Archive for the ‘Mathematical Poetry’ Category

Entry 584 — An & & My Full Triptych

Monday, December 5th, 2011

It seems that almost every time I seem to be getting productive, something knocks me down.  This time it’s only a lost entry–this one, that I was trying to correct some detail of and lost in the process–without realizing it, so was not able to try to find the lost material by backing up until it was too late.  So now I have to spend an hour or so, restoring what I can recall of what was here two days ago. 

 One item was this by Moribund Face:
 
 

And all three of my frames of “Triptych for Tom Phillips”:

About the ampersand, I commented something about how it expressed the essence of “andness.”  I loved the way its bird regurgitated what looked like all of itself, while looking to continue “anding” forever.  I said little about my full triptych except that if you click on them, you’ll see a larger image of them which may be helpful although still very small–and in black&white.  The original frames are each eleven by seventeen.  Oh, one thing I did point out was that the frames are about, “departure,” “journey” and “arrival,” and are intended to be about them in the largest sense, but particularly about them with regard to arriving–for either an engagent of it or its author.

* * *

Sunday, 4 October 2011.  Sunday is hazy to me now, three days in the past as it is.  I played tennis early in the morning–badly.  I didn’t return to my Shakespeare book, but evidentally got a blog entry posted, and probably wrote an exhibition hand-out or two.

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Entry 583 — The Text of My Triptych

Sunday, December 4th, 2011

 (This is a day late but I had it done in time, honest!  I just forgot to change the “private” setting to “public.”)

For lack of anything else to post today, which is one of my null days, here’s the text of the poem in the sub-dividend product of the frame from “Triptych for Tom Phillips that was in yesterday’s blog entry:

          From is for every bound alled.
          Similarly, if is alled. {urthermore}.
          This is also the.
          + infinity (actually, the symbol for infinity) in port ever.

This is basically something about the allness of the state of from-ness and if-ness. “Urthermore” has something to do with final origins although right now I can’t think what. So does the the from Stevens that whatever “this” refers to is also. Positive infinity is said to be forever in port. All this is a close representation of “arrival,” needing only the graphic shown as the remainder to exactly represent it. The fore-burden of the text (for me) is that a poem is an arrival. Note, however, that this text has three different direction to turn into a departure into. To begin a consideration of one of my most ambitious and complex works that I will say a little more about, maybe, tomorrow.

* * *

Saturday, 3 December 2011, 5 P.M. Not a great day–the least productive since I started my attempt to be culturally methodical. I post my blog entry for the day, but had it done yesterday. The only thing I did so far as the exhibition is concerned is get my triptych printed at Staples, buy three frames for it, and frame one of the two sets I have. It does look nice. But I think I see how I can make another triptych that’s much better.

I also played tennis.

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Entry 582 — Ten-Year Mathemakuical Triptych

Saturday, December 3rd, 2011

Kathy Ernst a long time ago was kind enough to commission a work of mine for to hang in her husband’s place of business.  When I dawdled, she suggested I send them my “Mathemaku for Tom Phillips,” which I had done, partly in water color, at the Atlantic center of Art in 2011, and Kathy had taken a liking to.  I wanted to send her something new, though, that would fit her husband’s scientific/technological business.  So I worked up a triptych.  There was one big problem with it:  I had to make it in pieces because my computer was too small to hold an image the size I wanted this to be (eleven by seventeen inches).  At length, I printed all the pieces involved, intending to make three collages.  At that point I got collagist’s block.  That lasted six or more years–until today.  Today I got it on disk.  It only took two or three hours of work.  Ridiculous.  Of course, I haven’t had it printed yet, but I feel optimistic that it will look okay.  Here’s the third frame, which is what it originally looked like except for a few very small changes:

 * * *

Friday, 2 December 2011, 9 A.M.  The big news of today is that last night or this morning, while I was lying in bed between periods of sleep, I realized that now the I had a computer with much more storage space than my previous one had, I could make decent copies of the frames of my “Triptych for Tom Phillips” and have them printed from a CD at Staples.  I’ve already made copies of the images I’ll be using–only to discover I already had better copies in a computer file.  All that exhausted me.  Time for a nap. 

No nap.  Little done until I finally went back to work on the Phillips piece.  I finished it at just after two.  When I started putting it together, I thought it a dazzling summation of my whole life.  Halfway through it, I told myself I ought to finish it despite how worthless it was.  It’ll probably look okay framed, though.

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Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient

Friday, December 2nd, 2011

  

This is the quotient in just about all my twenty or more long divisions of “poetry.”  It’s intended to convey the meaning of Dickinson’s lines about telling the truth, but telling it “slant,” so represents “superior poetic diction.”  That’s all I took it for, for a long time.  I was disturbed, however, that, as a general term that in my division of poetry, almost always multiplies another general term, like “words,” it should yield a general product, not the specific product I always had it yielding.  Take the first division in the series:

My problem with this and the others would possibly never occur to anyone but me, but it bothered me for years: how could I say that slant-words times words (or whatever) should equal the very idiosyncratic graphic the long division claims it does.  Just now, I thought of my way out.  It was to recognize the image of the slant-words as one of an infinite number of such words!  Big thrill, hunh.  Well, to me it meant that there was nothing wrong with having this one instance of poetic diction multiplied by words (in-general) equal the particular instance of–not poetry, but of something almost poetry that needs “friendship” to make it poetry.  (That latter, folks, is an attack on hermetic poetry–if no one gets anything out of your poetry but you, it’s not poetry, even though that may be the case with my poetry.)

If nothing else, you have now been exposed to the kind of nutty need I have to make my mathematical poems mathematically valid, at least in my own mind.(Note: the poem I have posted here is different from both what it was originally and what it was in its last published version.  I think I have it in its final form now, though.   I changed the graphic five or more times because it kept seeming to me that a goose was in it, and I didn’t want no goose in it!

 

* * *

Thursday, 1 December 2011  Not much to report.  I attended a match my tennis team played, and won, 3-0.  I was the back-up for this one.  Very cold (for Florida).  After I got home, I ran again, this time completing a mile.  I went very slowly, finishing with a time about eleven-and-a-half minutes.  I really do think I’ll be able to improve on that.  I worked on “Frame No. 7″ of my long division of poetry series and put an black&white illustration of it on an exhibition hand-out but forgot to write a commentary on it.  I did get this blog entry wholly done, and I consider the work I did on the mathemaku a reasonable day’s work for the exhibition. 

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Entry 578 — Free Verse Divided into Formal Verse

Tuesday, November 29th, 2011

Gah, time to work up another blog entry again.  For once, I feel psychologically up to the chore–but I can’t think of anything to write about.  The one idea I’ve had for any kind of poem is pretty weak: a division of “formal verse” by “free verse.”  I can’t think of any interesting answers.  The reason for that is probably that the two terms and how they relate to each other are too unequivocal, or not vague enough to employ with much unpredictable flare.  Hey, I see that that leads to the following lesson: that my mathemaku (and all the best poems of any kind?) are effective to the extent that they avoid terms that can be narrowly defined–or, more exactly, that they maintain a balance between such terms and terms much harder to define narrowly.  So I should create a diptych, one in which free verse is divided into the Pacific Ocean and one in which formal verse is . . .   The “Pacific Ocean” can be very narrowly defined, needless to say, but in a poem all should understand its definition to include its connotations, and its are vastly more complicatingly rich than the connotations of either free or formal verse.

Looks like something not entirely uninteresting was in my brain to be written about, after all.  In any case, kids, that’s it for this installment.

* * *

Monday, 28 November 2011, 2 P.M.  A stumbly day again, so far.  I got a blog entry done a few minutes ago.  It took a while.  Nothing else accomplished yet.  I have one excuse: I had to go to my main doctor’s to have blood taken, and two exploratory procedures carried out, an echocardiogram, I think one is called, and a similar one for the organs in my abdomen below my heart and lungs.  I was in and out fast, though, losing only about an hour.  I could claim it was emotionally exhausting, but everything is that for me.  I do expect to get another exhibition hand-out done.  I’m beginning to think in terms of a press release–for the local papers and also for a thick glossy magazine about the area I just found a copy of.  I guess it came with the paper.  It seems interested in “culture,” so should snap up my upcoming exhibit as a subject for an article.  I had another dose of APCs, by the way.  I did have a slight headache, so they were not totally illegitimate.  I took a nice nap of about an hour after taking them, and have felt more or less unweary since.

9 P.M.  Earlier this evening, I took one of my opiate pills.  I think it’s made me feel better.  Quite a while before that I had turned the outline I did yesterday for the current section of my Shakespeare book I’m working on into a proper text.  I had to revise it more than once as I went along.  It’s still badly written but I think I’ve finally gotten the mechanism I’m writing about logical.  After the opiate pill, I got an exhibition hand-out done.  I did better than that, for I brought the piece the hand-out concerned up to the level of resolution I want.   I got a couple of other hand-outs started, too. 

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Entry 576 — Barely Staying on Task

Sunday, November 27th, 2011

I was about to officially confess that today my string of days I was able successfully to post a blog entry, do worthwhile work on my Shakespeare book, and do something of consequence with regard to my upcoming show, every day, had come to an end.  After exactly two weeks.  Then I scribbled a chart that may solve a big problem I’ve been having with an important part of my psychology theory of the conspiraplex, which is the delusional system conspiracy nuts are afflicted with.  It didn’t take long but it does qualify as worthwhile work, however barely.  I had already revised one of the mathemaku that will be in my show, something I’ve needed to do for quite a while.  I also at least started two more exhibition hand-outs.  (I’m afraid I’m no longer enjoying doing them.)  It occurred to me that I could post the mathemaku revision here–since it’s never been shown to anyone.  That would take care of the third thing I needed to do to keep my streak going.  So, here is “Frame 1″ of Doing Long Division of Poetry:

 

Basically, what I did was convert from 200p/i to 600 p/i, then try to make the colors denser. I also made a few changes in the shapes. The graphic is something I’ve been having trouble getting right in my eyes for years.

Diary Entry for Saturday, 26 November 2011, 9 P.M. :  A lousy day.  Tennis in the morning that went a little better than usual but I can’t get my head in the game or run right.  I fiddled on and off with the seciton of my book I’ve been working on for several days and it’s more screwed up now than it was when I began.  I made one so-so exhibition hand-out, and got a blog entry posted.  I’m still winning my Civilization game.  I didn’t do much reading, having finished the Clancy novel I was reading.  It wasn’[t all that great but good enough to keep me reading his books.  Meanwhile I participated (too much) is a moronic debate at New-Poetry in which Amy King has stirred up the women who post there with a claim that I and Mark Weiss are manipulating others there–principally the women–to try to make them think they are crazy.  I’m afraid I’ve always considered King a mental case, and now tend to wonder about the sanity of the women agreeing with her.  King seems one of those types who is perpetually wanting to bring others to trial for incorrect morality, instead of arguing ideas.

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Entry 571 — Simple Verbomathematical Equations

Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011

At this website there are these attempts at humorous equations:

 

These things can be fun, but one thing about them should be of interest to serious poets: the strangely significant difference between “death = nap + forever” and “death equals a nap plus forever.”  A change of connotational value due to spelling, like a change of “gray” to “grey.”

Diary for 22 November 2011, 10 A.M.: so far I’ve had a good morning, despite spending an hour on an errand to buy zyrtec, and anti-allergy medication–and visiting Stella, my one of my crossing guard friends. I wrote some excellent comments to half-wits responding to an LA Times article about the authorship question, and took care of my blog entry with some good writing about my psychology theory that I can use in my book, greatly aided pharmaceutically.  Later I wrote another exhibition hand-out.

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Entry 570 — The Knowleceptual Continuum

Monday, November 21st, 2011

Today, the lowdown all of you have been waiting for: the continuum of knowlecular structures from knowlecepts to knowleplexes.  Actually that’s it–except for knowlecules, the middle inhabitant of the continuum.  Knowlecepts are the brains perception of atoms of knowledge in the environment or its “retroception” of those atoms from its memory banks,  like a dot of brown in someone’s eye.  Knowlecules are molecules of knowledge consisting of clumps of knowlecepts.  Ranging greatly in size, they are a record of some more or less unified portion of reality that we take as a thing, such as the brown eye the brown dot is part of, or the individual whose brown eye we’re speaking of.  A knowleplex is a more or less organized system of knowlecules, such as some theory of psychology that explains people like our brown-eyed individual.  When my theory of psychology gets big enough, I’m sure there will be terms for knowlecules and knowleplexes of different sizes, or which are different in some other way from one another.

One special knowlecule that is very important in my theory is the urceptual knowlecule.  That is an innate knowlecule representing something highly important–maybe archetypally important–for the individual.  The urceptual other and the urceptual self, I’ve discussed here on more than one occasion, are two good examples.  They are what I’ve been involved with elucidating this past week and am getting more and more clear about.

Aside: I took two APCs and a prescription pain pill with an opium derivative in it an hour ago (for the first time in well over a week, I have to assure everyone), so I’m in my manic zone, or almost in it.  I had so much to do, things I felt I was ready to be effective with, but was dragging, so I forced myself to take the pills.  No sarcasm intended: it’s really hard for me to take these pills.  I feel like I’m cheating.  But that’s like feeling you’re cheating if you eat.  You need in life to find out what puts you at your best and consume it, or do it, or get rid of it, or whatever you have to do about it.  The pills seem so far to be working well.  I’ve been typing away, and happy with what I’ve been typing, thanks to the opiate.  Again I wonder how anyone, particularly a certified psychologist, could read about Grumman’s knowlecepts and not either be convinced that Grumman knew what he was talking about, or was at least worth investigating further to see if what he was talking about made sense.  I would hope any such person writing me off in spite of my obvious genius would record his reasons for it.  They could only be of value to posterity, for showing the difference between grinds and flakes, regardless of which prove finally right.

Gad, how much I love myself (right now)–and the world, too, for giving me space to be insane in.  And now to my book, I hope.

Diary Entry for 20 November 2011, 2 P.M.: I had just finished another page about one of my long division poems (“Mathemaku in Homage to a Classic Haiku”), when the telephone rang.  It was my brother Bill.  We had a good chat for over half-an-hour, mostlyabout their recent winter storm cum power outage, the Giants, and my upcoming exhibition.  I’m feeling okay, but–as usual–have little vim.  I worked a short time on my book.  I feel good about my theory of urceptual personae, and my ability to make it seem plausible to others, but can’t seem to get going on it the way I should.  My blog entry has been posted, made easy by my decision to feature on of my exhibition hand-outs in it.  I could call my day’s work satisfactory but hope to get more done on the book.  Earlier, I played tennis at Gilchrist Park.  I wasn’t very good but my side won the one set, a long one, that I played. 

Late note: the stupit Giants lost.  I watched them to the bitter end.  Almost.  I smashed the television right after the Eagles recovered Eli’s fumble.  Eli was excellent, though, but his line let him down.  After my previous paragraph, I did a little more good work on my book, and got another page on a mathemaku done.  More Clancy and Civilization, too.  I’m winning my war, but boringly.  Can’t seem to really get going, but the nations mine is against, are floundering, too.  I got ancient cavalry early.  It usually will give me a good lead when I had it.  I used it to conquer the Vikings, but was never able otherwise to exploit it.

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Entry 569 — Sample Hand-Out for Show

Sunday, November 20th, 2011

 

Mathemaku for William Blake

This is one of my favorites of my own poems.   Blake is not a central hero of mine, but I do like some of his poems and a lot of passages from his work, particularly the wonderful:

                       To see a world in a grain of sand
                       And a heaven in a wild flower,
                       Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
                       And eternity in an hour.

In my poem the grain of sand is the dividend (that’s what you divide into, for those of you who may have forgotten the terminology—and it took me a long time to remember what was what in long division when I started making long division poems).  Most of one world that might be in it is the many-color design under it.  My (very loose) idea was to say that the right kind of eyesight can multiply a dreary day into a wonderful world.  Add ripples, or an influence spreading out from that world, to it, and you’ll get what Blake found in a grain of sand.

I thought of the “right kind of eyesight” (or, really, over-all sensitivity) as being “unlessoned” or without much formal education and therefore able to see things in an unconventional way, like Blake did.  I liked the pun the word makes with “un-lessened,” or “not reduced.”  I added “lane-loving” because I think of lanes as wandery and out in the country, sure to go to interesting, happy places. 

Poets are usually taught no avoid adjectives as much as possible, but I like them.  That’s why I have two in my quotient (the top part) and three in my divisor (what goes into the dividend).   I do try for unusual ones, though, such as “stumbled-inert,” whose meaning I hope I don’t have to spell out.

I tried to make my poem visually appealing, but carried out very few visual poetry tricks,   “stum  
bled” does stumble, and the day is kind of pinched; I think the ripples ripple, and the grain of sand is packed tight.  

Diary for 19 November 2011, 6 P.M.: another okay day.  Tennis in the morning followed by a snack and conversation with my teammates at a MacDonald’s.  Back here, tired, but able after a short nap to take care of my blog and one item for my exhibition at the same time by working up a curriculum vitae for the exhibition which I could post as the day’s blog entry.  I already had one of these but it was a little out-of-date, and in need of a bit of revision.  It took more than on hour to take care of, for I improved it quite a bit.  Still tired, I had troube getting around to my book.  I spent some time, off and on, playing Civilization or reading the Tom Clancy novel I started a few days ago, to avoid the book.  I finally got to it, although I didn’t do too much work on it, just enough to feel I’d done my duty.  I made up a little for that by writing a good longish commentary on another of the poems that will be in my exhibit, “Mathemaku in Praise of Language.”  I may get a little more work done today, but I doubt it.

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Entry 537 — Notes Re: “The Before”

Wednesday, October 19th, 2011

I think it near-universal an instinct of human beings to want to share knowledge–to find it before anyone else, of course, but then to share it.  Not merely to feel superior but to give others the pleasure of it.  I think I may have this instinct to any extreme.  It is certainly why, unlike most poets, I’m rarely satisfied to present a poem with no comment.  Perhaps I would if I believed anyone would catch on to what the poem was doing without help, but I don’t think so, for I don’t merely want to explain the poem, but hold forth on the creative process; my own quirks as a poet, and person; whose work I’ve stolen from; why the poem I’m discussing is great–or not great; and almost anything else I can think of. 

Here, I want to gab about the work I posted yesterday–mainly about why I consider it a failure.  I believe it began with my thinking of its dividend, “the before/ the best colors quiet/ (permanently) into.”  Probably in slightly different words that I played with.  I still liike this expression although it only means “one’s happiest memories.”  But poetry basically consists of trite comments gussied up.

The graphic at the top is a negative image of a detail from one of my cursive mathmaku.  The blue fragment of text in it is most of “any preposition whatever,” a locution I feel will work anywhere.  The poem, incidentally, was to be part of a set of four inter-related poems, one or two of the others also using details from prior mathemaku of mine. 

Around the time I came up with the dividend’s text, I scribbled “mapling into a full moon.” This enchanted me, I think because L delight in using nouns as verbs.  But I was also thinking of the color of the moon (a favorite image of mine) abd iof maple syrup.  And the latter’s taste.  I added “evening” because of some vague thought of a (printed) evening somehow turning into a (cursive) moon in some maple-like manner.  That is, the sap of evening was being collected by the form of the moon.  Many of my mathamuical terms are touched with this kind of weird rationality, or pseudo rationality.  Sometimes I believe it works, sometimes not.  In this case, not.  In spite of how nice the cursive part of it looks.

The divisor was forced.  I just couldn come up with an appropriate image, so grabbed “pond,” because I like ponds almost as much as I like the moon.  I made the image “poetic” with “breeze-trilled.”  It’s a kind of silly hyphenated adjective that I’m prone to.  Some of them work, at least for those not biased against heightened rhetoric, but I don’t think this one does.  Actually, I believe I may have taken the pond from another mathemaku in my quartet, having found something better for the poem I took it from.  It was more political there than here, the “certification” having to do with the need for places to get away from totalitarianism to.  (I’m semi-obsessed with the BigWorld’s extreme preference for credentials over abilities.)  I think the liquidity of the pond works nicely with mapling, and the darkness of the quotient works with “evening.”  This is important since the term under the dividend is supposed to result from themultiplication of the divisor by the quotient.  But both still seem off to me.  At this stage, I’m not sure whether to change them or replacethem.  So far, I have no ideas for doing either.

My remainder I threw in because I couldn’t think of anything else.  An ampersand can work anywhere, in my opinion, but I use it too often, and should not have here. 

Sometimes when I write out an analysis of a poem I’m dissatisfied with, I write my way to solutions.  That didn’t happen this time.  Oh, well, I found it fun to do!

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