The Sept. issue of The Believer contains a fantastic interview with scientist Richard Dawkins by poet and philospher Troy Jollimore. My favorite nugget is this section on the differences between metaphorical and scientific understanding:

BLVR: That made me think again about what makes poetry poetry, and I think there’s an interesting thing that can be said on an abstract level, which is that I think poets have a conception of truth that is different from what philosophers have and what scientists have. Philosophers and scientists tend to think of truth as converging, so that ultimately all the theories come down to the one truth that accommodates everything else. Whereas if we think about metaphorical truth, as poets do, we don’t think of metaphorical truth as necessarily converging. We don’t think of the latest metaphor as replacing the earlier ones. We think more of adding metaphors, and so you just come up with a new one, and now we see an aspect of the world that we didn’t describe before.

RD: Yes, I’m sure that’s right, but maybe truth is not what we’re talking about anyway there. In the romantic period, poets came close to despising scientific truth, didn’t they? [People] think science takes the joy out. Well, I wrote a book called Unweaving the Rainbow, which took on Keats’s idea of the rainbow being unwoven. It’s a view that I could never view with much sympathy, because it seems to me that the more we understand, the more beautiful it becomes. Richard Feynman, somewhere, talks about seeing a red flower and how you might think it’s beautiful, and wax beautiful, wax poetic about it, but he sees a greater beauty because he understands why it looks as it does. There is a level of beauty in understanding, and scientific understanding when you really get it is aesthetic; it is among the highest aesthetic experiences that you can enjoy.

The section exemplifies why I love most of the interviews in The Believer — because they’re never interviews per se. There are few questions and even fewer answers. The interview, then, becomes a simple record, a transcript of two brilliant people riffing on mutual obsessions.

Only an excerpt of the interview is available online. Buy the issue to read the rest.

Oh, and Jollimore’s first book of poems is Tom Thomson in Purgatory.