Poetry, Nature and Science: A Conversation with Frederick Turner

Our guest on this episode is Frederick Turner, whose book of translations, The Golden Goblet: Selected Poems of Goethe (with Zsuzsanna Ozsváth), is available from Deep Vellum Publishing.

Part One:

Childhood influences: brother Robert Turner, father Victor Turner (1:15) — The conflict between literary-humanistic and scientific-positivist values at Oxford and The Two Cultures (3:30) — The generativity, richness and abundance of the natural universe (6:00) — Communism, atheism and Victor Turner’s conscientious objection to the Second World War (8:30) — From communism to Catholicism (10:15) — Against postmodern social constructionism: “We have a nature; that nature is cultural; that culture is classical” (13:00) — The universality of the three-second line in poetic meter — Background to the poem “On Gibbs’ Law” and Josiah Willard Gibbs (16:00) — Reading “On Gibbs’ Law” (20:45) — Background to “Ride This One Out”: dark times for the country (23:45)

Part Two:

Reading the poem “Ride This One Out” (0:30) — Smartphones and cultural evolution (2:00) — Gardening as a model for engagement with nature (6:00) — The cross-cultural significance of shame in creation myths (10:30) — On the cultural life of Dallas (14:45) — On the Texas landscape (17:00) — A return to nature in the arts and humanities? (21:45) — Nature is full of representations (23:15) — Clement Greenberg’s theory of abstraction (24:30) — Lukacs’ theory of the novel (28:00) — Writing both science fiction and epic poetry in the 21st century (29:45)

This conversation took place on February 28, 2019 at UT Dallas.

The Athenaeum Review podcast is produced by Creative Disturbance.