Cephalopod Awareness Days – Interview With The Digital Cuttlefish

If you’re a follower of the Cephalopodcast, you’d know that Cephalopod Awareness Days are held from October 8-10, 2009! Today, the 10th of October is ‘Squid Day/Cuttlefish Day, or Squidturday, covering the tentacular species’.

So, here is a special interview with the award-winning, Science Blog Anthology published and regularly quoted, cited and loved blogger – Digital Cuttlefish!

I’m hoping to secure an interview with them for the Cephalopodcast show in the near future – in the meantime, they have kindly agreed to the following blog interview. Enjoy!

Kylie: “The Digital Cuttlefish” as a name is quite unique! Why a cephalopod? Why that one?

Digital Cuttlefish: I didn’t actually choose the name; it was given to me.  Part of it, anyway.  A friend called me a cuttlefish–I had no idea what she meant.  Turns out, anyone who hides in their ink (poets, writers–especially anonymous or pseudonymous writers) are “cuttlefish” where she lives.  The “digital” part was simply a recognition that my hiding in ink is actually hiding in pixels.

K: When did you first begin writing verse?

DC: My parents have, framed on their wall, a calligraphic rendition of a verse I wrote in, I think, first grade (or grade one, depending on your nationality). Six lines, iambic tetrameter, aabbcc. I still can quote it. But I won’t. I have handed in assignments in high school and college, which I wrote as sonnets. Not because it was required, but because I could. Verse comes very easily to me–much easier than unrhymed poetry, which always sounds horrible. (Mine, that is; I very much appreciate good poetry. I just don’t write it.)

K: You’re an Order of the Molly winner and recently Pharyngula blog, the site of PZ Myers, linked to you about a poem on astronomy. You have quite a range of topics, from religion, social commentary, psychology and ethics – however, do you have a preference for cephalopod poetry?

DC: Myers has linked to me a few times–once for astronomy, once for a religiously motivated double suicide (a modern Romeo and Juliet), once for a gay marriage verse… there might be more. I usually just write about whatever I see that interests me, and virtually everything interests me, to the point where I have to set limits for myself. Specializing in cephalopods may be a way of limiting, rather than a way of opening up. Besides, they are so cool. And with my moniker, there comes a bit of cephalopod oblige, and I feel a bit compelled to report on, say, Truman the Octopus, or the latest NY Times story on cuttlefish coloration, or Cephalopod Appreciation Days, or Squidmas.

K: Which particular verse form do you prefer?

DC: Wow. Um… I would like to think that I try to stretch a bit, and throw the occasional challenge at myself, playing with metrical feet (iamb, anapest, dactyl, etc.), tetrameter, pentameter, hexameter… I have written dozens of sonnets, hundreds of limericks (obviously, not all of my verse is on my blog), a handful of other formal poems (villanelles, terza rima, etc.).

But. In truth, I tend to keep coming back to a very small handful of very simple forms, and these other things are exceptions to the rule. I don’t know if there is a label for my usual form (I’m not a trained poet, so I don’t know all the vocabulary); it is close to a classic ballad form, but with variations.

I like to play around with the forms some, so that a very light form reports on a tragedy, for instance, or an epic poem describes something silly. But sometimes (like with the double suicide mentioned above) nothing but a sonnet will do, or sometimes nothing but an epigrammatic heroic couplet. And I am very fond of parody poems, so Frost, or Marlowe, or Shakespeare, or Gilbert, get to help me with writing.

I think this is the long way of saying “I don’t know.”

K: What advice would you give to those who are interested in communicating science concepts via verse?

DC: Why on earth would someone want to do that?

K: :p

DC: Ok… advice. Don’t suck. There is too much bad verse out there (I have contributed my share) and much more even worse unrhymed poetry (there, I plead not guilty). Science concepts are so interesting, so complex, so vast, that there is a good chance of being overwhelmed by the material. It would be easy to oversimplify the science, or to overcomplicate the poem. I have done both.

Read lots of science. Read lots of poetry. Don’t write about something you don’t know about (yes, I have); once you do know, you will find that two wonderful things happen–first, the number of things you can write about will increase, and your vocabulary will become better tuned to the writing. It is not always about having more words to choose from–sometimes having fewer words (but the right ones) is a tremendous help.

Practice. Lots. Stretch your writing muscles. Do parodies. Challenge yourself.

K: You have a book out on Lulu.com, which was the result of a year and a half’s work online – what will be your next step with your work? Is there another book on the way?

DC: Sort of. It’s actually an expanded version of the first book (at least, this is the current plan), which honestly was put together because some people requested it for last christmas season, and got thrown together in a hurry, without proper chapters, or introduction, or anything. The new version (and now that you ask, I may have to update the manuscript yet again) will also include some illustrations by the genius who drew my banner art cuttlefish–Michael McRae. This version of the book, I hope, I may actually even take the additional steps to get the ISBN registration, and get into bookstores. It is really a difficult thing to simultaneously be a cuttlefish hiding pseudonymously, and promote a book.

K: Well, I hope to help by doing my part in promoting it! Thanks, Digital Cuttlefish!

Tagged as: blogging, Cephalopodcast, Digital cuttlefish, internet, link elsewhere, Pharyngula, podcast, poetry, Science, Science communication, verse