RESPONSE POEM BY: Meribet Hernandez
ARTIST STATEMENT: This piece was created to show the intersection of quantitative failure and emotional exhaustion through my view as a chemistry student. I was inspired by the cold, detached tone of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Snow Man.” My goal was to communicate the absurdity of burnout, using the 4% yield as a physical measure of “nothing that is,” a result that is successful but practically a disaster. Through this process, I discovered a dark but funny beauty in the laboratory.
ABOUT THIS POEM
By Prof. Robert Ostrom
By using “The Snow Man” as scaffolding, Meribet’s poem relocates Wallace Stevens’s philosophical stance into the chemistry lab, using that setting to capture the monotony and quiet exhaustion of a semester.
Though the last line, “the decimal that is not there and the nothing that is,” remains only a slight reworking of Stevens’s original, the “decimal” grounds the poem in academic anxiety, the pressure to be something measurable, and the fear of coming up empty.
One must have a mind of acetone
To regard the sludge and the crust
Of the round-bottom flask, coated in brown
And have been bitter a long time
To behold the precipitate, shagged with impurities
The crystals rough in the fluorescent flicker
Of the Tuesday night; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the vacuum pump
In the sound of a few drops
Which is the sound of a semester
Full of the same air
That is blowing through the same empty beaker
For the student, who stares at the scale,
And, nothing themselves, beholds
The decimal that is not there and the nothing that is.
