Poet’s Corner. Jessica Goodfellow and her sons Taiyo (left) and Hugo settle themselves next to a stylized stone lion at a historic Shinto shrine in Kobe, Japan, where the family lives.

By Barbara Ellis

Caltech doesn’t usually turn out poets, but Jessica Goodfellow, MS ’89, is making a name for herself as one, despite the fact that she lives in Japan, where her intricate English-language poetry is, to say the least, not in heavy demand. There’s also her choice of unconventional subject matter. Goodfellow, 41, left Caltech without completing her planned PhD in economics in order to focus on a writing career, but while you can take the poet out of the Institute, it’s not so easy, it turns out, to take the Institute out of the poet. Dark matter, string theory, Bergman’s rule, and Zeno of Elea are among the subjects and themes that permeate her poetry. Such topics may be familiar to Techers, but they aren’t usually put into verse. Yet Jessica’s poetry is beginning to gain an audience; in the last four years she’s received the prestigious Chad Walsh Poetry Prize, won a highly competitive contest to have a poetry collection published, and been nominated three times for a coveted literary prize, the Pushcart. And this past March, two of her poems were heard nationwide when Garrison Keillor read them on his Writer’s Almanac segment on National Public Radio. In the intensely competitive literary niche that is poetry, that’s not a bad start.

Goodfellow’s poems often blend the vocabulary of the math and science she studied in school with the religious imagery of her childhood. The second of eight children in a close-knit family, Jessica grew up just outside Philadelphia, where her father was an electrical engineer and her mother a schoolteacher. She attended the city’s public schools before going to Provo, Utah, to study at Brigham Young University, an institution affiliated with her family’s Mormon faith. After earning a bachelor’s degree in economics, with a minor in math and communications, she came to Caltech in 1987 to study for an economics PhD, attracted by the work of experimental economics pioneers such as Charles Plott, Harkness Professor of Economics and Political Science. But she soon realized that she “wasn’t that interested after all” in microeconomics, econometrics, and game theory, and that what she really wanted to do was creative writing. Her mother had once told her that as a young child she made up poetry even before she could write (“She said that I used to recite poems to her and ask her to write them down”), and she had composed poems all through school, and even had several of them published in literary magazines for children and teenagers. “My favorite poets at that time were T. S. Eliot, Louise Glück, Mark Strand, and John Ashbery,” she recalls. But “because I was good at it,” her teachers and parents encouraged her to study math and economics, “and as I was one of those overly obedient children who tried to please every authority figure in my life, I didn’t rebel,” she says. “Until I came to Caltech.”

The “obedient” daughter found it very difficult to announce her decision to give up on her PhD, but “people were a lot more accepting than I had expected.” Her professors suggested she take a leave of absence to think things over, and encouraged her to come back, but in the end she left the Institute with her MS in 1989. “I really enjoyed my time at Caltech,” says Goodfellow, “and I met some of the most interesting, intelligent, and well-read people I have ever come across.” Through her Caltech friends and roommates, she also learned about areas of science that had barely been touched on during her high school and undergraduate years. “To my surprise, I realized that some subjects had not even been covered at Brigham Young. For example, we studied Lamarck, and how to classify species, but didn’t learn about evolution.”

To fill in the gaps, Jessica began to read popular science books, and found herself particularly drawn to the history of Western thought. “Starting with the ancient Greeks, when science and belief systems were not separate areas of study, I followed as well as I could the development of thinking, to where the scientific discoveries began to conflict with religious ideas—and we all know the repression of ideas that followed from those conflicts,” she says. “I think I was trying to find a historical parallel for the conflicted feelings I had as I grew up, when I began to perceive a growing dichotomy between the faith in which I was raised and the scientific subjects I was encouraged to study.”

God created the whole numbers:
the firstborn, the seventh seal. . . .
It took humankind to need less than this;
to invent fractions, percentages, decimals. . . .
Only humankind could find the whole numbers,
infinite as they are, to be wanting. . . .

—From “The Invention of Fractions,” read on NPR

After Caltech, Jessica looked around for work that would support her while she focused on her writing. “Japan was doing very well economically at the time, and there was a big demand for businessmen to learn English,” she recalls. So in 1990, she moved to the historic Japanese port city of Kobe, where she taught English in the afternoon and evening and “worked at my writing in the mornings.” She started on a novel, but “it was horrible, and I never got near the end.” It wasn’t a waste because “you have to work it all out of your system before you can write decently,” but since then she’s concentrated on poetry and short essays.

Returning to the states in 1992, Goodfellow put her quantitative skills back to use as a math teacher and, later, as an advisor in a Newport Beach investment firm. But working analytically with figures all day left her unable to write creatively in the evenings. “I would occasionally attempt to, but the results were abysmal,” she admits. In 1996, she returned to Japan to marry Naohiko Ueno, a Japanese doctor whom she had met shortly after arriving there in 1990.

Courtesans of tenth century Japan knew
the keening of the caged copper pheasant,
solo double-note aria for a missing mate,
could be silenced with a mirror.

—From “In Praise of Imperfect Love,” also read on NPR

Today Jessica, her husband, and their two young sons make their home in Kobe, where Ueno, now an MD/PhD, combines his work at Kobe Seaside Hospital with a visiting professorship at Kagoshima University Graduate School of Medicine. At present, he conducts clinical research into how chains of amino acids called brain-gut peptides may be implicated in conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and anorexia.

“When I returned to Japan I got part-time work teaching English and studied Japanese,” says Jessica, who today also runs a small English-language editorial business out of her home, “but mostly I was bored out of my mind. It was at that point that I got serious about poetry as a future, and decided to try and publish my work.”

Writing poetry keeps Goodfellow linked with the literary world in the United States and counteracts some of the isolation she feels in her adopted country. “I don’t have a lot of time to write, so being faced with a blank page and no idea where I am going to start is especially daunting,” she says. “It’s useful to always have a theme that I am working on. Usually a poem starts with an image or a line, and I build up from that. Sometimes I get spontaneous inspiration, but mostly it comes from sitting down with a pen and paper and willing something to come.” There’s also a lot of waste in poetry, she adds. “You hack away and hack away. In some ways, it’s like doing a scientific experiment. It’s mostly failure before you get anything.”

Once she’d set herself the goal of gaining a readership, Jessica began submitting poems to American literary journals, and saw several of them published. Her first major success came when the Beloit Poetry Journal (BPJ) of Farmington, Maine, published her six-part poem A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland in early 2004 and later awarded it the Chad Walsh Poetry Prize for that year. The $3,000 prize was, at the time, the most lucrative in the poetry field. “It came out of the blue,” Jessica recalls. “When I opened the letter in my kitchen, I started jumping up and down with excitement, and began gasping for air. The kids got quite worried and said, ‘Mommy, are you okay?’” Taiyo, now six, and Hugo, five, were also thrilled when they heard her poems on NPR (via an internet stream), although Taiyo was somewhat disappointed that Keillor had not chosen either of the poems that mention him.

At the motel, he watches me
lower the blinds against
the white noise, the presence
of all possibilit5ies in the night.
“It’s such a lovely dark, Mama,” he says.

—From A Pilgrim’s Guide part 1, “Road Trip”

The Pilgrim’s Guide follows a woman and her son as they drive through America’s tall-grass prairie states. The poem is based on Goodfellow’s childhood experience, harking back to a time when her family drove every few years from Pennsylvania to her maternal grandparents’ home in Southern California. “That’s how I got to see South Dakota and Kansas, whose imagery haunts me—the extreme weather conditions, the emptiness and flatness, and the excess of nothing,” she says. From the beginning of the poem cycle, numbers begin cropping up at seemingly arbitrary spots within the words and become more and more prevalent until the final poem, “015Random N6umber Tab8le,” consists almost entirely of digits.

The original inspiration for this, says the author, came by accident while she was working on her computer with then two-year-old Taiyo on her lap. “He was busy banging at the number keypad while I typed, and I got tired of stopping to delete his insertions, so I decided to just finish the project and come back and delete all the numbers when he was asleep. When I returned to do that, I was surprised at how readable the document was, with its ‘random’ number additions; it was actually a challenge to find them all because my eyes would just skip over them without any loss of comprehension. That got me thinking about all the randomness that occurs in our lives and how we process the information without letting it overwhelm or deter us; in many cases people don’t even take any notice of it. So that started the poem for me.” The former Caltech student crafted her poem with mathematical precision, using one random number table to choose the digits, and a second table to tell her where in the poem to insert them.

I am b5ecoming th8e center of some circ5le,
all p9oints equi05distant from72 me,
interc2hangeable. I a2m zero-
ing in on random355ness.

—From Pilgrim’s Guide part 5, “Crop Circles5”

When the Beloit Poetry Journal proposed to read this poem at one of its events, Goodfellow was curious about how they were going to handle the numbers—she was chiefly concerned with the visual impact when she had written it and had never considered the verses being read aloud. The BPJ solved the problem by using several voices to articulate the different numbers. Jessica later heard that “Apparently it got quite frenzied, and was likened to a composition by Philip Glass, an iconoclastic musician known for his ‘minimalist’ style. It’s rather interesting; one writes a poem, and then it goes out into the world and has a life of its own.”

See how matter curves around the emptiness,
how it cups and gently holds
the space where things are absent.
Matter buckles and spirals around it,
proving what is missing is more potent
than what isn’t.

—From “The Beach at Big Salt”

Encouraged by the favorable reception for Pilgrim’s Guide, Goodfellow began working on a collection of poems incorporating the scientific, mathematical, and religious themes that she had noticed appealed to many of her readers. She began by writing down “all the concepts on a math theme that I thought had the possibility of being forged into a poem, then, when I had a subject on my mind, I would look at the list and invariably one mathematical or scientific concept would fit with it.” In the resulting series of poems, the tale of Adam and Eve’s fall from paradise is assimilated to the apple’s legendary fall on Newton’s head (see “Imagine No Apples,” above right); the pathos of barren Sarai, the biblical Abraham’s wife, opens out into a meditation on physical and metaphysical emptiness (“In the time before zeros / merchants marked nothing with nothing / leaving spaces to show where something was missing. / But what shape was the space?”); and both geometric and interpersonal dynamics are explored in “Spatial Relations” (“Tonight I understand why / you were trying to learn, / like Zeno of Elea, not / to distinguish between a body / and the space in which it is.”) In the “The Beach at Big Salt” (excerpted above), Jessica describes dark matter in words no astronomer would use, yet they’re not inaccurate in their simultaneous invocation of the spiritual and material essence of this mysterious phenomenon.

All the poems excerpted in this article with the exception of “What You See If You Use Water as a Mirror,” can be read in full in the above chapbook, A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland, published by Concrete Wolf and available from its website (www.concretewolf.com) for $10. “Imagine No Apples,” which is printed in its entirety at the end of this article against an apple-peel backdrop, first appeared in Phoebe: A Journal of Literature and Art, while “The Beach at Big Salt” had its debut in the magazine RATTLE. And while it would certainly be nice, it won’t be necessary to travel to Japan to photograph these flowering cherry-tree branches, which were blossoming in April not far from the Caltech campus in Pasadena’s Old Town.

In January 2006, she felt ready to enter fifteen of both her newer and previously published poems in a chapbook competition (chapbooks are artfully designed booklets of poems or essays printed on letterpresses in limited editions). Most poetry journals run such competitions annually, and a couple hundred chapbooks are published each year, but there are thousands of would-be poets competing to win because, according to Jessica, “it’s an easy and cheap way to get published.” To her astonishment, she won the first one she entered—the 2005 Concrete Wolf Chapbook competition. (Of course, she then had to withdraw from all the others.) Her chapbook, entitled A Pilgrim’s Guide to Chaos in the Heartland in honor of the poem she still considers her finest, was published in the fall of 2006. She later learned that her use of scientific imagery had resonated with the Concrete Wolf judges, one of whom had studied math, and the other, chemistry, in college. “They were impressed by my poems because they found it difficult to use science in their own writing,” she says. The judges praised her “energetic use of language and her intellectual capabilities” and singled out an “invigorating and playful” style that “will leave you craving more from this uniquely captivating poet.”

In Shinto, the eight elements
of beauty include impermanence
and perishability. Choose one
as your watermark. No,
that is the wrong one.

—From “What You See If You Use Water as a Mirror”

Today Jessica has moved on to a new theme—water and the act of emptying (“loss in many guises,” as she expresses it)—and is hard at work on what she hopes will be a cycle of about 60 poems. Her goal is to publish an actual book, whose press run will be significantly larger than a chapbook print run of 100 to 200 copies, but “I’ll be competing against English professors, established poets, and people who have already had several chapbooks published,” she says. “What You See If You Use Water as a Mirror,” one of her first poems in the series, has already appeared in the BPJ, on the Verse Daily website (www.versedaily.org), and in the anthology Best New Poets 2006: 50 Poems from Emerging Writers, published by the University of Virginia’s literary magazine, Meridian. Although her new theme isn’t science- or math-based, “sine waves and other such images keep creeping in,” she confesses. The language also invokes Japanese imagery, something that is just “starting to come through” after
her many years in Japan.

Jessica has achieved success despite having no formal poetry training. Her advice for other would-be poets is to “work with other writers, professors, or peers. Careful readers can show you your mistakes a lot faster than you will notice them on your own, though you would probably get there eventually. On the other hand, “there’s a level of intuition in writing poetry that a person has or doesn’t have. I’m not sure you can learn it, but I think you can struggle toward it.” Jessica also recommends joining a writing group, as she did when her family was living for a time in Florida. She has since founded one in the Kansai region where she lives, because “it’s illuminating to have feedback from the right people at the right time.” There are currently six other native English speakers, all of them married to Japanese men, in the group, but it’s open to anyone writing in English.

It took courage to give up her PhD program and leave Caltech, but Jessica doesn’t regret her decision to pursue a calling that has captivated her since childhood.
Despite the awards she’s garnered, and the poems she’s published, she continues to describe herself as a writer. “Poet is a designation I don’t feel worthy of at this time,” she insists. Perhaps these lines from a prose poem, “Strategy of Change,” ostensibly written about a friend, sum up her thinking best:

Having no method of invention but the process of elimination—
unorganized and random—if you were to say all her efforts
amounted to nothing, she’d not find it surprising. This does not deter her;
she doesn’t believe in entropy, continues her ceaseless creating.