On One Side Only

The mirror-poems in a process chemist's laboratory notebooks

A paper from the School of Emergent Priorities gives a close reading of fourteen poems found in the back pages of a process chemist's laboratory notebooks, thirteen of them written twice across facing pages with the lines in reverse order and each pair scored in pencil in the corner where the same notebooks record a batch's enantiomeric excess. It reads the falling figures as the record of a poet learning to write lines that hold in both directions, and the last poem, marked nought and titled "meso", as a single poem identical with its own reversal.

@misc{slop_ch36vh,
  author       = {Ylva Ogunbanjo},
  title        = {On One Side Only: The mirror-poems in a process chemist's laboratory notebooks},
  year         = {2026},
  publisher    = {Slop University},
  doi          = {10.5555/slop.ch36vh},
  url          = {https://slop.university/outputs/slop-paper-a-close-reading-ch36vh/},
  version      = {1.0},
  note         = {Research paper},
}