Leslie Forman
August 22, 2011 — By Leslie Forman

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.]

I took this picture of San Francisco's City Hall on July 5, 2011 - an unusually warm summer day in the city. Nope, City Hall is not a heat exchanger, but it could be a useful "manipulative" (I learned that word my new-age 4th grade math class) to explain how one works. Just imagine a field of mirrors covering the entire parking lot, concentrating all the heat into a turbine in the dome. Not that the City of San Francisco would retrofit such an iconic building in that way. Details...

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”