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Boy, can London do the Olympics right or what? Olympic Park is decorated with permanent poem monuments like the sweet-looking one by Caroline Bird pictured here and the Tennyson one pictured below—3-D verses that are part of the Winning Words initiative run by U.K. National Poetry Day founder William Sieghart who has said he wants to "carpet our nation with poetry." But that's not all. Winning Words has also designed an interactive poetry game to go with the Olympics, and there was an Olympic poetry competition that received over 2,000 entries from kids in London. Furthermore, on July 23, London mayor Boris Johnson recited (in ancient Greek as well as English) "Ode for the London Olympics 2012," a poem commissioned from Oxford scholar Armand D'Angour who composed one for the Athens Olympics back in 2004 as well. Add to all this the Poetry Olympics held in London in late June, and you've got one heckuva Po-lympic scene going on across the pond....

In 1971, J. F. Bunnett and Francis J. Kearley Jr.— organic chemists studying a class of cyclic molecules called arynes —pulled off one of the most astonishing but now largely unknown stunts in the history of what we can only call experimental American poetry: they reported their research on haloanilines in three pages of iambic pentameter (yes, you read that correctly) and published it as " Comparative Mobility of Halogens in Reactions of Dihalobenzenes with Potassium Amide in Ammonia " in the Journal of Organic Chemistry . (Page one is pictured here; scroll down to find pages 2 and 3; and click on the article title above for a .pdf version.) Far out, right? Or, to quote one of the P&PC office interns, "Like, WTF, man?" Well, to help figure out W exactly TF Bunnett and Kearley might have been thinking, we solicited the help of Drew Duncan (pictured here), an award-winning teacher and professor of organic chemistry at Willamette University who took some time ...