Biographical Particles…
Before Tesla became a brand name affixed to electric cars and associated with the fall of Twitter and the rise of DOGE, before the Silicon Valley hagiography reduced him to genius eccentric, there was Nikola Tesla the Serbian immigrant, son of an Orthodox priest and of an inventive mother who recited book-length epic verses to her sons. Yes, before all that, there was “Niko,” shy brother to a dead boy whose brilliance could never be escaped in life nor outshined in the Tesla household.
Born in 1856 in what is now Croatia, Nikola arrived in New York in 1884 with a handful of poems; designs for a kind of flying machine; a recommendation letter from Thomas Edison; four centimes in his pocket; and a head full of rotating magnetic fields, visions of which blurred the boundary between dream and invention. He had left his brief love affair with gambling behind him in Europe; he would give up alcohol in accordance with prohibition (a sacrifice he’d come to believe shortened his life expectancy from 150 years to 135); and by middle age, he’d swear off all stimulants, including caffeine. He swam daily, even in winter, believing the physical discipline would calm the electrical storms in his brain. And he wrote occasional poems in the style of his Balkan homeland, verse that barely survives except in fragments quoted by biographers who found them curiosities beside the patents.
In many ways Niko was a cipher, one that did not ask to be solved. He never developed any real romantic attachments, though had strong friendships with many personalities of the day, including Mark Twain and Rudyard Kipling. Later in life, he befriended whole flocks of pigeons, whom he could be found feeding in the middle of the night, on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The sight of pearl earrings could turn his stomach. Certain sounds so profoundly disturbed his nerves as to leave him bedridden for days on end. He made a habit of circling his block three times before entering his apartment building. And in something between innocence and hubristic delusion, perhaps, he believed he could end war through invention, designing weapons so terrible—particle beams, resonance devices that could shatter bridges, an “all-seeing” machine eye—that nations would cease fighting for fear of deploying them.
And although Nikola Tesla was, at his career peak, a world-famous showman—seen by his awestruck public as everything from a dapper genius to a bedeviled wizard, his lightning-haloed brainchildren drawing crowds that numbered into the thousands—he would die alone in a New York hotel room in 1943, malnourished, deeply in debt, his papers seized by the U.S. Office of Alien Property, his name decades away from its resurrection as shorthand for innovation.
A Polyphony of Currents
Tesla’s work with polyphase currents emerged from a vision that arrived complete—the rotating magnetic field materializing in his mind during an 1882 walk through a Budapest park, as he recited lines from Goethe’s Faust and the setting sun cast its own rotational light over his path. Where Edison’s direct current required a fussy tangle of separate wires for each circuit, each phase, Tesla saw how alternating currents could be combined, offset in time, their sine waves as-though braided through space to produce a field that turned without any mechanical intervention. The polyphase system—typically three-phase, though Tesla experimented with two, four, six phases and beyond—allowed a single set of conductors to carry multiple currents, each reaching its peak at different moments, the whole system breathing in a rhythm at once circular, orbital, perpetual.
What made this radical was not merely efficiency but a reconception of electrical flow as something composed of multiple temporal streams. Tesla’s induction motor, powered by polyphase current, didn’t require the hulking inefficiencies of a commutator, nor any brushes wearing against copper: The magnetic field itself rotated, dragging the rotor along through electromagnetic induction alone. This was current as chorus rather than solo voice, each phase singing its part in the round, and the motor turning not from any single force but from their interference pattern, their elegant and constructive collaboration.
At the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, Tesla and Westinghouse illuminated the White City with polyphase power, demonstrating how alternating current could travel long distances, without the pesky voltage drop that plagued Edison’s system, and that multiple phases could balance each other’s load: What had seemed wasteful—sending current backwards as well as forwards, cycling through positive and negative—was actually the key to transmission across space.
The polyphase sestet, my own far humbler invention (shown below), enacts this principle structurally, using the two Tesla brothers—Nikola and Dane—as alternating magnetic poles, their voices traversing the poem’s field in offset patterns that mirror the transformer’s progressive shifting. In the given poetic mechanism, the current (represented by c) moves through Dane’s consciousness (c₁) in the illuminated present moment, then leaves him at nil until the magnetic poles switch and current flows through Nikola’s position. At that point, c is traversed by maximum current and c₁ in turn falls to zero. The letters N and S mark these alternating magnetic polarities, the north and south that must reverse to generate the rotating field. In short, what drives the poem is not narrative progression but electromagnetic rotation—the two brothers’ alternating perceptions creating a field that pulls the reader forward not through linear time but through recursive, rotating attention.
This form draws additional constraint from the Welsh englyn tradition, layering its consonantal patterning and word-echo systems onto the electrical architecture. The polyphase sestet uses strict patterns of repetition and variation—fazed/faced, element/lament, fill/fell, prince/prints—creating something like what Tesla called “divisible by three” operations, each sonic event capable of recursion, of being performed again in shifted position. The consonant clusters echo across the caesura that splits each line, the way current in a a rotating magnetic field separates while remaining magnetically coupled across phases; and certain words function as what Tesla termed his “magic number,” appearing in patterns of three or four, their recurrence not ornamental but structural, holding the magnetic field in place. The poem generates, in essence, its energy if not its meaning through this interference.
You might reasonably ask, “Why go to all this trouble to write in a form that tries to mimic the movements of one of Nikola Tesla’s inventions? What’s the end game?” I would not have had an answer to that question when I began writing in this form, and I’m not sure that I have an answer now; however, looking back over my shoulder at the process of discovering and writing into this form, my sense is that, thinking in a form that is derived from one of Tesla’s most enduring fascinations, the rotating magnetic field, was a way to get close to him, was a means of approaching the impossible task, so embedded in any life devoted to literature, of achieving some kind of intimacy with the distant dead, the minds you’ve never met beyond the language they’ve left behind as artifact of themselves. Such a task may be futile, this kind of reaching through form and language, this asymptotic approach to touching if not inhabiting a stranger’s mind, and yet it seems, for all of its inevitable and embedded failures, a worthwhile obsession.
(Ordinarily, I take little interest in describing the forms I work within, but in this case, I thought charting my process—particularly of translating close readings of patents into a new poetic form—might be helpful to some readers who are searching out their own ways to draw something creative, something positive, from technology, which is in so many ways assailing us at present, whether it is threatening our water supply and air quality by its server and data center requirements or by probing into corners of our homes and minds where it has no business. If we must share the world with hypermodernity, perhaps a minor consolation might be found in using some of its formal mechanisms to create art, which can still mercifully transcend the role of brute function.)
