The creative portion of this thesis is a poetry collection titled Some Other Europe, and thematically it revolves around Nikola Tesla’s life and inventions. Nikola Tesla (1856-1943)
was a Serbian-American scientist and inventor, known for his contributions to the design of
the alternating current electricity supply system. He was born in Smiljan—a small village in
what was then a military border province of Austrian Empire, and is now part of Croatia.
There are several reasons for choosing Tesla to be the main (and only, apart from the lyric “I”) speaking character in my poetry collection: he was one of very few famous scientists and well known immigrants in America from the former Yugoslavia (where I am also from);
many modern inventions in the field of communications and radio technology—necessary for
today’s commerce and global economy—are attributed to him; and he has become (in popular
culture) a symbol of an eccentric, misunderstood genius unable to profit from his own
inventions.
Growing up in Yugoslavia in the 1980s and 1990s made me aware, from an early age,
I witnessed the break-up of the country into independent states, civil war and its
consequences, both financial and humanitarian. War and suffering in Europe, particularly the
Balkans, are therefore subjects I could relate to, and which seemed relevant to Tesla’s life,
especially during WW1, and even more so WW2, when he was living in relative comfort in
the US, knowing his family, along with most of Europe at the time, was in less fortunate
circumstances. Some of the sequences in my poetry collection (“Across the Atlantic” and “All these feathers”) are entirely about that period of Tesla’s life.
Nikola Tesla’s successes and failures in America and his disappointments with the
commercial aspects of industrial finance meant that—according to most biographies and
historical sources—following his contribution to the Niagara Falls power plant design, and
his experiments with wireless transmission of energy and radio resulting in half-finished
Wardenclyffe tower, he lived in anonymity and isolation, continuing to work on his own.
In Some Other Europe, the character of Nikola Tesla is developed using very few biographical facts: his origin, his most significant inventions and commercial failures
resulting in relative poverty, his life alone, and his love (or at least company) of pigeons later
in life. These few biographical facts I found useful in imagining Tesla as a lonely immigrant,
an idealist disappointed in profit-driven American dream and society, and someone aware of
historical misfortunes of small, insignificant nations at empires’ crossroads. This Tesla,
isolated and lonely, unable to let go of his memories of Europe and his intrinsic belief in
human kind and his own work, seems like the kind of character whose views and feelings
would be equally interesting in the 21st century. The fact that some of his inventions helped shape the world as it is now, technologically advanced yet full of inequality and discontent,
progress in the 20th century, due to their contribution to what were seen to be the most important inventions of that time, Nikola Tesla’s inventions used in generation and transport
of electricity, as well as radio and communication technologies, account for his popularity in
recent years. There are numerous websites, many run or assisted by scientific institutions or mainstream media, dedicated to maintaining Tesla’s legacy, for example PBS7
Tesla
Laboratory, Tesla Memorial Society of New York8, IEEE prize9 etc. He features as a character or is mentioned in a number of movies (e.g. “The Prestige” starring David Bowie,
as well as numerous TV series and documentaries) and books of fiction, and many
biographies have been written about him over the years10. Though there are plenty of other sources stating the same facts as Wikipedia, I chose to include and quote internet sources in
the few footnotes in my collection. The reason behind that decision was to contrast Tesla’s
internet popularity, citing sources often written in sensationalist language and full of
superlatives, with his more human, lyric “voice”, which is the dominant dramatic voice of the
collection.
In my poetry collection I use many of the strategies and techniques discussed in the
critical part: repetition, logopoeia, historical and thematic parallels, to make the voice (or
speaking “I”) of the poems intentionally ambiguous and difficult to attribute to either Tesla or a lyric version of myself. In some pieces the two voices blend, letting a contemporary Tesla
emerge as a character, “speaking presence”, addressing either a specific or unspecified other or speaking to “himself or no one” in the poems closer to the lyric genre (Tucker 243). These
7http://www.pbs.org/tesla/ins/index.html?PHPSESSID=a1c8b67c466de299d4bb8481481d8481 and PBS- produced video http://www.shoppbs.org/product/index.jsp?productId=2886392
8 http://www.teslasociety.com/biography.htm 9
http://www.ieee.org/about/awards/tfas/tesla.html
10 The titles of some Tesla biographies and autobiographies and complete reference information are listed in the Bibliography on p.97.
explorations of voice I see as a bridge between 20th century events—namely World War 2, as well as European empires, history and culture—and more contemporary issues and themes,
like the civil war in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, global economic crisis, political tension in
Europe and other parts of the world. Because the collection progresses chronologically from
poems describing late 19th century events to sections containing poems about World War 2 and 21st century themes, Tesla’s notional voice becomes the link between time periods,
allowing for repetition and variations on central themes of the collection: love, war, economic
crises and inequality. The collection, on a different level, is also attempting to comment on
the irony of Tesla’s purported commitment to scientific work resulting in loneliness and isolation (loneliness for science), in the context of today’s isolation and alienation many feel in the technological age (loneliness because of science). In that sense, Tesla becomes a
metaphor for 20th century idealism: belief in progress brought about by education, scientific enquiry and innovation.