Or at least, I'm pretty sure this is the world's largest collection of poems specifically on chromatography. Anyway, they can be viewed here, here, here, and (12 of them) here.
This, of course, is all good work from the Science Creative Literacy Symposia, we held a few weeks back. This is the output from one of the sessions, which involved working with plant material to isolate things like chlorophyll and other pigmented compounds via silica chromatography.
I'm actually very impressed with these pieces, since a lot of them read very well (although note that I'm no poet by trade or training). Below is one of my favourites, but check out the links above to read them all (especially if you have a thing for chromatography and column work).
COLUMN CHROMATOGRAPHY
Needled twigs, frozen crushed
Mixed with ethanol.
Separated, chunks from liquid,
Poured into a tube,
Left to sit a while.
Separated colours
Under UV light
Neon orange mixed with red
Where chlorophyll is plentiful.
Like a sunset at the beach,
On a summer trip.
The brilliant colours
Lie the sun, when it actually looks like
A fiery sphere.
The sun, sandwiched between layers,
In column chromatography.
~Claire Senn
Life Science
Education & Careers
Comments
Can you submit some of your own?! I've been writing haikus to my HPLC for years now, but I thought they were just to amuse my labmates. Unfortunately, mine are not as serious:
Little green men in
my HPLC desire
my early demise
But I can come up with some that are better.
Posted by: scicurious | June 2, 2008 12:17 PM
Yes, yes! Do send your good stuff to the Science Creative Quarterly.
Posted by: David Ng | June 2, 2008 1:40 PM