Entry 1761 — The Final Final & Other Stuff-

Entry 1761 — The Final Final & Other Stuff

On Sunday, March 22, 2015 12:04 PM, Bob Grumman <[email protected]> posted this at NowPoetry:

The first took me over a week, the second fifteen minutes, except for a spelling correction two hours later. The first is at /2015/03/21/entry-1759, the second one day later. I’m posting them because the first is autobiographical: Peach Island actually exists in Long Island Sound fifty yards or so from the shore of Harbor View where I spent my best years (from age 7 to 12), and my poem about it has zillions of epiphanies!

The rest of the poem and all of the second poem are autobiographical only to the extent of expressing my love of fantasy stories beginning with the Grimm’s tales my mother read to me. I was almost going to call the first poem an homage to JK Rowling but it only connects to the Potter series as fantasy. I think I may try for a specific poem about Harry if my subconsciousness can come up with the necessary ingredients. Confession: while I do regard Rowling’s series highly, I want to make a poem on it mainly as a way of enlarging my audience–maybe even double it to 16.

Feedback, of course, would be appreciated. Feedback, of course, not expected. Except possibly for the Superior Two whose names I will not divulge.

* * *
On Sun, Mar 22, 2015 at 2:22 PM, ‘stephen russell’ via NowPoetry <[email protected]> wrote:

peach island, just offshore —
abondoned house
in the middle of the trees

Bob, I think you can delete a few words … still, fascinating ….

I’ve always thought that your work would appeal to bright pre-adolescents. I remember Bloom, in a snide remark on the Charley Rhodes show, refer to Harry Potter as “trash.” Apparently, because Potter did not measure up to E B White, the book was unworthy of his esteem.

* * *

Very interesting, Stephen–my immediate reaction to your suggestion was, doesn’t he realize I want to indicate the size of the little island? But I thought about it for a while and realized I didn’t have to! In fact, if I don’t, the reader can imagine the island any size he wants to! And the main purpose of the poem is to give the reader something to use his imagination on. So thanks!

As for Bloom, you know my opinion of him. Bloom’s contempt reminds me of Edmund Wilson’s for detective novels. As for me, the only genre novels I don’t like are romance novels, and that’s because I’m one of those horrible XY people. But I consider Rowling much better than White, even though he was an XY, she a double X.

Off to fix my poem, now.

–Bob

* * *

http://www.georgetown.edu/news/lannan-center-for-poetics-endowment-symposium-2015.html

MARCH 18, 2015 – GEORGETOWN HAS RECEIVED A $4 million gift to permanently endow its Lannan Center for Poetics and Social Practice as it celebrates its 25th anniversary and prepares for its annual spring symposium – featuring renowned poets, writers, intellectuals and activists – this month.

Aho, an almost perfect counter-post to mine about my new anti-social practice and unmillioned or hundreded poems. (Ain’t it turble way I takes everythin’ personal!)

This entry was posted on Monday, March 23rd, 2015 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Cryptographiku, From My Poetry Workshop, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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Alison Bielski « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Alison Bielski’ Category

Entry 31 — Old Blog Entries 663 through 670

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2009

In #663, I presented my Odysseus Suite–but the reproduction is too crude for me to re-post it here. My next entry featured this, by Endwar:

TenByTen As I announced when I first posted this, I am hoping to publish an anthology of mathematical poems, like this one, so if you have one or know of one, send me a copy of it, or tell me about it.

#665 had this by Marton Koppany, which I have to post here because it was dedicated to ME:

Odysseus

Hey, it’s mathematical, too. The next entry, whose number I fear to state, concerned this:

Bielski-Haiku-BW

This is from Typewriter Poems, an anthology published by Something Else Press and Second Aeon back in 1972. It’s by Alison Bielski, An English woman born in 1925 whose work I’m unfamiliar with. I find this specimen a charmer . . . but am not sure what to make of it. Three lines, as in the classic haiku. The middle one is some sort of filter. Is “n” the “n” in so much mathematics? If so, what’s the poem saying? And where does the night and stars Hard for me not to assume come in? Pure mathematics below, a sort of practical mathematics above? That idea would work better for me if the n’s were in the lower group rather than in the other. Rather reluctantly, I have to conclude the poem is just a texteme design. I hope someone more clever sets me right, though. (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen later visio-textual works using the same filter idea–or whatever the the combination of +’s. =’s and n’s is, but can’t remember any details.)

It was back to my lifelong search for a word meaning “partaker of artwork” in #667–but I now believe “aesthimbiber,” which I thought of in a post earlier than #667, I believe, but dropped, may be the winner of my search.

Next entry topic was about what visual poets might do to capture a bigger audience. I said nothing worth reposting on a topic going nowhere because visual poets, in general, are downright inimical to doing anything as base as trying to increase their audience. One suggestion I had was to post canonical poems along with visual poems inspired by them, which I mention because in my next entry, I did just that, posting a Wordsworth sonnet and a visual poem I did based on and quoting part of it–and don’t re-post here because of space limitations. I wrote about the two in the final entry in this set of ten old blog entries.

Tags: minimalist poetry
Posted in Alison Bielski, Endwar, Marton Koppany, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, minimalist poetry, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

David Riesman « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘David Riesman’ Category

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.

* * *

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.
.

Posted in Autobiographica, David Riesman, From My Poetry Workshop, Knowlecular Psychology, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Temperaments | No Comments »

Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress « POETICKS

Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress

If I ever come to be seen worth wide critical attention as a poet, I should be easy to write about, locked into so few flourishes as I am, such as “the the” and–now in this piece, Basho’s “old pond.” I was wondering whether I should go with “the bookshop’s mood or “a bookshop’s mood” when Basho struck. I love it!

Just one word and a trivial re-arrangement of words, but I consider it major. (At times like this I truly truly don’t care that how much less the world’s opinion of my work is than mine.)

We must add another allusion to my technalysis of this poem, describing it as solidifying the poem’s unifying principal (and archetypality), Basho’s “old pond” being, for one thing, a juxtaphor for eternity. Strengthening its haiku-tone, as well. But mainly (I hope) making the mood presented (and the mood built) a pond. Water, quietude, sounds of nature . . .

Oh, “old” gives the poem another euphony/assonance, too.

It also now has a bit of ornamental pond-color. Although the letters of the sub-dividend product are a much lighter gray on my other computer than they are on this one, the one I use to view my blog.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 8th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Basho, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase, Poetics, Wallace Stevens. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 372 — Mathemaku Still in Progress”

Kevin Kelly says:

6 March 11 at 8:31 PM

I really like this one; it strikes me as very E.E. Cummings-inspired, and I love that guy. I think the use of gray is a good idea because it gives the “remainder” more punch at the end. I’m a bit confused on reading your description in which you keep talking about Basho’s pond, which I don’t see in evidence here … I’m thinking if I had seen an earlier version of this, or I was better versed in the Grummanverse, I would understand that. And finally, you won’t have to struggle between “the” or “a” bookshop’s mood soon, where there’s just one bookshop left. Just had to end that with a little (sad) humor!
Bob Grumman says:

6 March 11 at 9:20 PM

Oh, boy, I get to explain! Nothing I love more. Basho comes in because of his famousest poem, which I’ve made versions of and written about a lot, the one that has the “old pond” a frog splashes into. My poem has an “old bookshop” that has a mood with depths a street enters like (I think) the pond’s water with depths the frog enters. But now that you bring it up, I guess the allusion is pretty hermetic.

Glad you like it. I still do now that I’m looking at it again–although it strikes me as pretty weird.

Entry 155 — Latest News & a New Version of a Poem « POETICKS

Entry 155 — Latest News & a New Version of a Poem

I find it amazing how badly I’m keeping my blog going. I will be worse at it over the next two weeks or so because I’ll be out of town. I’m leaving this afternoon for New York City, where I’ll spend a day or two with friends, then head for Connecticut to spend days with siblings. Eventually I’m to be at the Bowery Poetry Club for some sort of reading from 2 P.M. until 3:30 P.M. on Saturday, 10 July. The subject will be mathematical poetry.

Now for an update of the poem I have, or will have, on the wall of mathematics-related art that is now at the Bowery Poetry Club as part of the month-long event the reading I will participate in will wrap up:

I owe this version to Connie Tettenborn: her comment about my original version that its dividend, “mathematics,” ought to be switched with its quotient, “Spring,” didn’t make sense to me–but it did make me vaguely realize that I was claiming that arithmetic was of greater value than Spring, and that ain’t nothin’ of greater value than Spring. When Connie explicitly made that same point, I recognized that I had to do something, but took a day to come up with the solution above. I know think this may be one of my better poems instead of something I quickly made with a goal of being accessible. And I’ve always like the device of showing a correction.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 30th, 2010 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Connie Tettenborn, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Entry 1121 — An Improvement « POETICKS

Entry 1121 — An Improvement

When I happened to see my blog entry two before this one, I noticed I’d forgotten to finish my poem’s dividend-shed. After I did that, I reformatted the dividend to have it going off the edge of the page, like the ellipsis. This little trope has long been a favorite of mine–maybe it’s now a mannerism, but I refuse to stop using it.

Silver Jewelry

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 15th, 2013 at 12:00 AM and is filed under From My Poetry Workshop, Mathematical Poetry Specimen. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Entry 1121 — An Improvement”

karl kempton says:

15 June 13 at 12:56 PM

fine poem

Bob Grumman says:

15 June 13 at 2:34 PM

Thanks, Karl! Maybe I’m not nuts for liking it myself.

Connie Tettenborn « POETICKS

Archive for the ‘Connie Tettenborn’ Category

Entry 155 — Latest News & a New Version of a Poem

Wednesday, June 30th, 2010

Posted in Bob Grumman, Connie Tettenborn, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Enter 135 — 13’s from The Pedestal Project

Friday, May 28th, 2010

Today I’m finally starting to post what I’ve decided to call “13’s from The Pedestal Project,” by which I mean my favorites of those submissions to John M. Bennett’s and my gallery of visio-textual art at The Pedestal. I call them “13’s” because the people who created them were, so to speak, all–in my opinion–tied for thirteenth place in the competition for the twelve spots available in the gallery.

The first piece is “Fifth Grade,” by Connie Tettenborn:

When I saw this, I was biased toward it because so many of the other submissions to a gallery supposed to be of visual poetry was (tediously) not visual poetry by any reasonable definition, and this was. I was also charmed by its evocation of what fifth grade seemed to me. I found the choice of data the kids were being bombarded with interesting, too: it happened to include three pieces of knowledge of extreme importance to me all my life: the discovery of America (and I claim Columbus discovered America; Eric the Red or his son, whoever it was, who got to Newfoundland only extended the shoreline of Europe), long division and the planets (which in fifth grade were just about equal to dinosaurs and the Pyramids to me).

I liked the little kids in proper order–although I’m not sure why Connie uses the particular letter she does to represent them. Wait, they are, I now see, “e.g.’s” . . . I’m still not getting the connection . In any case, one of the kids seems not paying full attention, which is a nice touch. The idea of Knowledge coming in from some Afar that seems almost divine intrigued me, too. There’s the concept of a window into understanding, too.

In chatting over syberspace with Connie, I’ve learned that she is new to visual poetry, so deserving of special praise for doing so well to being with. Because she asked for help, I’m now going to say a few minor negative things about “Fifth Grade.” One is that I’m not sure “bah bah” fits the piece as well as “blah blah” would have, and I think “gaga” and “lala” not particularly effective. I think the choice of varied fonts good, but believe a little more could have done to the in-flow–for instance, some overlapping could have worked nicely, I think, and great difference in the size of letters.

I wondered about the use of color, finally deciding straight monochromatic, facts-only dry knowledge worked best. But use of colr and visual imagery might be something to try, too, if the artist wanted to make a sequence of variations on a theme, which her piece would be a good start to.

Posted in Connie Tettenborn, visual poetry, Visual Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

Mathematical Poetry Specimen « POETICKS

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:

Posted in Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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

Here’s my “light” poem again:

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.

* * *

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.
.

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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?

Posted in Autobiographica, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | 2 Comments »

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.
.

Posted in From My Poetry Workshop, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Visual Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

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.

Posted in Mathematical Poetry, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Poetics | No Comments »

Entry 1568 — Me ‘n’ Riesman, Part 2

Friday, September 12th, 2014

The autonomous person will differ from the inner-directed person only in that he will be much more likely to question his indoctrination.

* * *

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.
.

Posted in Autobiographica, David Riesman, From My Poetry Workshop, Knowlecular Psychology, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Temperaments | No Comments »

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)))

Posted in Announcements, Bob Grumman, Infraverbal Poetry Specimen, Mathematical Poetry Specimen | No Comments »

Entry 390 — Two Poems from three Years Ago « POETICKS

Entry 390 — Two Poems from three Years Ago

Just about three years ago I wrote a version of the following poem:

. Poem has a question

.             Whose sleep is the sky?
.             For hours and
.             hours Poem
.             wondered.

I improved it just now by deleting its previous two last words, “about that.”

Note: I find that the day after I wrote the above, I “improved” it by adding ten or twelve lines to it. I hereby disown that version.

The following is a re-done poem I sent a year or more earlier to something going on in Mexico. I was trying to do something with the show’s theme of International friendship, or something. Barely worth keeping, I’d say but may some will enjoy it.

Note: as should be obvious from the way I strained tofind things for this entry, I’m still blah.

This entry was posted on Saturday, February 26th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Of Poem. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Entry 390 — Two Poems from three Years Ago”

marton koppany says:

27 February 11 at 2:25 AM

Whose sleep is the sky.
Bob Grumman says:

27 February 11 at 6:43 AM

Aah, you minimalists!

But possibly yours is an equal but different version of the poem; I like Poem physically in his poems, though, and the emphasis on the time the question intrigues him. There’s even a juxtaphor (implicit metaphor) between the motion of the sky and the motion of Poem’s wonder–for me, at any rate.
marton koppany says:

27 February 11 at 7:52 AM

It just came to my mind as a possible “answer” to Poem’s “question”. Perhaps, yes, because he was physically there.
Kevin Kelly says:

6 March 11 at 2:11 PM

I’m still working my way in reverse (top to bottom) on your blog, Bobby, so I may find more like these, but I think there’s something really interesting going on in “Mathemaku No. 21,” specifically in the figure after the minus sign. I like the possibilities with the reverse type creating new shapes inside those already created in the mashing up of letters.
Bob Grumman says:

6 March 11 at 3:23 PM

Thanks for the look, Kevin.

Entry 569 — Sample Hand-Out for Show « POETICKS

Entry 569 — Sample Hand-Out for Show

Mathemaku for William Blake

This is one of my favorites of my own poems. Blake is not a central hero of mine, but I do like some of his poems and a lot of passages from his work, particularly the wonderful:

                       To see a world in a grain of sand
                       And a heaven in a wild flower,
                       Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
                       And eternity in an hour.

In my poem the grain of sand is the dividend (that’s what you divide into, for those of you who may have forgotten the terminology—and it took me a long time to remember what was what in long division when I started making long division poems). Most of one world that might be in it is the many-color design under it. My (very loose) idea was to say that the right kind of eyesight can multiply a dreary day into a wonderful world. Add ripples, or an influence spreading out from that world, to it, and you’ll get what Blake found in a grain of sand.

I thought of the “right kind of eyesight” (or, really, over-all sensitivity) as being “unlessoned” or without much formal education and therefore able to see things in an unconventional way, like Blake did. I liked the pun the word makes with “un-lessened,” or “not reduced.” I added “lane-loving” because I think of lanes as wandery and out in the country, sure to go to interesting, happy places.

Poets are usually taught no avoid adjectives as much as possible, but I like them. That’s why I have two in my quotient (the top part) and three in my divisor (what goes into the dividend). I do try for unusual ones, though, such as “stumbled-inert,” whose meaning I hope I don’t have to spell out.

I tried to make my poem visually appealing, but carried out very few visual poetry tricks, “stum
bled” does stumble, and the day is kind of pinched; I think the ripples ripple, and the grain of sand is packed tight.

Diary for 19 November 2011, 6 P.M.: another okay day. Tennis in the morning followed by a snack and conversation with my teammates at a MacDonald’s. Back here, tired, but able after a short nap to take care of my blog and one item for my exhibition at the same time by working up a curriculum vitae for the exhibition which I could post as the day’s blog entry. I already had one of these but it was a little out-of-date, and in need of a bit of revision. It took more than on hour to take care of, for I improved it quite a bit. Still tired, I had troube getting around to my book. I spent some time, off and on, playing Civilization or reading the Tom Clancy novel I started a few days ago, to avoid the book. I finally got to it, although I didn’t do too much work on it, just enough to feel I’d done my duty. I made up a little for that by writing a good longish commentary on another of the poems that will be in my exhibit, “Mathemaku in Praise of Language.” I may get a little more work done today, but I doubt it.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, November 20th, 2011 at 12:00 AM and is filed under Bob Grumman, Literary Criticism, Mathematical Poetry Specimen, Pluraphrase. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.