culture. A jerk politician can make hay in Oklahoma
By saying he doesn’t believe in Darwin, or climate change.
Let’s take a kayak to Nyack. Or be more at home on the range.
Vote for you, sigh for you, die for you. Is this the counterfoil
To sweetest music? Entropy, energy. Dead life come back as oil
To enable movement, music, power and light, heat, racket.
Cigarette lipstick traces, you know how we do, an airplane ticket.
Cool or hot music, cold calculation or comfort. Ancestral voice
Of pride or need: keening meaning — will we die of all this?
— ROBERT PINSKY, author, most recently, of “Gulf Music”
and editor of the anthology “Essential Pleasures”