John Canaday is the author of Critical Assembly, a collection of poems in the voices of the men and women—scientists, spouses, laborers, locals, and military personnel—involved in the Manhattan Project. His previous book of poems, The Invisible World, set in the Middle East and New England, won the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. He is also the author of a nonfiction study, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs.

Gregory McCartney: Hi John, Thanks for being in the Honest Ulsterman. Let’s start with your background. I understand that you’ve a PHD in the intersection of literature and science and have written on both. Do you come from a literary or scientific family background or was your interest in both something you just picked up on your own time or at school?

John Canaday: My grandfather was an art critic and historian and wrote mystery novels. My grandmother was a dramaturge and editor. My father was a computer scientist involved in the development of UNIX. My mother and her mother were most interested in history, particularly ancient history. My brother inherited my father’s love of computers and became a software architect.

So I’ve been around people who feel passionate about the arts or the sciences since I was a kid. It never occurred to me not to love both. The world is too complex, and there is too much variety and beauty in the ways people have found to respond to that complexity—why give up the pleasures of either discipline?

Well, of course there are pretty good reasons to focus one’s energies. It’s hard enough to master a single set of conceptual tools. And different disciplines require radically different skill sets and habits of mind. Yet they aren’t at all incompatible. There are deep connections and commonalities between the arts and sciences, and their disparate ways of looking at things and the diversity of symbolic structures they produce complement one another to produce an incredibly rich experience of the world—both within and around us.

GMCC: As a curator of contemporary art and the editor of Abridged I’m fascinated by how it is possible to create new possibilities by enabling literature and other disciplines to blur the borders between them. Is there a correlation in writing poetry and writing on science? Poetry has traditionally been associated with emotion or, if you want to be a bit flowery, the heart, whereas science is considered very much of the head. Though there are rules and formulae to both.

JC: There are many obvious differences between the disciplines: different methods, different foci, different goals. But literature and science draw upon a common pool of representational modes—metaphor, metonymy, narrative—which stretch way back into prehistory. And they both emerged as modern disciplines out of the common ground of the medieval exegetical tradition. So, although they employ representational modes in various ways (e.g., science strives to construct static metaphors; literature favours dynamic metaphors), they have a shared foundation that gives them a deep compatibility.

On a practical level, your head and heart distinction sums up the divide pretty nicely, though I’d be inclined to use the words objective and subjective. Science seeks objective understanding, so it focuses on reproducible phenomena that can be clearly delineated as closed systems and described in terms that are independent of the subjective consciousness of the observer. Literature, on the other hand, seeks subjective understanding and therefore focuses on fleeting or unique phenomena (unique in specifics, but commonly experienced as abstractions such as love and death) that blur into one another and whose description is inextricable from the subjective consciousness of the observer.

But these aren’t absolute divisions. Scientists have increasingly come to recognize the entanglement of the observer in the phenomena under observation, and “literary” representation has always been tremendously sensitive to scientific insights. Indeed, I’d argue that Western culture as a whole has shifted rather dramatically over the past 400 years from a dependence on the dynamic metaphors associated with the arts to a privileging of the metonymic structurings of a scientific mindset.

The more we question received notions of “two cultures”—and I think there’s a growing recognition that rigid notions of the incompatibility of science and art are drastically overstated—the easier it will be for a given individual (a student, say) to engage with both, to enjoy each, and to explore the ways in which the disciplines complement rather than exclude one another.

GMCC: I’m of an age in which the Cold War was the backdrop to growing up. In Derry and Northern Ireland we had battles of our own but behind it lurked the possibility that something completely literally Earth shattering and out of our control could potentially overwhelm the local conflict at any time. How did you become interested in the ‘Bomb’ and do you remember your attitude towards it at the time?

JC: My interest, if that’s the right word, came out of that same Cold War backdrop. I began working on Critical Assembly while I was living in London on a Watson Fellowship, studying American expatriate writers and sampling the expatriate life myself. It was a time of great tension, of Reagan’s evil empire rhetoric, and I walked the streets imagining ICBMs passing overhead. I had studied some physics and some of the history of nuclear weapons in college, and I was fascinated by both. And I longed to do something productive with my poetry—to set aside explorations of my own navel in favour of a broader canvas. So I began reading biographies of Manhattan Project participants, along with the hibakusha’s accounts of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then exploring what the representational magic of poetry might make of them.

GMCC: Were you nervous writing in Critical Assembly poetry about such famous names, Einstein, Oppenheimer, Bohr, Frisch etc?

JC: Absolutely. For one thing, there is such a massive body of textual evidence and interpretation of these figures, and I knew I had to come to grips with their representations of themselves and others’ representations of them before I could attempt my own. And then, because these individuals were so famous, I knew I’d have to engage in virtual wrestling matches with my readers’ preconceptions. Not that those preconceptions would be wrong, but they might or might not be compatible with the aspects of these individual’s characters that I was trying to draw out. For instance, if a reader looked to Bohr as moral exemplar—which is not an unreasonable thing to do—they might be resistant to a portrayal of his role in allaying other scientists’ qualms about working on weapons of mass destruction.

What I found, though, was that these “famous voices” often lent themselves as readily to my verse appropriations as figures about which virtually nothing is remembered. In each case, it was a matter of identifying a moment of crisis in that speaker’s involvement in the Manhattan Project, and then exploring how they dealt with it, how they struggled to find a new equilibrium—or reassert the old. And this was just as challenging for the small fry as the great whales.

GMCC: What I found fascinating about Critical Assembly was firstly that poems would be written about the Manhattan Project, those involved directly and those related or living nearby that were affected by the fallout (so to speak) of the project. There has been lots of powerful works written, filmed and made about when the bomb dropped in reality in WW2 or in imagined apocalyptic scenarios but not so much perhaps about how those in the Manhattan Project felt day-to-day as it were felt. What made you focus on this aspect?

JC: In its root sense, a poet is a maker, which implies that poetry is, most simply, a made thing. But I believe that poetry can be something greater, more active—itself a “making something happen.” Which leads to the question, how might poetry do this? It’s unlikely one could make poetry do something different in kind from what it has been doing these past millennia, so best follow its native genius, which, it seems to me, is exploring what language can do to represent individual human experiences of the world, the self, and each other.

But while most poetry focuses on the experiences of the author—or a generalized stand-in—it seems to me that its (need I say, remarkably subtle and sophisticated?) representational tools might be more productively applied to the experiences of people who themselves made a great difference in the world. There are a multitude of worthy candidates, but surely among them are Einstein, Bohr, Oppenheimer, and all the others who made the Manhattan Project possible. And though there are biographies and histories that treat these individuals, poetry approaches its subjects from quite different directions—conceptually, linguistically, structurally—and therefore offers insights that aren’t available through scholarly narratives and analyses. Poetry allows us to get inside an individual’s head because that interior depends so deeply on language, and not just its prose articulations, but its shadings and nuances, its rhythms and enjambments, its echoes and rhymes.

As a result, poetry can give us unique insights into what it was like to be involved in seminal historical events. In the case of the Manhattan Project, my hope is that this will give us a better understanding of nuclear weapons. It seems to me (and to many others) that these weapons present an unparalleled danger, in part because they are so poorly understood. Yet how are we commoners, who have no direct experience of these weapons, to gain such understanding? The individuals closest to them, who designed them, built them, tested them, used them, suffered under them offer an obvious avenue.

Another question I hoped to answer, at least partially, provisionally, is how good people could be involved in such dreadful doings. This question is tremendously important in the development of nuclear weapons, but in many other contexts as well, both large and small, from slavery to the Holocaust, from the Stanford prison experiment to schoolyard bullying. And it involves looking not just at the leaders, but at the “little people” as well—the maids, machinists, secretaries, and bystanders of all sorts.

GMCC: I loved that line in the first poem MediaLog: William Laurence: ‘Success that could only be seen in the best (or worst) light’. It’s interesting that you started the book with a poem featuring a reporter rather than even Albert Einstein (who came next). What was the thinking behind that?

JC: I ended my first book of poems, The Invisible World, on a ghazal, so it felt right to start the second with that form. As for Laurence, his experience as the only journalist given access to the Manhattan Project offered a perspective that melded the distanced, objective stance of the historian with the insider view of a participant, so he provided a natural bridge from a reader’s previous exposure to the Manhattan Project through histories and biographies to the first-person representations in Critical Assembly. And I also liked that Laurence, as a writer surveying the whole project, served as a kind of oblique stand-in for my own voice.

GMCC: I read that Critical Assembly took thirty years to complete. That length of time is usually associated with novels. Though for me there is something novel-like about the book with major and minor characters so to speak given voice, motive and importantly human complexity. There must have been a huge amount of research. I’m wondering how you felt ascribing, so to speak, opinion or actions to people, most of whom presumably you perhaps never met. How careful were you to ensure a veracity of character so to speak? I mean to have them speak and act as they would have?

JC: As you intuit, one of the reasons it took me so long to write Critical Assembly is that I wanted to get the history and the science right, and that involved an enormous amount of research. But you also put your finger on a crucial aspect of these poems: though I have gone to great lengths to be true to the individuals I represent—indeed one of my guiding principles has been that I’d want each of these people to feel I had spoken accurately for them, and through them—in the end these folks are all speaking through me. That can be seen as a limitation of the book, and I have wrestled with it as such; but in the end I have come to see it as a feature rather than a flaw: many of these individuals have written their own accounts (which are referenced in the bibliography included in Critical Assembly), so if my poems are to add something to the accounts that already exist, surely that lies in the admixture of my own perspective to those of my subjects? That is, the poems in Critical Assembly are ultimately not in the voices of the people they portray; nor are they in my voice; they represent a hybrid consciousness formed by the intersection of our perspectives in the liminal space that poetry creates between writer, reader, and subject—and as such, they ultimately include the reader’s voice as well.

GMCC: Leading on from this would you consider yourself part historian?

JC: Of necessity. I first took on that role when I wrote my nonfiction study, The Nuclear Muse: Literature, Physics, and the First Atomic Bombs. And it has been a great satisfaction that Richard Rhodes and Martin Sherwin, historians who won Pulitzer Prizes for their work on the Manhattan Project, have felt that Critical Assembly does justice to the history it portrays.

GMCC: The geography of New Mexico is beautifully, sometimes almost forensically described in the poems. You really get a sense of its majesty and desolation. In a way it matches the contradiction in the bomb; aesthetically the mushroom cloud could be considered a beautiful thing but of course it kills. How familiar are you with the area?

JC: I first visited when I was eleven. My family took a cross-country trip in a camper van to visit friends in Albuquerque, and we spent some time in Bandelier National Monument, where the Los Alamites liked to hike, and a local pueblo, where the Los Alamites attended dances. The landscape captured my imagination then, and it won my heart over when I returned to attend reunions of the military and scientific personnel at Los Alamos in the 1980s and 1990s. But I have had to make do with those few visits, and so the landscape has lived in me far longer than I have lived in it.

GMCC: You bring the people, particularly the women, who have been nearly forgotten to the fore. A stenographer wondering about how far the fantasies of a ‘poor, sad bachelor mouse’ would go. Kitty Oppenheimer’s frustration and scorn. A site manager who hopes whatever ‘they’re doing’ will help make her ‘whole again’. Rose Bethe hoping ‘we chose the lesser sin.’ As the bomb and the weapons industry in general is quite macho, did you feel it important to have the female voice as a major part of the project?

JC: Absolutely. Without the women, the Manhattan Project wouldn’t have happened. And without the women, Critical Assembly would be a ghost of itself.

GMCC: There is a beautiful (though in the context probably not the word to use) kind of foreshadowing of the ‘macro’ events in the domestic almost micro occurrences in the poems. Appolonia Chalee’s distrust of new machinery for instance. In particular I find Ruth Marshak’s battle with the army over eggs particularly horrifying:

…’I’d had enough

Of finding grim reminders

Of what they wanted to become, and failed.’

It seems to perhaps signify either an official unawareness or indifference to the potential consequences which maybe could mirror the Manhattan project as a whole?

JC: I’m delighted that you hear these resonances. I don’t think there was an indifference to consequences on the part of most of the individuals who were part of the Manhattan Project, but there was certainly a collective, institutional indifference—an inertia and a singularity of focus that rendered self-reflection, questioning, doubt almost impossible. This effect was amplified by the military’s insistence on secrecy and compartmentalization: most of the people involved in the Manhattan Project didn’t know what they were working on; even many of the scientists didn’t have a clear sense of the big picture, despite how thoroughly they were masters of their own particular corners of the endeavour.

Yet there was an aura to the project, and one would have had to be wilfully blind not to notice that something extraordinary and rather sinister was going on: the pervasive secrecy that prevented husbands and wives from speaking freely to one another; the sudden appearance on an isolated mesa of an industrial, scientific laboratory; the construction of small cities in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and Hanford, Washington; the gathering together of scientific gods such as Niels Bohr, Enrico Fermi, Hans Bethe, and John von Neumann cheek-by-jowl with scientific journeymen. In that context, even the most mundane experiences, like cooking breakfast for one’s family, became freighted with deeper, often disturbing connotations.

GMCC: You had a stage version of the poems produced by Derek Walcott? How did that happen and how strange did it feel?

JC: I was studying poetry at Boston University with Derek, and he invited me to sit in on his playwriting workshop as well. It was an eye-opener: a way of thinking about our relationship to space, and the ways we fill it with our bodies and our words, that seemed inevitable, yet far from obvious. Classes were hands-on, a collaboration between students and professional actors, and they took place in the Playwrights’ Theatre, where Derek also produced a couple of plays a year. He suggested that I work up some of the poems in Critical Assembly into a stage version, and he ended up liking it enough to include it in an evening of one acts.

Seeing these poems come alive in the voices and bodies of the actors, and hearing what a professional could do with my language, was more magical than strange—if something can be magical without being strange. At any rate, it seemed completely natural, but it made me feel with fresh force the degree to which the language wasn’t “mine,” despite how hard I’d worked to give it these particular shapes. Experiencing these poems in the space of the theatre helped me recognize that any utterance is a collaborative action, even poems penned in a lonely garret. And it reminded me that my job is ultimately to give readers mind- and mouth-filling lines that inspire them to join in the collaboration.

GMCC: We survived the Cold War and MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) but now it all seems to have come round again with people, even presidents and prime ministers blithely talking up ‘the nuclear option’. Is the world a more dangerous place? Or have people just forgotten what these bombs actually can do?

JC: These are questions that experts continue to debate but to which most of us give too little mind. Whether the world is more dangerous now than during the bad old days of MAD, I don’t know, though I’m inclined to say both yes and no. On the one hand, with the end of the Cold War, the prospect of total nuclear annihilation seems (though of course it may not be) more remote. But on the other hand, that very illusion of safety is dangerous, because it allows us to imagine (falsely) that nuclear weapons can be used in ways short of the catastrophic. It allows the men who control these weapons to boast about the size of their buttons.

I began Critical Assembly in the belief that we don’t understand nuclear weapons, what they mean or what they can do; that it was a matter of real urgency to seek greater insight with every resource at our disposal; and that all of us engage in the effort, not just generals, presidents, and policy wonks. I still believe these things, and I still hope Critical Assembly adds something to the endeavour, though if I’m honest with myself, that hope feels pretty slim these days. Most people don’t seem to share my sense of the criticality of these issues.

GMC: Finally, the inevitable last question, what is next?

JC: The second half of the story. I originally envisioned Critical Assembly as a single volume in three parts: the design and construction of Fat Man and Little Boy, the preparations at Wendover and Tinian for their use in combat, and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, with an emphasis on the voices of the hibakusha. But as I researched and wrote, I realized the story was far too large for a single volume, so I split the project in two. The first volume, before you, tells the scientists’ stories, including, as you’ve noted, many of the other individuals involved in their work, including spouses, labourers, locals, and military personnel. The second volume, in progress, is in five sections: the 509th Composite Group training at Wendover to “deliver” nuclear weapons; the debate among politicians, scientists, and the military over the use of these weapons; the preparations on Tinian Island; the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; and what I’m loosely calling “the aftermath”: the incorporation of these weapons into society and psyche.

Of course I continue to work on other projects as well. At the moment, this means an essay on the relationship between metaphors and equations, and a collection of haiku versions of “the great books.” But most of my time continues to be devoted to what my friends call “the bomb poems”—including searching for a better title than that for the second volume. So if anyone has any bright ideas . . .

Critical Assembly is available from Amazon for locally based readers: HERE or for readers in the US/ROW it is available from New Mexico University Press HERE amongst other outlets.