Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2
Category: Mathematical Poetry Specimen
Entry 34 — Yesterday’s Mathemaku Again, and Another « POETICKS
Entry 34 — Yesterday’s Mathemaku Again, and Another
Here’s the latest version of what I think I’m calling “Frame 17″ of The Long Division of Poetry:
I didn’t like the background blue as dark as it showed here, so I lightened it. For some reason, that made a lot of difference to me. I also changed the quotient of the mathemaku below, another variation on the lead frame of The Long Division of Poetry that I composed in 2007 and have only touched up slightly since, mostly to increase its resolution. I feel it’s about as good as I’m capable of getting as a mathematical poet–although I do feel I’ve done a few mathemaku that are better than it.
The divisor is hard to read on-site, I don’t know why. The image is much darker than it is on the screen of the computer where I do my Paint Shop work, even though I tried to lighten it. Oh, it’s tiff on my computer, jpeg here, which may explain it. Anyway, the divisor reads, “a memory of/ Harbor View, June 27, 1952″
Note: for those of you new to Grumman Studies, “manywhere-at-once,” which is usually capitalized, is where (according to my poetics) metaphors and other figures of speech send one. Two or more places in one’s brain at the same time. So this poem attempts to express the value of equaphoration–my term for any poetic device that in some way equates one thing with another, even irony, which equates the truth with its opposite.
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Uncategorized « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category
Entry 592 — Some n0thingness from Karl Kempton
Tuesday, December 13th, 2011
I wasn’t sure what to put in this entry, I’m so blah. Fortunately I remembered I had just gotten a package of poems from Karl Kempton, reflections, among which were many worthy of re-publication here, such as this:
mindless x ( ) = less mind
The origin poem for all the poems in the collection is “american basho”:
old pond
frog
splash
!
Too blah to give the collection the critique it merits, I’ll just say that it seems to me a zen meditation on . . . well, the zero/hole/opening/ letter o in Basho’s old pond, the latter representing the mind . . . unless it represents something beyond that. Karl and I have metaphysical differences, and sometimes I’m not too sure what he means, but his ideas are always worth thinking, or meta-thinking, about.
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Monday, 12 December 2011, 2 P.M. Tough day. A routine visit to my general practitioner at 9:40. I’m doing fine according to the various tests I underwent a week ago. Then marketing followed by the delivery of “The Odysseus Suite” (signed by the artist!) to my friend Linda as a birthday present. After dropping off the frozen lasagna Linda had given me, and the things I’d bought at the supermarket at my house, I went off again to (1) deposit a check, (2) leave a framed copy of my “A Christmas Mathemaku” at the Arts & Humanities Council’s office, and buy some items at my drugstore. I was home by a little after one, too tired to do much. But I scanned the Carlyle Baker work I posted in yesterday’s blog entry to take care of daily blogging chore. Dropping the mathemaku off at the A&H Council office took care of the only other duty I’m still trying to take care of daily, my exhibition-related duty. Now for a nap, if I can manage to fall asleep.
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Entry 450 — Visioverbal Visual Poetry
Wednesday, May 25th, 2011
I suppose, now that I’ve seen (most of–I haven’t been able to download all the images to my elderly, bottom -of-the-line computer) the collection of artworks Geof Huth curated here, I’ll have to make something of a retreat in terminology. Geof, probably the most influential authority on the definition of visual poetry around, seems to believe that artworks containing nothing but words can be poetry–if, apparently, it does something “visual” like use the fact that “hear” and “here” sound alike but mean different things–as well as artworks containing nothing whatever that is explicitly verbal or even textual are visual poetry. My impression is that they majority of people contributing to shows like this one are similarly against sane naming. Ergo, instead of using “visual poetry” to mean what I think it should mean, I’m going to try from now on to call what I think of as visual poetry (because it is both meaningfully visual and meaningfully poetry): visioverbal visual poetry. “Visioverbal” rather than “verbovisual” because “visioverbal,” for me suggests that what is verbal is more important than what is visual in what is being described. It’s an awkward phrase, but what else can I use?
If asked to curate a show of what others call “visual poetry” (don’t worry, I won’t be), I will simply call it, “stuff.” Why confuse things with any name more detailed?
I can see one virtue of the use of the name “visual poetry” for almost anything: a “visual poet” can do art of a kind done for decades, like collage, and feel original be giving it a name it hadn’t been called by. (Not that there aren’t some really fine works in Geof’s gallery.)
Entry 101 — MATO2, Chapter 3.02
Tuesday, February 9th, 2010
I wasn’t finished with the revision of my book, just with getting a good rough draft of it done. My morale got a substantial boost on Thursday 3 January 1991 due to a letter from John Byrum. He asked if I’d consider letting him run a series of excerpts from my book in the newsletter he edits. I thought that a great idea and after my afternoon nap have spent quite a bit of time getting 12 excerpts ready for him. As I’ve gone along, I have also found places in my book in need of improvement and have thus taken up the book’s revision again. In fact, I’ve cut my final chapter by around 500 words.
9 P.M. Friday 4 January 1991 I made a few new changes in the book and in the excerpts as well.
8 P.M. Monday 7 January 1991 Got my Manywhere excerpts ready for John Byrum.
10:10 P.M. Tuesday 8 January 1991 The bank account is very low–I can’t publish more than a hundred copies of my revised edition of Manywhere without going below the minimum balance on my last account with anything at all in it. But I guess I’ll have enough to print 100 copies of the psychology book, assuming my Xerox holds up.
9 P.M. Thursday 17 January 1991 The mail included a nice letter from Carita (a member of the Tuesday Writers’ Group who’d bought a copy of my book before moving to Miami)–and the card I’d sent to James Kilpatrick for him to let me know if he’d gotten my letter about “vizlation” with. He had, and–more amazingly–will be quoting it in a column in February, he says.
10 P.M. Monday 21 January 1991 I spent most of the rest of the day writing definitions for the words in Of Manywhere-at-Once’s glossary. It took me a surprisingly long time, but it was helpful, for I was able to improve several passages conerning those words in the main part of
the book. I was dismayed to find two or three spots where my definitions were quite confused. But now the only thing left to do to get the book completely ready for printing is a table of contents. (Aside from working out the margins and all that baloney.)
8:30 P.M. Wednesday 23 January 1991 I heard from John Byrum, okaying my Manywhere series except that he preferred to start with my second excerpt rather than the one telling about my beginning the sonnet and I decided he was right. So I withdrew the first excerpt and the last, which goes with it. Consequently, he’ll be running ten installments.
26 January 1991 I am now like a 25-year-old in quantity of accomplishments and social recognition, but like a 50-year-old in actual accomplishment. It also passed through my mind how extremely self-confident, even complacent, I am at the deepest level that things will eventually come out right for me. I think I get that from Mother. But I’ve always known, too, that I have to work hard if that’s to happen, as I have, for the most part.
Tuesday 29 January 1991 dbqp #101, which I found in the back of my mailbox when I put some letters to go in it this morning. Very interesting short history of dbqp and list of its first 100 publications with personal comments about them. He mentioned me a great deal which was flattering but made me a little self-conscious, too.
Friday 1 February 1991 I was full of intimations of apotheosis this morning. My feelings built till I got back from shopping and found rather null mail awaiting. They faded quickly, then. But I continue to feel pretty good. Actually, it was good mail–letters from Malok, Jonathan and Guy. Also material about 1X1 exhibit but no letter from Mimi, and a request for a catalogue. Lastly, a quotation for printing 100, 1000 copies of Of Manywhere-at-Once from McNaughton (or something close to that, a company I’ve heard does good work): $1000, $2000. Second price not bad at all but 1000 copies too many at this time.
YEAR-END SUMMARY (of my fiftieth year): 9 minor reviews of mine appeared in 5 different publications; 7 pieces of vizlature of mine, all but one of them visual poems, appeared in 6 publications; 2 or 3 of my letters appeared here and there; I got 1 mailart piece off to a show; I got 8 textual poems into 4 magazines; I produced 2 or 3 unplaced visual poems; I wrote 3 not-yet-placed essays; I got my book, Of Manywhere-at-Once, published at last, then revised it in totum; I made and self-published SpringPoem No. 3,719,242.
In short, not much of a year, but not terrible, either.
Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress « POETICKS
Entry 454 — Mathemaku-in-Progress
I continue to believe someday people will be interested in how various poems of mine came about. Hence, the following three stages of my unfinished “Cursive Mathemaku, No. 2″:
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I scribbled notes for version one, then took weeks to draw my ideas at Paint Shop, and more weeks to put them together in a work something like version one, which is probably the third version of the finished base of the poem. Almost two months went by before I dared add the final cursive lines I always meant the work to have to make version two. Over a week went by before I made (today) the more well-thought-out third version. I’m pretty sure both that the third version (already revised two or three times–modestly) is the one I’ll go with. I’m looking forward to adding colors, with a good idea of what they’ll be, although I never go with all or even most of the colors I use in a work.
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Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient « POETICKS
Entry 581 — My Most-Used Quotient
This is the quotient in just about all my twenty or more long divisions of “poetry.” It’s intended to convey the meaning of Dickinson’s lines about telling the truth, but telling it “slant,” so represents “superior poetic diction.” That’s all I took it for, for a long time. I was disturbed, however, that, as a general term that in my division of poetry, almost always multiplies another general term, like “words,” it should yield a general product, not the specific product I always had it yielding. Take the first division in the series:
My problem with this and the others would possibly never occur to anyone but me, but it bothered me for years: how could I say that slant-words times words (or whatever) should equal the very idiosyncratic graphic the long division claims it does. Just now, I thought of my way out. It was to recognize the image of the slant-words as one of an infinite number of such words! Big thrill, hunh. Well, to me it meant that there was nothing wrong with having this one instance of poetic diction multiplied by words (in-general) equal the particular instance of–not poetry, but of something almost poetry that needs “friendship” to make it poetry. (That latter, folks, is an attack on hermetic poetry–if no one gets anything out of your poetry but you, it’s not poetry, even though that may be the case with my poetry.)
If nothing else, you have now been exposed to the kind of nutty need I have to make my mathematical poems mathematically valid, at least in my own mind.(Note: the poem I have posted here is different from both what it was originally and what it was in its last published version. I think I have it in its final form now, though. I changed the graphic five or more times because it kept seeming to me that a goose was in it, and I didn’t want no goose in it!
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Thursday, 1 December 2011 Not much to report. I attended a match my tennis team played, and won, 3-0. I was the back-up for this one. Very cold (for Florida). After I got home, I ran again, this time completing a mile. I went very slowly, finishing with a time about eleven-and-a-half minutes. I really do think I’ll be able to improve on that. I worked on “Frame No. 7″ of my long division of poetry series and put an black&white illustration of it on an exhibition hand-out but forgot to write a commentary on it. I did get this blog entry wholly done, and I consider the work I did on the mathemaku a reasonable day’s work for the exhibition.
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Entry 1109 — Still Trying to Get People To Appreciate My Urine « POETICKS
Entry 1109 — Still Trying to Get People To Appreciate My Urine
The other day I was thinking about early childhood, how it is for most of us idyllic before we’re sent off to school. What particularly grabbed me was the simple fact that when you’re very young, everything is new. And important! And magical! Imagine a world in which one can enter a dark room, push a switch, and fill the room with light! What could possibly be more magical than that? For a while, I think my ability to fill a bottle with this beautiful yellow liquid that came so easily out of the thing hanging between my legs was a miracle–one, furthermore, that only I was capable of. I kept a jar of the liquid which I showed my sister and a friend of hers–because I thought they’d appreciate it. But my mother noticed. No mother around now to do the same for the following two poems, both of which are miracles:
I’m sure they’ve been on exhibit here before, but the second has been spruced up. Each represents, it seems to me, all I’ve learned over the years as a poet. Keats is a source for both, but especially the first. Does anyone read him anymore? The Grimms’ Fairy Tales my mother read to me and my sister are another. Poetry, I suspect, has been my way of trying to return not to the Faereality of my childhood but to the wonderful paths I was sure would lead into it. One of them (the most important?) pre-sleep bedtime when I got to within a tenth-of-a-poem of daydreaming all the way into the wonderful secret world story characters lived in, comic book characters soon prominent among them.
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Mathematical Poetry « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Mathematical Poetry’ Category
Entry 1425 — 2 Long Division Problems
Wednesday, April 16th, 2014
I was going to send a list to an art show in Minneapolis containing mathepoetic long division problems like the two below. I couldn’t come up with enough good ones, and my list wasn’t appropriate for the show, so I sent a list of quotidian shopping list on top of notes for the list of long division problems. Here are two of said problems:
I was intrigued by the way part of the lines of the letters I used as guide for my thicker-lined spelling of “coal mine” showed through. I’d been deleting them but decided to leave them in, then wrote the crude version of “woman” on top of the violet version. It makes some kind of emotional sense to me, but I haven’t figured out what.
The problems are just multiplication problems really: what times distant cries of seagulls equals childhood (fading) and what times a coal mine will equal woman, but making them long divisions suggests the answer will have a remainder. Anyway, the idea is to get an engagent using his imagination. Simpler ones would be good exercises for children. For boy, what’s 100 zombies into interesting Sunday afternoon at the beach, maybe.
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Entry 1342 — My Latest Poem
Thursday, January 16th, 2014
I’m going to spend the rest of the day reading a Len Deighton novel, the second in a trilogy that I’ve been reading with enjoyment this past week. I just don’t feel like any megalospiel, or even hohenspiel of any kind. Ergo, it’s pure recreospiel for me (Is that what I named it?) Nonetheless, I must post a daily blog entry, so I grabbed my latest poem for today’s:
I’m going to postpone my comments on this till tomorrow as I feel pretty sure I’ll again need something for that day’s entry, and am confident I can then at least tell you the name of the poem the above is a detail of–the remainder, actually.
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Entry 1308 — Mine Review Continueth
Monday, December 23rd, 2013
I was going to celebrate the Winter Solstice with Zero Production, but then I found out yesterday, not today, was when it occurred, so I had to finish the review I was working on. I wrote over 1300 word, pretty good ones, I think. Below is one of the poems I dealt with, with my comments on it following it:
Something of what seems to me at the frontier of math-related poetry that I hope will be further explored in the future is Sarah Glaz’s fascinatingly strange “13 January 2009.” It consists of two texts side by side, one, “13,” with nothing in it but numbers (and equal signs), the other, “January 2009) devoted entirely to words about the dying of a man named Anuk whom I take to be an ancient Egyptian (in spite of the poem’s title!) I feel ready to go on for another thousand words at least about this poem, but will limit myself here to telling you that, according to its author, its “structure follows The Fundamental Theorem of Arithmetic, which states that every positive integer greater than one may be expressed in a unique way as a product of powers of distinct prime numbers”—which (inexorable) process, I would add, is shown in “13.” I hope to say more in an essay on mathematical poetry I have in the works for this periodical. Conclusion: when I began thinking about this review, I had visions of making an insightful taxonomical study of its poems, but their “multi-dimensional links to mathematics and . . . wide range of styles” as Glaz has it in her introduction, and wide range of techniques, I’d add, made that too difficult a task. So all I have to say now is that I hope anyone still reading this has enjoyed my chatter as much as I’ve enjoyed indulging in it.
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Entry 1298 — “The Long Division of Creativity”
Friday, December 13th, 2013
Whee, as the year draws to a close, I finally made another long division poem:
I’ve already sketched a variation on it in which creativity is divided by summer. I hope to make a 4-season set of it.
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Enter 1266 — A Boast
Monday, November 11th, 2013
Today, mainly once again to save work, just a short entry, this, which is from the Schirmers 2000 edition of Richard Kostelanetz’s Dictionary of the Avant Gardes, page 397:
My boast about this is that, so far as I know, it is the world’s first definition of mathematical poetry to appear in a reputable reference. I believe it is still the only such definition to do that, certainly in the United States.
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Entry 1259 — The Dead Career Goes On
Monday, November 4th, 2013
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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Entry 1253 — Guest-Blog Non-Entry
Tuesday, October 29th, 2013
M@h*(pOet)?ica – (A Lesson in Poetic Logic–First Draft of Essay for Scientific American, if I haven’t been fired.)
This entry will be a short one in defense of the poetic logic of mathexpressive poems. By poetic logic I mean a kind of connotative, or indirect, logic as opposed (in some cases, rather extremefully) to the denotative logic of strictly scientific prose and all pure mathematics. Loose, but making intuitive sense. To show as exactly as I can what I mean, I am going to use my latest work, “Four-sided Investigation of the Core of Faereality” as an example. It consists of four long divisions of “the core of faereality.”
Before getting into my discussion of this, I think the following labeled long division example may make things go smoother (if only for me, as I still have trouble with the terminology involved!)
According to the above, a long division the multiplication of a long division poem’s divisor by its quotient yields what I call its “sub-dividend product” (because I’ve never been able to find its official name, if it has one). I consider this the most important operation the poem carries out because of the metaphor it makes the sub-dividend product for the multiplication of divisor and quotient, and the partial metaphor it makes it for the dividend. It is, in fact, the main point of a long division poem.
Hence, in the first long division poem in my quartet, “science,” the poem’s divisor, is multiplied by “poetry,” its quotient, to yield the sub-dividend product depicted below:
Does this make sense? It certainly does not make rigorously scientific sense, which is why mathematicians have trouble with such poetry. As a poet, though, my only concern, as previously stated, is poetic logic. I claim that science taken poetry times equals: (1) fragments of various mathematical statements because—and here you must bear with me—because poetry is in effect less that one, science more; (2) a peculiar irregular shape, because poetry is a deconstructive element; (3) a pleasurable flow of colors because of the sensually pleasing matter poetry, as a form of art, provides; and (4) the extraction from the piece’s mathematical statements a poetic text, “From is for every bound alled,” in the process uncovering a wonderful detail in a formidable set of generalizations (the definitions of elementary calculus the background text is from).
The poetic text is the most important feature of the sub-dividend product; note well, though, that it is entirely provided by the divisor; the quotient merely works out one of the many ways it can achieve poetic significance. Because of its dominance, the poetic text must be more than the weird apparently unintelligible splash of words the one here is, for the poem to give pleasure to those not aesthetically satisfied by meaninglessness. Ergo, I will try to make sense of it.
To begin with, the reader must tolerate syntactical misbehavior; to do this, he must assume that a linguistic integrity on the part of the text’s author that assures him that the author is breaking with normal syntax for some higher, poetic purpose. As that author, I claim he is! And that the reader must drop out of linguistic standardness into exploratory maples semi-dreaming. Hopefully, he will bump into the possibility that “From” not a preposition but a noun meaning “from-ness”; from there the ascent (or descent) its being for “every bound” “alled.” Paraphrase: No matter where one is coming from the result is alled, or everything possible.
At this point I need to tell you that the poem’s dividend is “the core of faereality.” Therefore, “From is for every bound alled,” according to the rules of long division, comes close to equaling that. The “bound” or territory within the core of faereality, which I use to suggest the world of the imagination, and/or the subconscious and/or where Alice went, et cetera, is what is alled.
Add the remainder, a fragment of the word, “poetry,” to the sub-dividend product and you get the core of faereality exactly. In other words, the full result of sciences taken poetry times needs a fragment of poetry to exactly equal the core of faereality. (And we have a second metaphor—one that indicates two components of the dividend, so a fuller metaphor than the ones in most ordinary poems.
There is more to the poetic text extracted than I indicated, by the way. “From” also works as a preposition, with “is” becoming a noun, and “a bound is also a leap. I hope readers will find more routes to the core of faereality (and from faereality to realms like childhood, science fantasy, dreaming, mythology, poetry (as opposed to poems), and even physics, religion and philosophy, since all of them are in some final way forms of faereality, however much else they also are.
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In the quartet’s three later long divisions mathematics, poetry, and music are multiplied by poetry to yield different approximations of the core of faereality. Here’s the result of the last of poetry times music:
The only comment I’ll make about this is that I carefully removed all indications of the mathematical under-text from this (and the one resulting from poetry times poetry), since neither music nor poetry are explicitly mathematical, although both are a little mathematical, music (which has fractions!) more so than poetry. But lo, the undertext still refers back to the definitions required for calculus—the same way everything at bottom is mathematical.
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Entry 1228 — Protozoa, Part 2
Sunday, September 29th, 2013
Here is the corrected version of my piece in Shadows of the Future (it’s now in the latter, too, thanks to Jeff Side):
I’m still too blah to say why the change was (vitally) necessary, but I told Jeff, when asking him if he could switch versions, that, for me, it would be like changing “5 x 10 = 2″ to “5 x 2 = 10″–which should give you a huge clue as to my thinking.
And now, from Wikipedia, to make this the first blog in history to contain an entry on mathematical poetry and protozoa, is some information about the flagella of protozoa:
Types
Three types of flagella have so far been distinguished; bacterial, archaeal and eukaryotic.
The main differences among these three types are summarized below:
- Bacterial flagella are helical filaments, each with a rotary motor at its base which can turn clockwise or counterclockwise. They provide two of several kinds of bacterial motility.
- Archaeal flagella (Archaella) are superficially similar to bacterial flagella, but are different in many details and considered non-homologous.
- Eukaryotic flagella – those of animal, plant, and protist cells – are complex cellular projections that lash back and forth. Eukaryotic flagella are classed along with eukaryotic motile cilia as undulipodia to emphasize their distinctive wavy appendage role in cellular function or motility. Primary cilia are immotile, and are not undulipodia; they have a structurally different 9+0 axoneme rather than the 9+2 axoneme found in both flagella and motile cilia undulipodia.
Bacterial
Physical model of a bacterial flagellum
Structure and composition. The bacterial flagellum is made up of the protein flagellin. Its shape is a 20 nanometer-thick hollow tube. It is helical and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane; this “hook” allows the axis of the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell’s membrane that act as bearings. Gram-positive organisms have 2 of these basal body rings, one in the peptidoglycan layer and one in the plasma membrane. Gram-negative organisms have 4 such rings: the L ring associates with the lipopolysaccharides, the P ring associates with peptidoglycan layer, the M ring is embedded in the plasma membrane, and the S ring is directly attached to the plasma membrane. The filament ends with a capping protein.
The flagellar filament is the long helical screw that propels the bacterium when rotated by the motor, through the hook. In most bacteria that have been studied, including the Gram negative Escherichia coli, Salmonella typhimurium, Caulobacter crescentus, and Vibrio alginolyticus, the filament is made up of eleven protofilaments approximately parallel to the filament axis. Each protofilament is a series of tandem protein chains. However in Campylobacter jejuni, there are seven protofilaments.
The basal body has several traits in common with some types of secretory pores, such as the hollow rod-like “plug” in their centers extending out through the plasma membrane. Given the structural similarities between bacterial flagella and bacterial secretory systems, it is thought that bacterial flagella may have evolved from the type three secretion system; however, it is not known for certain whether these pores are derived from the bacterial flagella or the bacterial secretory system.
Motor. The bacterial flagellum is driven by a rotary engine (the Mot complex) made up of protein, located at the flagellum’s anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons (hydrogen ions) across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell’s metabolism (in Vibrio species there are two kinds of flagella, lateral and polar, and some are driven by a sodium ion pump rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor alone can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with the flagellar filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm. The direction of rotation can be switched almost instantaneously, caused by a slight change in the position of a protein, FliG, in the rotor.
The cylindrical shape of flagella is suited to locomotion of microscopic organisms; these organisms operate at a low Reynolds number, where the viscosity of the surrounding water is much more important than its mass or inertia.
The rotational speed of flagella varies in response to the intensity of the proton motive force, thereby permitting certain forms of speed control, and also permitting some types of bacteria to attain remarkable speeds in proportion to their size; some achieve roughly 60 cell lengths / second. Although at such a speed it would take a bacterium about 245 days to cover a kilometre, and although that may seem slow, the perspective changes when the concept of scale is introduced. In comparison to macroscopic life forms it is very fast indeed when expressed in terms of number of body lengths per second. A cheetah for example, only achieves about 25 body lengths / sec.
Through use of their flagella, E. coli are able to move rapidly towards attractants and away from repellents. They do this by means of a biased random walk, with ‘runs’ and ‘tumbles’ brought about by rotating the flagellum counterclockwise and clockwise respectively.
Assembly. During flagellar assembly, components of the flagellum pass through the hollow cores of the basal body and the nascent filament. During assembly, protein components are added at the flagellar tip rather than at the base. In vitro, flagellar filaments assemble spontaneously in a solution containing purified flagellin as the sole protein.
Evolution. The evolution of bacterial flagella has been used as an argument against evolution by creationists. They argue that complex structures like flagella cannot evolve from simple structures. In other words, flagella are “irreducibly complex” and need all of their protein components to function. However, it has been shown by numerous studies that a large number of proteins can be deleted without (complete) loss of function. Moreover, it is generally accepted now that bacterial flagella have evolved from much simpler secretion systems, such as the Type III secretion system.
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Danged inneresting, I think!
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Entry 1227 — A New Anthology
Saturday, September 28th, 2013
Yesterday Jeff Side announced the e.publication of Shadows of the Future, an anthology of otherstream poetry (or, in some cases–in my possibly excessively picky opinion–almost otherstream poetry) edited by Marc Vincenz, and published by Argotist Ebooks. So I’m going to use this entry for some words about it instead of going on to the second part of my investigation of protozoa. That I will do tomorrow, assuming I choose to continue my investigation (and I hope I do–nothing more valuable for the ol’ brain than a plunge into something you don’t know hardly nothin’ about).
Interesting. When looking for what categories to assign this entry to, I found I had none for “Poetry.” I do now. So I can bring up that subject to tell you the anthology has 120 works, almost all of them poems by my definition, on 166 pages . . .
and here a digression to complain about my stupid computer (or, yeah, my stupid inability to know how use it): I would like to be able to click from here to the anthology the way I can click from here to a file on my word processer or anywhere else but totally out of it. There must be a way to save it as a regular file I can access on my word processer; if so, I’m ignorant of it. So I have a second copy of this entry on the slot (can’t remember its name) with everything I can click to on it. To get to the anthology, I go to that entry, and click the link in it to the anthology. Very annoying.
Back to the anthology now. Marc has a nice one-page forward in it. Following it is a page-and-a-half introduction to it by me which is just my standard boilerplate about the refusal of the Establishment to so much as acknowledge the existence of the Otherstream. Basically it’s a polemic intended to annoy estabniks enough to make them reply to it. It has little chance of doing that but what else can I do? I think it presents a good definition of the establishment, though.
My only real disappointment with the anthology is how little visual poetry is in it–but that was because, for some reason, few visual poets submitted anything to it. There were visual poems by seven people–and textual poems by five people like mIEKAL aND who often do visual poetry. In all, 37 had works in the anthology. When going through it doing my counts, I spent a few minutes with my own poems. One of them disturbed me: I decided it was wrong! Here is the wrong version:
I doubt anyone but I would see what is wrong (crucially wrong, in my view) with this, but just for the fun of it, I won’t say more about it, nor show the corrected version for a while.
I’m too worn out from being too worn out to say much more about the anthology. Before signing off, though, I want to recommend it strongly. It’s an excellent tour of what’s going on in the vast countryside beyond the borders of the mainstream. The vispo cover by David Chirot is worth the trouble of clicking to it alone! That one work will give you more to wander through thoughts and feelings about by itself than the entirety of most mainstream anthologies of contemporary poetry.
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Entry 1205 — The Experioddicist, July 1993, P.2
Friday, September 6th, 2013
Lessons in Poetry « POETICKS
Archive for the ‘Lessons in Poetry’ Category
Entry 756 — Next Commentary
Friday, June 1st, 2012
Here’s the introduction to my series of long division poems:
One day I thought of using “poetry” as a dividend. This would allow me to make almost any graphic as a near-synonym for it it—such as my “smmerthings.” My first thought was to divide “words” into it, since words are necessary for poetry. Since diction that is “slant” in Emily Dickinson’s sense, seems to me a major ingredient of good poetry (along with metaphorical slantness), although good poetry is possible without either, I quickly chose a distorted image of the word, “words,” as my quotient.
I’d composed the original version of “smmerthings” before I could use color. Now that color was easy for me to use, I wanted it. Adding it, I got carried away, and made a fairly extreme variation on my original poem.
By then, I’m fairly sure, I saw that I could make a series of similar long divisions. In each one, words told slant would multiply a different divisor to get a different variation of “summerthings,” and—therefore—a different remainder. It would be like dividing 90 by 9.001, 9.002, 9.003, etc.
Sometime after that, I added a prologue showing the evolution of the series beginning with my original version of “summerthings.”
This was the first of my divisions of poetry (shown in black and white because that’s how it will appear on the page containing my commentary on it, which follows under it) :
While at the Atlantic Center of Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, for two weeks in 2001 thanks to Richard Kostelanetz, who chose me and several others to join him there for an all-expenses-paid workshop for artists under his leadership, I learned to use Photo Shop from Kathy Ernst, to whom I’ll be forever grateful, for it led to the full-color poems I now make—albeit not using Photo Shop but Paint Shop, another program that works the same way but is cheaper. One of the first of matheaku I made using Paint Shop when I got home from New Smyrna Beach was the above. I liked it well enough to make ten or twelve variations on it, each dividing something else into “poetry” and getting the distorted rendition of “words” as the answer.
Most of these, including this one, were pretty simple. The quotient represents Emily Dickinson’s idea of telling the truth “slant” in poetry. In this frame of the sequence that resulted, slant-words times regular words (or straight-forward language) yields a graphic (with words, or parts of words, in it) intended to suggest one example of what poetry is . . . almost. Almost, because to become a specimen of poetry, the graphic requires the addition of “friendship.” You see, in spite of how odd my poems are, and how befuddling they can seem, I do think they should be friendly, and therefore understandable. I also feel that any poem is more than anything else an act of friendship, a sharing of inner feelings made as arrestingly enjoyable as possible with others.
It is important to note that the graphic derives from my visual poem, “summerthings.” As my sequence continues, and each divisor changes, my graphic changes. It remains throughout based on “summerthings, although sometimes the connection is very hard to see. In any case, my hope is that it is always visually appealing.
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Entry 755 — “summerthings” and Commentary
Thursday, May 31st, 2012
I’ve been toying with the idea of sending out samples of my work with commentary like the one below to galleries, museums and writers for visual art magazines. Apologies if I’ve already posted this.
“summerthings, a collage,” is the first visually non-representational visual poem I made. It may have been my first “large work”—i.e., the first of my visual poems to fill a whole page. I think I made it is the middle nineties. I remember showing it at a YRI meeting (a gathering of local poets) held in an unfortunately short-lived gallery-in-a-home a painter and his wife had on the Peace River near the bridge from Port Charlotte into Punta Gorda.
It later became important for me as the source piece for a number of variations in color I did of it, each of them acting as the “sub-dividend product” of a long series of long divisions into “poetry” I started ten years or so ago, and am continuing. As a work by itself, it is mostly what I hope seems an arresting design to a viewer. It is intended to put a viewer into a summer thunderstorm—like those I remember from my upbringing in Connecticut, but still often experience now that I live in Port Charlotte. The torn pieces of paper (construction paper, for the most part, in the original, are intended to suggest the idea of a thunderstorm’s tearing up a day as though it were paper.
The peculiar a I meant as an image of growth. In the bottom right-hand corner of the piece is a full-scale poem consisting of the word, “summerthings,” and word-game permutations of it. The other letters are present mainly for what they contribute to the graphics of the piece, but also to run wherever a viewer want to take them—“OOD” to “good” or “mood,” for instance.
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Entry 734 — Hilton Kramer on Susan Sontag
Thursday, May 10th, 2012
Hilton Kramer, who recently died, was not a leading hero of mine but I agreed with him a lot more than I didn’t, and consider him one of the very few worthwile cultural critics of his generation, which I place just slightly before mine. The current issue of the New Criterion, which he co-founded, pays tribute to him, in part with a few excerpts from his writing, including the following:
On ‘‘A Susan Sontag Reader)
What gave Sontag’s early essays their aura of daring and controversy was the remarkable air of confidence she brought to the task of defending and codifying the values implicit in this movement to strip the arts of what she herself described as “moral sentiments?” Bidding a not-so-fond farewell to art that was conceived, as she put it, as “a species of moral journalism:’ she hailed the advent of a “new sensibility:’ whose most distinctive feature was said to be that “it does not demand that pleasure in art necessarily be associated with edification?’ Fundamental to the new sensibility-as she wrote in her manifesto-like essay “One Culture and the New Sensibility” in 1960s-was “a new attitude toward pleasure” And it was as the Pasionaria of this new, pleasure-seeking revolution in sensibility that Sontag emerged as a critical spokesman of the Sixties.
– From “Susan Sontag: The Pasionaria of Style” (1982), reproduced in The Twilight of the Intellectuals: Culture and Politics in the Era of the Cold War
I reproduce it because one of the reasons Kramer was not a leading hero of mine was due his insistence that art should be morally edifying. Of late, however, I’ve been wondering how much I genuinely believe that. For instance, isn’t my newest long division poem, a moral statement? It plainly tells those encountering that the arts and humanities are a damned good thing. Perhaps even more emphatically, it asserts that the achievements of human kind are of the greatest value.
Note: I’ve changed the remainder to “small clouds, dawdling west”–I felt a need to tone down the bliss of the poem.
Back to my poem’s morally assertive message, and it is that, my defense, after reflection, is that while the message is there, it is merely an excuse for the metaphors responsible for its aesthetic punch, if it has any: the multiplication of dead music that results in something fairer than morning–something, the poem now claims, rendered equal to humankind’s achievements by virtue of simple clouds doing what clouds quotidianly do. Properly attended to, in my opinion, the poem isn’t anything to argue or agree with, but to sensually enjoy. As are the poems of Stevens which so often, on the surface, are statements about aesthetics, but at the deepest far more than that.
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Entry 708 — Long Division Poetry I, Lesson 1
Saturday, April 7th, 2012
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My pwoermd for the day–remember that I’m doing a sequence of months; this one is where “June” would be expected. Pitiful, but maybe if I made the S look like a J, it’d work better? Nah.
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Entry 116 — Finally Back « POETICKS
Entry 116 — Finally Back
All I have today is a revision of my last mathemaku:
The title of the piece is “Mathemaku in Honor of Andrea Bianco’s 1436 Map of the World.” I changed the previous quotient from “music” to a picture of a lute. My reasoning was that “music” was too general; I wanted something that said “medieval.” I’m satisfied with it now.
I’m a bit shocked to see how long it’s been since my last entry here. I thought it’d only been four or five days. I’m going to try to post more often now, maybe not daily but at least three or four times a week. The past three days I’ve woken up feeling good. I’ve been more productive though not as productive as I’d like to be. Still, I’m out of the null zone I was in.
Part of the reason for that is that my bad leg (due apparently to sciatica) is better, although I still can’t run on it to any extent. I’m optimistic that it will fully come around if I give it time and don’t play tennis again till I’m sure it’s okay. Three times I played when it seemed okay but not right, and each time suffered during the next few days.
The pain pills I’m taking for the problem are probably (alas) the main reason I’m feeling so good psychologically. Also contributing it the fact that I’m winning the game of Civilization I’m playing in! I’ve never won it at the level I’m now playing it at. This shouldn’t mean anything but it means a ridiculously lot! Winning just about any kind of competition really zings me!
That’s it for now. Hope to be back tomorrow. Will definitely be back before the week ends.
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Entry 583 — The Text of My Triptych « POETICKS
Entry 583 — The Text of My Triptych
(This is a day late but I had it done in time, honest! I just forgot to change the “private” setting to “public.”)
For lack of anything else to post today, which is one of my null days, here’s the text of the poem in the sub-dividend product of the frame from “Triptych for Tom Phillips that was in yesterday’s blog entry:
From is for every bound alled.
Similarly, if is alled. {urthermore}.
This is also the.
+ infinity (actually, the symbol for infinity) in port ever.
This is basically something about the allness of the state of from-ness and if-ness. “Urthermore” has something to do with final origins although right now I can’t think what. So does the the from Stevens that whatever “this” refers to is also. Positive infinity is said to be forever in port. All this is a close representation of “arrival,” needing only the graphic shown as the remainder to exactly represent it. The fore-burden of the text (for me) is that a poem is an arrival. Note, however, that this text has three different direction to turn into a departure into. To begin a consideration of one of my most ambitious and complex works that I will say a little more about, maybe, tomorrow.
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Saturday, 3 December 2011, 5 P.M. Not a great day–the least productive since I started my attempt to be culturally methodical. I post my blog entry for the day, but had it done yesterday. The only thing I did so far as the exhibition is concerned is get my triptych printed at Staples, buy three frames for it, and frame one of the two sets I have. It does look nice. But I think I see how I can make another triptych that’s much better.
I also played tennis.
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i love these, bob!
Hey, thanks for the good words, Maria. As soon as I saw them, I thought of your embroidered poems and how similar my scribbled poems have in common with them–a kind of looseness, different-colored threads, domesticity (?), sensitivity (I hope!). Main thing is how much fun they are!
–Bob