Entry 1083 — More Mathpo Blither
I believe I’ve worked out my final argument for considering mathematical operations to happen in my mathexpressive poems:
(1) Consider the sentence, “It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” The sun is presented as a metaphor for Juliet but it remains an actual sun.
(2) Consider the equation, “(meadow)(April) = flowers.” The mathematical operation of multiplication is presented as a metaphor for the way April operates on a meadow, but it remains an actual mathematical operation of multiplication. The equation carries out the operation of multiplication on two non-mathematical terms to get a third non-mathematical term. It is something real that acts metaphorically.
If the mathematical operation does not occur, what happens? Two images, one of a meadow, one of April, whose collocation a reader is to take as having to do with flowers? What sort of poem would that be? Not that the actual mathematical operation makes it a great poem; I only use it because its simplicity makes my point so clearly.
That it is possible for such a thing as a poem that is part mathematical and part verbal to exist is important to me for taxonomical reasons since it helps substantially to allow me to claim all poetry ultimately to be of just two main kinds, lexexpressive poetry, which consists of nothing (or, sometimes, nearly nothing) but words (and punctuation marks), and plurexpressive poetry, in which one or more expressive modality is as aesthetically important in it as words (and punctuation marks): visioexpressive poetry, mathexpressive poetry, audioexpressive poetry and performance poetry (which I want to find a term for that carries on my “X-expressive” coining).
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