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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