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On Jul. 30, 2012 Dr. Jay Curlin, professor of English, had a poem that was featured in The New Yorker. Dr. Curlin never submitted the poem but after a remarkable set of circumstances The New Yorker’s poetry editor Paul Muldoon, contacted Curlin and asked him whether he might publish it in the magazine. The poem, entitled “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” was written in the Fall of 2010 to feature two words that appeared in the Daily Word Game utilized by professors to enhance students’ vocabulary. The words were “Higgs-Boson,” the legendary god particle and “hirsute,” a word meaning hairy. The poem’s title is a reference to the Bible verse Hebrews 11:1.
“After a couple of years of playing the daily word games [Jay] would incorporate [them] in his reading quizzes in poems he wrote that he called lexical rhymes,” said Johnny Wink, professor of English. “He started sending me these and I thought they were so first rate that I asked him whether he would mind me sending them out on a mailing list because I thought there would be people, in addition to students, who would like to see them. And indeed there were. That then set up this amazing thing that happened with The New Yorker.”
Wink was driving in his car this past July while listening to NPR when he heard a story about how people at CERN had thought they spotted the Higgs-Boson while working at the supercollider. After hearing this, Wink then emailed Curlin and told him about what he heard and Curlin sent Wink a copy of the poem. Wink then sent out the poem to the people on the mailing list.
“I thought they’d might like to see it again now that the Higgs-boson is in the news,” Wink said. “Now you have to remember that Jay is a really good poet but he has not really made any attempts in the direction of becoming a known poet. Years ago I talked him into submitting a poem to a magazine called the Plains Poetry Journal. Jay doesn’t submit poems to places and any poet who is out to make a name for himself lusts to get in The New Yorker. The competition is fierce with all the people writing poetry for the English language and realizing that this is the Cadillac of magazine publications.”
Among the members of this mailing list was Douglass Hofstadter, Pulitzer Prize winner and College of Arts and Sciences distinguished professor of Cognitive Science and Comparative Literature at Indiana University. Hofstadter enjoyed the poem and sent it to some friends of his asking if any of them had any idea of where it might get published. A few of these worked at CERN where the Higgs-Boson was spotted, and one suggested that they look to an online source of publishing. After a number of days they didn’t hear anything about the poem until Curlin was emailed by Muldoon asking him for permission to publish “The Evidence of Things Not Seen.”
“What we found out was this,” Wink said. “Douglass Hofstadter knew some general editor at The New Yorker and sent the poem to him. As it turned out the general editor apparently liked the poem a lot and sent it to Muldoon, the poetry editor. Muldoon liked it a lot and that’s how Muldoon came to write Jay. [He] never submitted a poem to The New Yorker and he must be in a very rare category of people who get asked by The New Yorker [to have there poems published]. This is something that might happen to famous people and well known writers, but Jay’s only published one poem. He is an utterly unknown poet beyond his circle of admirers – the people on the list. And yet because of a strange set of circumstances, The New Yorker asked Jay Curlin if they could publish a poem of his. I just think that is a great thing.”
Because of the recent news regarding the Higgs-Boson The New Yorker rushed to get Curlin’s poem printed within the month.
When he first received the email from Muldoon, Curlin said that the shock was like “a lightning bolt.” He said he was balancing his checkbook in the middle of a Saturday morning when he got the email.
“The title of the message was simply ‘Your Poem,’” Curlin said. “I looked and the text said it was from this Paul Muldoon. It said, ‘Mr. Curlin, I was very taken with your poem and was wondering how you’d feel to have it published in the New Yorker if it hasn’t appeared elsewhere.’ I immediately responded, ‘Good Heavens! I’m mystified Mr. Muldoon that you would want to publish this poem. Indeed this will be its first appearance.’ I was absolutely thunderstruck but also immensely honored and deeply flattered.”
Curlin has been writing poetry since his childhood. He also incorporates much of his poetry in some of his course work and classes. He has written close to 500 poems solely through his efforts to incorporate the daily words in his lexical rhymes. He writes about 42 poems per semester.
Upon speaking of how he felt when he learned who was reading his poem, Curlin said he felt like crawling under a rock. He laughingly recalled the moment in “The Odyssey” when Odysseus fools Polyphemus by calling himself “Nobody.” When he learned that the people at CERN would be seeing his poem and Hofstadter’s positive remarks regarding it, Curlin said he was embarrassed and wanted to say that “Nobody wrote these poems,” similar to Odysseus.
“The week after my poem was published, one of the poems that appeared was by Margaret Atwood. When I looked at these bylines of the type of people who were being published, all of a sudden I felt very very small. I wanted to crawl under a rock and hide.”
Curlin’s poem has received strong responses from his readers and both positive and negative criticism. He says that when he wrote the poem, it was at a point when the Higgs-Boson was purely hypothetical. Curlin said that he thought at the time how amazing it is that scientists say we should have faith in the things we can’t see but still know that they have to exist, but do have a problem with the Christian form of faith.
“That’s exactly what faith is,” Curlin said. “It’s the evidence of things not seen. A lot of people say that now we know that everything about the Christian theology must be wrong [because of this discovery]. But by no means does it does the discovery this July do anything to our faith. To me, it’s a beautiful reminder that our faith is built on what we cannot see. And every once in a while this supercollider will give us a reminder that there are all sorts of things out there that we cannot see, but nonetheless have faith that they exist.”
Curlin’s poem is posted in Lile Hall in front of the English department.
Samuel Cushman 