My career, by BigCity standards, may have hit rock bottom, but it CONTINUES: shown here is a wall of our county administration building with a few of the pieces in my latest local Arts & Humanities exhibition, which I hung this morning:
![100_0085[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00851.jpg)
What the heck, here’s another wall:
![100_0087[1]](/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/100_00871.jpg)
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Here’s yesterday’s image again:
It’s one of my mathemaku, of course. I’ve actually been working industriously on it, trying get it right enough to submit to some sort of anthology Nico Vassilakis and Crag Hill are putting together. The version above is a recent revision of my first draft of 2007, a variation on “Frame One” of my Long Division of Poetry series.
“Frame One” is similar to the top image except that its divisor is “words.” It had long bothered me because (and make sure to write this down, students, because it’s an excellent example of the way I think about my poems) its claim was that “words” squared (basically–although it’s really distorted words, or words told slant. times regular words) happened to equal an image having to do with summer rain. Why that and not, say, a Pacific sunset? Obviously, the quotient times the divisor could equal anything. That, I didn’t want. Off and on I thought about this, but could think of no way to take care of it. Until a couple of days ago, when I finally concentrated for more than a few minutes on it. I came up with several pretty good solutions, one of them changing everything in the poem but the sub-dividend product (the image).
My final solution (I hope) resulted in the above poem. All I did was add “memories of a long-ago summer day” to the quotient. That assured that the sub-dividend product would have to do with summer–that it would be, that is, a visual poem about summer. And, as a poem, it would be poetry.
No doubt in due course I’ll think of something else I find illogical about it and want to revise it again. For now, though, I’m happy with it.
Oh, I’ve made several changes to the main image in it, too. One was to combat the darkness in the top version (which wasn’t in it until I put it out here). I’m as fussy about getting my graphics looking the way I want them as I am about everything else in a poem–except the choice of font, and things I can’t do anything about with my equipment, like density of resolution.
What I’m trying to somewhere with is “Mathemaku for a Vacant Lot.” What follows is its subdividend-product-in-progress. I think it’s almost there but I want to let it sit for a while. The rest of the poem is fairly set. I may fuss a bit with the look of the texts but not their content.
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I just realized something I should have realized long ago but didn’t: a huge virtue of the long division poem is that one can use it to indicate the value of its images to each other. In a long division poem I was working on last night, I suddenly saw how important the size of the remainder was. I’ve done other long division poems in which in which I consciously exploited the remainder’s small size, and I’ve often worried that my dividend might be smaller than my divisor or sub-dividend product or quotient, or even remainder. But I’ve never thought of the abstract aesthetic value of the characteristic. It’s something no other poem than a math poem can have, and that few math poems can have as clearly as a long division poem. So: hurray for me.
That’s all for today. I had hoped to post a new mathemaku, the one I sketched last night, and was very proud of. But a day of tennis then a long dental procedure–a tooth implant–did me in, and I started the day sluggish. And no longer think much of the poem.
Tuesday night in bed, I scribbled the notes for a new mathemaku on my bedside pad (which I had to get out of bed to go find!) I filled the page below. I expect to get a quite good poem out of it but haven’t gotten to converting the notes to anything yet.
I didn’t get much sleep last night, nor made up for it with a nap today although I’ve tried three times to nap without success, which is ridiculous considering I can barely keep my eyes open. I’m also all tuckered out due to a grueling tennis match. Doubles, in the senior tennis league I’m in. An hour-and-a-half. We won but just about every point was a tough one. It and my sleepiness is why the notes above are it for this entry.
Saturday, December 12th, 2009
In #675, I posted Endwar’s “Ten X Ten,” having liked it so much, I assume, that I’d forgotten I’d posted it a week of so before at my blog. Under the Endwar piece, I had three mathematical poems by Kaz Maslanka, one of which is also a visual poem but too large to reproduce here without losing most of the text. One of the others has the same problem, but the one below should be readable:
Oops, you may need a magnifying glass. My choice of reproduction seems to be the size above, or four times as large. Anyway, it’s called “A Man’s Intelligence” and may be more informrature–a specimen of informratry–than poetry. Let me quote what it says: “A man’s Intelligence” equals “intelligence Quotient” divided by the product of “The measurable level of Dionysian blood transfused in a saffron masseuse boasting whispers through the cool crystal shot glass of the finest golden tequila” times “The amount of passion fueled by a young pink Venus–her hand wandering in slow circular patterns, a seemingly aimless whistle up the man’s inner thigh.”
#677 and #678 are about the Christmas mathemaku I’d done a draft of the previous year, and worked some more on at this time (December 2005), and have worked on since then, finishing it, I believe. Then a reproduction and revision of a long division poem I used in the autobiographical essay in the mainstream series of such things I got it into many years ago, without its making any difference whatever in my vocational reputation. I don’t like it well enough to reproduce it here. I had another of my mathematical poems in #680 that I don’t like enough to reproduce here.
They look great, Bob! Good to see them exhibited.
All the best,
Márton
Thanks, Marton. Who knows, maybe some nut will notice them and be so impressed by them that he’ll scrawl, “Wow!” in chalk on the wall!
Actually, if I were really ambitious, I’d sneak in and vandalize them, at last thereby getting press coverage.