Motherboard City published by Fair Acre Press

Mario Petrucci https://www.mariopetrucci.com/ facilitated a science<>poetry course hosted by Mary Mullholland and the Poetry School in 2024/5 and edited the anthology “Motherboard City” that represents poets work from the workshops. Mario is a British-Italian poet, literary translator, educator and broadcaster. He was born in Lambeth, London and trained as a physicist at Selwyn College in the University of Cambridge, later completing a PhD in vacuum crystal growth at University College London.

When asked if your poetry was on one level an escape from your scientific work, but it was also inspired by it?

He replied:

“Yes, in that more generic manner. And I suppose one thing I learned from science, especially quantum physics – which is what the cultural movement of Modernism perhaps in part learned from relativity, which evolved at about the same time – is that you could do many things simultaneously in a poem. You could have all these quantum states simultaneously alive in the poem. That plurality wasn’t always reflected in my scientific work, however, where I’d often have to focus and deliver a definitive answer, an absolute. The poetry seemed to hang off that limitation, but also provided a complement to it, where I could explore ideas in ways that were much more generalised or eclectic, far more open and ambiguous, and therefore more alive to those possibilities in meaning that can’t quite be resolved.”