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November 8, 2001
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Nobel Prize-Winning Chemist
to Read His Poetry at Smith College
NORTHAMPTON, Mass.-The Poetry Center
at Smith College presents Nobel Prize-winning chemist and poet
Roald Hoffmann at 3:30 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 16, in Neilson Library
Browsing Room. The event is free, open to the public and wheelchair
accessible.
Hoffmann has the rare honor of being both an acclaimed poet and
an internationally renowned chemist. His poetry addresses "the
risky enterprise of being human." Of his dual role as poet
and scientist Hoffmann writes:
"The language of
science is a language under stress. Words are being made to describe
things that seem indescribable: equations, chemical structures
and so forth. Words do not, cannot mean all that they stand
for, yet they are all we have to describe experience. ... [T]he
language of science is inherently poetic. ... Emotions emerge
shaped as states of matter and, more interestingly, matter acts
out what goes on in the soul."
Hoffmann was born in Zloczow, Poland
(now Russia), in 1937. His father was killed organizing an escape
from a concentration camp. Hoffmann and his mother survived the
Holocaust and-after living in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria
and Germany-immigrated to the United States in 1949. Hoffmann
earned his B.A. from Columbia University in 1958 and his Ph.D.
from Harvard in 1962. In 1981, Hoffmann won the Nobel Prize
for chemistry (with Kenichi Fukui).
Introduced to the world of poetry by Mark Van Doren at Columbia,
Hoffmann began writing poems in English (his sixth language)
in the 1970s. His first collections of poetry, published by
the University of Central Florida Press, were "The Metamict
State" and "Gaps and Verges." In 1988, Hoffmann
won the Pergamon Press Fellowship in Literature. Calhoun Press
published his most recent book of poetry, "Memory Effects,"
in 1999. Hoffmann has also written a book of essays on science
and poetry, titled "The Same and Not the Same," and,
along with Vivian Torrence, created an innovative interdisciplinary
book on science called "Chemistry Imagined" (Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1993).
Currently Frank H. T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters at Cornell
University, Hoffmann is at Smith College to participate in "Explanation
and the Chemical Sciences," a conference sponsored by the
departments of philosophy and chemistry, the Picker Engineering
Program and the program in the history of science. His keynote
talk, "Most of What's Interesting About Chemistry is Not
Reducible to Physics," is also free and open to the public
and will take place at 8 p.m. on Friday, Nov. 16, in Wright Hall
Auditorium.
Hoffmann's poetry reading will be followed by a bookselling and
signing.
For more information about the reading, call Cindy Furtek at
(413) 585-4891 or Ellen Doré Watson, Poetry Center director,
at (413) 585-3368.
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