Archive for the ‘Mathematical Poetry’ Category

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Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton

Tuesday, December 13th, 2011

I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah.  Fortunately I remembered I  had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:

mindless x ( ) = less mind

The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:

old pond

frog

splash

!

Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that.  Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.

 * * *

Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M.  Tough day.  A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40.  I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago.  Then marketing followed by the delivery of ”The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present.  After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore.  I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much.  But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore.  Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty.  Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.

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Entry 589 — A Spin-Off

Saturday, December 10th, 2011

The poem below is something I spun off the mathemaku I posted yesterday.  I made it mainly because I wanted to use a complete long divion poem as a term in a larger long division–something I’ve done once before but have never been satisfied with. 

 

* * *

Friday, 9 December 2011, 8 A.M.   Now that I’m starting to get things done, my luck has soured.   A while ago I was getting ready to take the three framed works I now have for counter-display to the Arts&Humanities Council office.  I could only find two.  I was carrying the missing one around in my bicycle basket a few days ago.  Looks like someone grabbed it.  Unless I found a some incredibly stupid place to hide it from myself here.   Luckily the frame was a cheap one, and the poem, which I’m sure the ones who stole it had not interest in (if they stole it for the poem, I’d be very pleased) is about the easiest of the ones I have to zap out another copy of.  It’s the “Hi” one.  But I’m out ten dollars or so, and have to ride out to get another frame, a wearying chore that upsets my plans for the day.

It is now a little after nine.  Just as I was about to leave to get a new frame and take care of a few other errands, I found the “stolen” work.  It was in a packing envelope (as I remembered it had been) and right in the chair I would naturally have put it in after getting back from the bike ride I’d had it with me on.  My jacket was draped over it, but not entirely over it.  I should have looked where it was as soon as I thought it lost.  I’m not going senile–I’ve been doing things like that all my life.  I must say, I feel a lot better.  And something good came from it: needing another copy of the poem, I fooled around with it at Paint Shop and improved it.  (Hey, that counts as my work for day on exhibition-related matters!)

It’s now eleven.  I did some more work concerned with the exhibition: I went to the A&H office and talked to Judy, the lady in charge.  I got a better idea of things from her–such as the date of the opening (3 January 2012).

5 P.M. and I’ve corrected my “A Christmas Mathemaku,” which I’ve always considered a potential crowd pleaser, and done a write-up on it.  I plan to leave a framed copy of it at the Grumman Exhibition Center on Monday.

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Entry 588 — Back to “the the”

Friday, December 9th, 2011

 A brand-new mathemaku I got the simple idea for a few days ago and made on my computer yesterday.  One thing I dislike a great deal about it is that it is an opinion poem–worse, the opinion is a political one.  But it has a nice graphic taken from my Long Division of Poetry series to which a photograph of outer space taken by the Hubble telescope has been added.  A central meaning of its remainder, which I stole from the fourth frame of my “Suite for Odysseus” is “mystery.”  As you all should know, its dividend, which I use in lots of poems, is from a poem by Wallace Stevens.

 

* * *

 Thursday, 8 December 2011, 3 P.M.  I’m in a good mood.  The poem above came out reasonably well, and smoothly–and gave me something for this blog entry.  It will probably be in my show, so counts as work done for that.  But I also got one of my piece for that into a frame that can be set on a counter, which counts indisputably as work for the show.   Meanwhile, I’ve disconnected completely from my Shakespeare book.  Next, I have to get a press release for the show done.  Should be easy but I’m having trouble pumping myself up to do it.

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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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Posted in Aesthetics, Bob Grumman, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Moribund Facekvetch, Visual Poetry Specimen | Comments Off

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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