Clara Janés. Quantum poetics or the physics of poetry

Abstract

This text describes the two-culture notion that Charles Percy Snow elaborated in a lecture in 1959 and discusses the notion of transdisciplinarity as the methodological approach to Clara Janés’ poetry, physics being its most common analogical referent. Janés’ books of poems revolve around two alternatives, on one hand, the certainties, causality and determinism of classical physics and, on the other, the uncertainty, indeterminism and irreversibility of quantum physics, a dualism that the book explores through the figures of Erwin Schrödinger and his deterministic wave function and Niels Bohr, architect of quantum physics and the principle of complementarity. To maintain the floating state of the quantum paradox is Janés’ poetic resource to sustain creative potential and avoid the collapse that opting for one choice would cause, just as observation does in quantum physics.