Column 119 — September/October 2013
My Scientific American Blog
Small Press Review,
Volume 45, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2013
M@h*(pOet)?ica
Blog-Master: Bob Grumman
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/07/27/mhpoetica-music-and-autobiography/
To celebrate the full year of entries to my Scientific American guest blog that I completed early this past June, and feeling by then that I could get away with it, I devoted my next entry to my own works. No doubt I’m a gross narcissist, but I did feel self-conscious about such blatant self-aggrandizement. But I have several rationalizations for it. One is that no one else will aggrandize me and I deserve to be, at least a little!
Seriousfully, I have several less self-centered rationalizations. Indeed, I’d go so far as to call them “reasons!”
1. If an analyst of an art practices the art himself, what works would he be more qualified to discuss than his own–and use to illustrate his over-all view of the art?
2. Consider, also, what other works than his own could more effectively reveal his strengths (and, perhaps more important, his shortcomings)–and the strengths and weaknesses of the kind of art he is discussing.
3. Discussion of his own works leads readily to discussions of himself. Not that I consider myself the proper center of writings like this, but I do strongly believe in making oneself a part of almost any writing—because I myself like finding out about a writer as a person as well as about whatever subject he’s writing about. And a sort of self-interview interwoven through possibly dry text may help keep a reader reading. True, it might also turn off a reader impatient with what he considers irrelevancies. But, hey, I’m not sure I want anyone like that reading my stuff!
4. Feeling free to digress agrees with me—although I suppose that isn’t a very serious reason.
5. Nor, I suppose, is my belief that it makes me feel more honest to yak about myself and why I’m doing what I’m doing as I go along—even when I lie!
I was going to begin my entry with a brief autobiography about how I became a mathematical poet. When it became too long, I dropped it–but I have room for it here, and posterity will want to know! My parents are central to it, for they supplied me with math-genes, both of them having been gifted in math although my mother made no special use of it and my father used it only for a few years as an engineer with Sikorski until being let go because he lacked a college degree.
They passed their mathematical genes on to Bill, Jr., the older of my two older brothers, who became a successful civil engineer (and, at 84, still does work as a consultant) and to me. My other brother, Sherman, was good at math, too, but not what you’d call “gifted.” My sister (gotta be complete!) was better at other things, but not a math whiz.
I was certainly no mathematical prodigy, just automatically strongly attracted to it (and, therefore, better than most at it). My brother Bill helped by introducing me at the age of nine or so (before my school was teaching it) to . . . long division. Because of baseball.
Like many boys, I was a baseball statistics nut, so it came about that one day when the males in my family were living and dying with our baseball team, the New York Giants, I wondered aloud about what batting averages were, which led to Bill’s introducing me to long division, and decimals. For more than a week after that, I spent a lot of time figuring out my favorite players’ averages, right after each time at bat. I never went on to doing anything of interest in math, as a mathematician, although I unofficially minored in it when I finally went to college in my thirties.
But I feel my experience with batting averages awakened what I now think of as a visceral sensitivity to mathematics. I would love to learn if real mathematicians believe they have the same sensitivity. I mean the feeling that numbers are nearly as much things-in-themselves as sounds or colors. In any case, my first long division poem seemed to me to be doing something no other aesthetic object did. So I have specialized in long division as a poet for the past twenty years. Six of them are in the blog entry I’m writing about here.
The first of my poems in the entry, though, is not a long division poem, or even mathematical. In keeping with the entry’s theme, which is the importance of music in my work, it’s an ancient visual haiku from my first collection of poems, poemns, which I paid to have printed in 1966. Here it is in full: “strains of Franck and/ radio is to sky as/ flowerstem is to earth”–with the last line upside-down to make it visual!
A little later my “Seaside Long Division” appears. Its quotient, “Musick,” is the only thing in it overtly connecting it to music–but part of the reason for its dividend, “yesterday,” was the Beatles’ song of that name. Here’s the beginning of my relatively long discussion of the poem (slightly revised), to give you an idea of the commentary in the entry (which I’m Very Proud of): “It is one of my woozier efforts—intentionally, I claim, for wooze is mainly what it’s about. I almost want to leave it at that. But, like Pound, I’m an inveterate village explainer, so have to go on to tell you that the “commocean” (which is part of the product of “musick” times the divisor, “distant sail”) underlying a large part of the poem is wooze, and the word, “dreams” (“dreams of marauders” being the poem’s remainder), is almost a synonym for “wooze.” And look at how the coloring woozes out an opening into whatever it is that the poem is about. I would ask, too, is any of the arts closer to pure wooze than music? Finally, right at the center of the piece is ‘yesterday’: or where the present dissolves into wooze.”
The word. “music,” is more or less defined by the next of my poems. A G-clef sign connects two others to music, and a whole staff makes the connection in the remaining two.
Before leaving, I want to quote a footnote I had in the entry which I consider Very Important: “Because there’s always someone at a poetry reading who is annoyed with poets who try to explain their works on the grounds that a poem that needs to be explained is no good, I thought I’d defend the practice—at least for poems that are difficult because unconventional the way mathexpressive poems are. The simple reason explanation is in order, and should in some cases be required of the poet, is that it is only fair. Why? Because conventional poems come pre-explained! That is to say, schools begin teaching conventional poems—simple rhymes, for instance—as soon as children begin formal education, and continue to do so throughout college, even to students not majoring in English. And PBS programs on poetry, large-circulation magazines and commercial presses publishing poetry as well as poetry critics with readerships of more than a hundred help them by re-explaining them. Conventional poems don’t need their creators’ explanations of them, unconventional poems do.”