A passion for chemistry and art.

The world opened up for me at Columbia College in New York City. My chemistry courses were routine, but a core curriculum in great books and a poetry course taught by Mark Van Doren as well as one in Japanese literature and two in history of art--all of these just drew me into the world of art and literature. I stayed with chemistry, but just barely. In fact, it was not until three years into my PhD studies that I committed fully to our wonderful molecular science.

But I kept reading in the humanities. And sat in on courses in literature in the languages I tried to keep up. Eventually, at age 40, I began to write poetry. It took me seven years to get a poem published. Ten years later, I started to write science for a general audience, in part through a forum offered to me by American Scientist. Every four or six months, I could write a column about chemistry in culture, about the intersections of chemistry, philosophy, society, and history. And ten years later, I began to write plays. In between, I took part in making a series of 26 half-hour video programs about chemistry called "The World of Chemistry."

In time, I have built my own land between chemistry, philosophy, and poetry. My art historical interests come through in my writing. I also write about ceramics on a regular basis. Actually, I'll write about anything!

My poetry has appeared in various literary magazines. Two collections, entitled The Metamict State (1987) and Gaps and Verges (1990), were published by the University of Florida Press. Memory Effects was published in 1999 by the Calhoun Press of Columbia College, Chicago. At the end of 2002, two poetry collections of mine were published, Soliton, by Truman State University Press, and a volume of selected poems translated into Spanish, Catalista, published in Madrid, Spain by Huerga y Fierro.

In 1993, the Smithsonian Institution Press published Chemistry Imagined. This art/science/literature collaboration with artist Vivian Torrence reveals the creative and humanistic sparks of chemistry. A series of 30 collages by Torrence paired with short essays, personal commentary, and poems by me evoke the magic of the molecular science. The book has been translated into Spanish and Chinese.

In 1995, Columbia University Press published my The Same and Not the Same. This book points to the dualities that lie under the surface of chemistry, and that endow this seemingly quiet central science with tension. There are German, Russian, Korean, Spanish, Portuguese, and two Chinese translations of this book. In 1997, W. H. Freeman published Old Wine, New Flasks--Reflections on Science and Jewish Tradition, by myself and Shira Leibowitz Schmidt. This book looks in a non-confrontational (and, I hope, witty) way at how science and religion, dealing with the mundane, are both led to eternal and important questions of authority, purity, identity, the natural, and the unnatural. A Spanish translation of this book has appeared.

The play, Oxygen, by Carl Djerassi and myself premiered at the San Diego Repertory Theatre in 2001, and has had productions in Toronto, ON; London, U.K.; East Lansing, MI; Madison, WI; Columbus, OH; Germany; Korea; and Japan. Oxygen has been translated into many languages. A second play, Should've, has had two productions so far--one in Canada, another in Italy.

My "literary" Web site is www.roaldhoffmann.com. It contains a complete list of publications and instructions for ordering the books and downloadable copies of many articles. The poetry books are about the price of three lattes each. The Web site also describes "Entertaining Science," a cabaret I run monthly in New York City.

EVOLUTION

I had written three pages

on how insects are such good chemists, citing

the silkworm sex attractant,

and the bombardier beetle, spraying out

hot hydrogen peroxide when threatened.

And I was in the middle

of telling the story of the western pine beetle,

which has an aggregation pheromone

calling all comers (of that species).

The pheromone has three components:

one from the male, frontalin,

exo-brevicomin wafted by the female

and (ingenious) abundant

pitch-smelling myrcene

from the host pine.

I had written this the night before,

broken it down into short lines.

When I woke up Sunday and sat down to work,

quietly, with a second cup of coffee,

the sun was on my desk.

I had some flowers I had picked on the hill

in a vase: bush lupine, California poppies,

and some of the grass that grows here.

On the grass stalks the bracts were a few centimeters apart.

They were beige, finely lined husks,

their line set by a dark spikelet,

more like a stiffened flagellum than a thorn.

A hint of something feathered inside.

The sun's warmth had burst some of the pods,

which had fallen on the draft

words were lost in the sun), fallen

b chance next to the shadows of seed still hanging, and,

the grass seed

like dormant grasshoppers,

legs of now bent spikelets

cast second, finer shadows.

Then I saw you walking on the hill.

Cornell University's Roald Hoffmann, Nobel laureate in chemistry and accomplished poet and playwright, has entrusted Should Have Theatre, an Edmonton-based team, with bringing his new play to life on stages in Canada, the U.S., Italy, and beyond. After premiering for a global scientific audience of 2,000 in Torino in August 2007, the play ran in Edmonton September 2007 at Word! A Symposium of Talk, Poetry, and Performance, as a Cultural Capital of Canada showcase event. It was performed in Vancouver at Celebrate Research Week at The University of British Columbia, marking the re-opening of The University of British Columbia's chemistry heritage building. Should Have Theatre welcomes invitations for other performances.