Archive for the ‘Mathematical Poetry Specimen’ Category
Entry 1759 — A Possibly Finished Poem
Saturday, March 21st, 2015
Ooops, the above is not my final version, this is:
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Entry 1709 — I Done A New Math Pome!!!!
Friday, January 30th, 2015
The following is an accident, whether a happy one or a disappointing one, who knows. What happened was that I was looking through my digital files for a poem for Bill Michele and came across the divisor and dividend of this one in a folder labeled, “Long Division Problems Worth Attacking.” I immediately wanted to attack it. What’s below is the result (so far–I’m not sure whether it needs more work or not):
I think I was in the mood to work on it because of my thinking about HSAM yesterday. It may be my first autobiographical long division poem. The only unauthentic thing in it is the divisor. Actually, they may well have been there, hard to imagine they would not have been. But they’re not in my memory of the episode. Extremely sentimental, yes? It’s very simple but perhaps still “difficult” for many . . . Will it nonetheless make me famous?
I’d sorta like to do more poems like it, but have no ideas for any yet.
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Entry 1604 — Almost Finished
Saturday, October 18th, 2014
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Here’s my “light” poem again:
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I felt that “faereality” was strained as my divisor. I wanted light becoming Apollo, whom I consider a god of rationality, times a kind of reverse of rationality, and faereality was certainly that, but it felt wrong. I believe now that what was wrong with it was that it opposed reality as well as rationality, and I don’t think of Athens as being significantly unreal. I considered using “intuition” or “intui-tiveness,” but felt they were to abstract. Then I thought of “X,” representing the unknown. It could stand for anything, which made it an easy choice–but also a kind of cop-out. So I made it a window on a part of faereality, or (happy) magic. I could take Athens as being to a degree magical, but only to the small degree I thought my fragment of faereality would give it. As I write this, I’m no longer sure I was right.
In any case, I soon felt my “X” was too lazy a choice. At that point, I remembered the version of “mystery” I’d used in my “Odysseus Suite,” and re-used elsewhere. I thought I might use it times X as my divisor. When I found it, though, I saw it already had an “x!” I changed it slightly to what it is here. It worked pretty well, I thought, for the amazing rise of Athens was as mysterious as it was magical. And both opposed rationality. The rest of my term worked, too–the combination of “idea” and “dream,” the hint of “yesterday, ” and the allusion to my poem about Odysseus, specifically the portion of it about his homecoming was a lucky bonus.
I now think I was right about including magic in my divisor. No great event is without that. The allusion back to several poems of mine that “faereality” is part of, is a nice extra, too. Speaking of that, I began to make more of the fact that I was using so many things in this poem from other poems of mine: just about the whole of the divisor, but also the idea of stacked terms from more than one poem of mine, including in particular the one with the swans in it the preceded this one. I began to think that I might by now, without thinking about it, have developed a sort of set visiopoetic mathematical terms. What, I wondered, if I were to begin consciously making such terms and repeating them through a sequence as a way of knitting it more effectively together. Inter-textuality. Something to think about . . .
As for this particular poem, it still needs a background, and I probably need to color “Athens.” I may have all its essential components right, though.
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Note: Yesterday I saw my GP and he felt my problems with the my legs were due to various back problems we already knew about but considered minor. He still feels my problem is minor but no longer so minor as to ignore, so he prescribed physical therapy. I’ll be signing up for it on Monday. I’m to go back to him if there are no signs of its helping in two weeks.
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Entry 1603 — Thoughts and a Story
Friday, October 17th, 2014
The following is from an email I sent to Karl Kempton in reply to a thoughtful response of his to my entry of today, the 16th:
Still walking on partial legs. Being the kind of person I am, I’m thinking maybe what’s screwing me up is polio: in fact, I’m hoping it’s that instead of what I’m sure it is: brain cancer–although I had some kind of scan of my brain when I went to the hospital a month or so ago about this same problem and it was negative.
One interesting thing: I’ve sort of given up on myself–and it’s a kind of release: I’m just doing things I like to do, the heck with the things I think I should do. Fortunately most of the things I like best to do may be worth doing, like an essay I’m writing about my “Mathemaku No. 10,” which is on the cover of the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts. I’m calling the essay, “The Story of My One Almost-Famous Poem” (“almost-famous” because it got into a college textbook, then into a hard-cover mathematics poetry anthology and finally into the JMA). I’m trying to depict the lot of the invisible poet.
Here’s the essay I was working on–which I find too cut and dry, so I guess it’s a rough draft:
The Story of my One Almost-Famous Poem
by Bob Grumman
The poem above was first published in a micropress publication containing just 7 poems of mine called, simply, Mathemaku 6-12. The press (which I term a “micropress” because too small in readership to be considered a “small press”) was “tel-let,” the publisher was John Martone, the poems involved were what I considered to be mathematical haiku—i.e., short lyrical poems in which a metaphorically significant mathematical operation, like the long division of “Mathemaku No. 10,” was carried out.
John had previously published the first five of my mathemaku in 1992 in a collection called, yes, Mathemaku 1-5. Mathemaku 13-19 came out in 1996. Like me, John was what people call “an experimental poet”—and I call “an otherstream poet,” meaning basically a poet seeking poetic fulfillment in a different stream than the one most poets do. Hence, we were both getting published in the same very few magazines receptive to unconventional poetry. I don’t remember now how it came about, but a correspondence developed between us. Soon after that, I used my micropress, the Runaway Spoon Press, to publish some of his poems, and he reciprocated by publishing some of mine . . . or vice versa. Such is the way it generally is in the micropress: it’s either self-publication or publication by colleagues who like what one is doing.
During the next ten or fifteen years, “Mathemaku No. 10” got re-published a few times, mostly at my poetry blog, poeticks.com, or elsewhere on the Internet. Eventually, came its publication (as a visual poem, which it is not) in the college textbook the half-page I’ve reproduced is from. Interestingly, I was supposed to get paid for my contribution with a copy of the book, but never did, nor did anyone replay to the letters I sent the publisher about what I thought was a minor mix-up. I eventually bought a second-hand softcover copy of the thing from Amazon.
It’s not a visual poem in my view, incidentally, because the heart and the two pieces of arithmetical paraphernalia are the only things in it that are not purely verbal, and they are all symbols with specific meanings, just like words, much more than suggestive visual images, so I consider them to be acting primarily as words, albeit pictorial.
The textbook was printed in an edition of over a hundred thousand, I believe. And one student actually wrote me about my poem! A year later it was included in the only other hardbound book I’ve ever had anything in: an anthology called Strange Attractors, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, who were among the poets writing mathematics-related poems that I had recently met at a conference for such people in Washington, D.C., having by then encountered some of them on the Internet.
As a result of my friendship with Sarah, my poem made its final splash (so far!) with an appearance on the cover of the March-June 2014 issue of Journal of Mathematics and the Arts (with an essay on “visiomathematical poetry and a book review by me inside!) that Sarah had been the guest-editor of.
And here, in this essay, is my poem yet again. But it can’t possibly make me more almost-famous, can it?
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Entry 1602 — Long Division of Athens
Thursday, October 16th, 2014
Here’s my latest, unfinished:
The neato recreation of Ancient Athens in my poem was stolen from www.sikyon.com. It is copyrighted by Ellen Papkyriakou/ Anagnostou, with all rights reserved. If I’m still around in 2015, I’ll try to get permission from her to use it here. Still here, you wonder? Well, I think my nervous system is about to go. Lou Gehrig’s disease? I don’t know. I seem to only be half in touch with the lower part of my legs, especially after sitting for a half-hour or more. It’s as though they are on the way to being asleep. I can still walk on them, but if I jog a few paces, I feel the left one beginning to give way. I will be seeing my regular doctor Friday. A week or so after that I have an appointment with the surgeon who did my hip replacement. My hip now feels about the way it did when I went to him to get the replacement. Whether that’s related to my leg problem, I don’t know. It’s quite interesting. Needless to say, I give myself only a fifty-fifty chance to make it into 2015, but that’s just me, always sure of the worst when anything like this happens to me, but sure of the best when it happens to anybody else. Anyway, I’m proud of myself for finally converting my notes for the thing above into a semi-finished product. Gotta add color, and I may change the divisor, but don’t feel up to it right now (15 October, 2 P.M.).
Nota Morbeedissima: if I don’t never finish the above, I’d be grateful is someone else did, following how I done my swan one. Actually, I would not be able to be grateful, but you know wot I mean.
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Entry 1597 — My Swan Poem, Finished
Saturday, October 11th, 2014
I finished this at around 5 P.M, yesterday, and immediately stuck it here. I plan to comment on it tomorrow, when perhaps I’ve calmed down a little about how terrific it is.
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Entry 1589 — “Homage to Debussy”
Friday, October 3rd, 2014
A month or two ago, I suddenly had ideas for poems that I took notes on. Seeing the notes yesterday when hunting for something else I never found, I saw enough of the poem below to work it out. I made the version below this morning. It’s not finished. I want to think a little more about it. I feel “reason” and “intuition” need inner colors. I hope an idea for a background occurs to me, although I wouldn’t say it needs one. The interior of “dreams,” by the way, consists of a fragment of “faereality” from other poems using that, with the coloring shown here. My clever little way of alluding faery magic into this poem’s idea of a dream.
Conclusion: my career as a poet ain’t over quite yet, I guess. The one thing that bothers me about my few recent works is how little visimagery counts in them.
Observation: whenever I get intensely into one project, I seem to flood with ideas for others. Nice, but the danger is my getting distracted into four or five completing projects. But I did finish the second-to-last draft (for some reason, I just don’t want to use “penultimate”) of my novel yesterday. And I swear I’ll get the final draft done before 2015.
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Entry 1586 — “Moonlight Equation”
Tuesday, September 30th, 2014
intuition + reason = moonlight + pond
I’m bringing the poem above back from an earlier but recent entry because when I just happened to see it Sunday night, it made me realize a virtue of mathematical poetry I hadn’t thought of before: that an simple equation in the form a + b = c + d strongly suggests each of the terms has a different value than the others; hence a must be part c and part d, which means the reader has an extra meaning to muse about: in my poem, just how much moonlight, for instance, is intuition, and how much reason. Ditto for each of the others. In other words, “intuition + reason = pond” would be a nice poem, but not nearly as loaded as “intuition + reason = moonlight + pond.” To over-argue my point, the three-term poem consists of one mathematical idea, the other of five mathematical ideas.
No more for this entry. I’m having another tired of my tired days, but just got through another chapter of my book, one I don’t think I made more than two or three changes to.
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Entry 1568 — Me ‘n’ Riesman, Part 2
Friday, September 12th, 2014
After more reading of The Lonely Crowd, I’ve decided I’m very much inner-directed, according to Riesman’s description of the type. I got him wrong when I though his inner-directed type was similar to my rigidnik. I now an unsure how his autonomous type differs from his inner-directed type. According to Riesman, many of his readers, including colleagues of his, confused the two. I now see why–and Riesman himself seems to consider it a natural mistake. (He is excellently self-critical, it seems to me, but has surprising blind spots: for instance, about the possibility of innate psychological tendencies: he mentions such a possibility every once in a while, but quickly drops the subject, seeming to take social determinism the only important kind of determinism in the main body of his book–or so my impression is after not going very far in it.)
I’m also wondering how Riesman’s other-directed types ultimately differ from his tradition-directed types. Possibly, I just thought, because their memories coincide with their environmental input? They pray to whomever their tribal god is only partly because they’ve been trained to, but mostly because everyone else in the tribe is. The inner-directed person prays to his god because of his indoctrination entirely: he more or less has to because he is part of Riesman’s inner-directed society and thus not sure of having the right people to imitate.
The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.
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Last night while lying in bed hoping for sleep to come, I suddenly had a few ideas for poems, two of which follow:
intuition + reason = moonlight + pond
I’m not sure whether they’re finished or not, or whether, if finished, they’re keepers or not.
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Entry 1540 — A New Work of Mine at Truck
Saturday, August 16th, 2014
Just an announcement today as I ccontinue to try to get my current reviews out of the way (and do seem to slowly be succeeding in doing so). Go here to see “An Evening in June, 1952,” a nostalikuical long division about (sob) my lost boyhood, mostly the part of it spent in boys’ adventure books, but also actual times camping out. Click once on my poem to see a better version of it.
The codes are simple, but I’ve put hints that help down at the far right, if you need them. Further hints available for $12 apiece at HINTS, 1708 Hayworth Road, Port Charlotte FL 33952. (Note, for those of you keeping score: yes, it is a Major Poem.) (Note, for any knownstreamer accidentally here who laughs at the presumption of my declaration, I dare you to present a cogent argument against it. Not that my declaration isn’t intended as a joke, but only in part. I absolutely believe it. I don’t think all or even most, of my poems are major, but if–at my age–I didn’t feel some were it would indicate that I’ve completely wasted my life.)
(((b=a, 5=e)))
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this i like. keep it. do no touch ups.
A very beautiful piece!
Thanks:
Nico–but I’m itching to make one very small change! I probably won’t. IF I do, I promise not to mess with it otherwise.
Marton. Yours and Nico’s encouragement is much appreciated. Your eyes are as good as they come. I hope you get me to do a few more cursive poems. I’ve let some ideas wander in but they so far have all kept going.
–Bob
I like this. I think the cursive really flows well with the illustration. Would like to see more of these.
Thanks, Kevin. This one has now gotten three compliments. I did try to do another cursive but it turned off into something else. I do want to try more, though.