Essay on Mathemaku by Joey Engelhart
Multiplying the Unquantifiable: “Mathemaku” and its Twisting of Language with Formal Operations — Joe Engelhart
While many centuries have exposed us to frequent upheavals of poetic convention it could at least be expected that readers would be dealing with words, words whose function in the poetic context were reasonably well-established and predictable. To the dismay of our sense of order, “mathemaku,” a micropoetry in the rarity of its practitioners and in the dissimilarity of the languages it juxtaposes, fits qualitative language into mathematical formulas, and leaves the reader to figure out how to conceive of the poems. By imposing a language designed to remove ambiguity onto English, mathemaku actually increases subjectivity, and challenges our notions of how to read a poem.
Mathemaku grew out of Bob Grumman’s boredom with conventional haiku. As such, he is very interested in the cycle of innovation in poetry and the following exhaustion of that innovation. He sees the “first effective use of [a particular innovation]” as a moment of major accomplishment in poetry (Comprepoetica). It comes as no surprise that his history with haiku and the consequent development of mathemaku is largely cause by his ennui with convention. He notes that in the 1950s, haiku was still innovative in the west, because of its compactness, its dependence solely on images, and its objective viewpoint. As its newness began to be used up, as it were, and poets saw the form as too predictable, they introduced new methods of breaking lines, creating more lines than the conventional three, and infusing visual structure into the form. Eventually, graphic art was used in haiku as well. Grumman experimented with these, and even published completely conventional haiku. But he found himself “[unable] to improve upon the conventions,” because it became nearly “physically impossible for me to make more: I couldn’t see how I could make one that wasn’t predictable.”
He began to introduce mathematical operations into his haiku. It is an understandable step for one who tires quickly of the conventional. It witnesses the juxtaposition of poetry, which celebrates subjective experiences, or at least operates inextricably by the subjective perception of a relative, single human observer, and mathematics, which relies on its own objectivity to produce meaningful results. In other words, Grumman imposed what could not, in conventional thinking, be more different from poetry, onto his haikus.
What is particularly fascinating about this is that the objectivity of mathematical operations does not end up rigidifying his poetry; in fact, it infinitizes the subjective possibilities of the poetic combinations. This occurs because the formal operations of math, the tools which Grumman borrows, were designed for quantifiable inputs. When he replaces numbers with language, something that cannot be quantified, you are forced to make do with the impossible, to, for example, divide the indivisible. If you give fourth graders six pennies and the operation “6÷3,” they move the six pennies into three separate piles. When Grumman divides “existence by poetry,” the same fourth graders would have a difficult time making “poetry” piles of “existence” on the classroom rug (“Mathemaku No. 10”).
This highlights a couple of points about mathemaku. First, it is funny. It makes a certain joke out of the logic and conventional rigidity of math. Especially when we see a drawing of a heart where we expect a numerical quotient, mathemaku encourages us not to take mathematical operations so seriously. It offers the chance to lighten up with our endeavors in arithmetic.
However, once the humor wears off, it challenges the functional fixedness with which we approach our abstract tools, and gives new life and traits to both math and poetry. Therefore, and second, it takes an abstract system developed for the description of concrete phenomena, and applies it to the description of the metaphysical or abstract. Mathemaku cuts the line that fastens mathematical reasoning to the concrete, the empirically verifiable, and this reasoning floats away from objective truth. The mathematical operations still occur, but they do not produce a standardized result. This is because they proceed within the black box of intuition, and are thus subject to the inner subjectivity of mathemaku’s readers and authors. Looking once more at the division of existence by poetry, anyone can in fact put existence into groups of poetry, but the quotient will depend upon what each reader thinks poetry does to existence. This division is insightful on Grumman’s part, because it accurately describes what a poem is: a slice of existence grouped and shaped by the poetic process. The final “answer” depends on an individual’s opinion or experience of poetry; in other words, that individual’s interpretation.
However, it also depends on the particular poem, or “grouping of poetry,” which highlights another aspect of Grumman’s division: technically, the quotient must always be wrong. In math, each grouping created by the divisor is identical, because the divisor is the same regardless of what is being divided. When poetry is the divisor, this becomes impossible, because there is no consistent poetics; poetry always relies on an instance of subjectivity, and even if the same poet fashioned the same “grouping of existence” over and over, it would never end up the same, because he or she would experience the same moment differently each time. Framing this another way, math is designed to accurately describe the result of any situation under which the conditions of a given formula is followed. Thus, if you have six of “anything,” and divide it by three of “anything,” you will always be left with two of that “anything.” It is designed to make generalizations. If you make generalizations with conditions of a changing nature, like words such as poetry or existence, the generalization cannot always be true. Although Mr. Grumman says that groupings of existence into poetry results in “♥,” I would not believe him if he told me that was what results of every poem in the world. Thus, he illustrates the human heuristic of weighing our varying experiences of something, poetry in this case, and making a judgment about it. We, like math, generalize, but we cannot accurately apply our generalization to every specific manifestation of the subject which we generalized. It is not human fault that causes this, it is the complexity of language and subjectivity. By applying mathematics to these, its ability to accurately generalize crumbles. It is a moment of subjectivity’s preeminence over objectivity, a moment when language breaks down the reliability of math, and reformulates it into a purveyor of the endless possibilities of interpretation.
The mathematical symbols in mathemaku also amplify subjectivity in poetry because they make it impossible to know how to read the poem. Take Grumman’s “Mathemaku No. 6b,” for example:
Were you to read this aloud, how would you proceed? There are many non-phonetic symbols here. Thus, were you to speak the words to which these symbols refer, and another record what you say, two different texts would result. The following is not Grumman’s poem: “The absolute value of breathing times April equals greater than and.” You really cannot read a mathemaku; anything you read aloud would be rerecorded with words that were not in the original poem. On the other hand, we can think of a mathemaku as producing an array of poems, because of the numerous ways it prompts us to possibly read it. Nevertheless, if we want to experience the mathemaku itself, we must simply sit with the visual representation on the page in front of it. Granted, this is true for any poem, since an oral performance does not conserve the visual structure, nor the qualities of written text. However, the degree to which a mathemaku changes upon reading certainly exceeds a conventional poem’s change. We can force the symbols which comprise mathematical operations to be our English words, but what we really see are variations of lines. These representations are as much the bases of visual arts as linguistics.
As a reader, we see that the markings mathemaku utilizes are applicable to any form of representation. It calls our attention to the state of the poem as symbolic, as all language, math, and art is. We become quite conscious of this as we proceed to interpret the poem, and increases our awareness of the steps we take to arrive at meaning. “(breathing)(April)” makes an impression in our minds, but because we are not used to using the language in a poem in this way, we are lead to contemplate what how we are using this operation. For example, do we amplify the essence of breathing, its qualities, by those of April, and hold the product in our imaginations? Or do we imagine what we become if we breathe on an April day? And what if the parenthetical groups do not lead us to work out a qualitative multiplication, but to do something else with them instead? Indeed, there is nothing intrinsic about parentheses that force us to comply with their mathematical context. We see the exciting disarray, the lawlessness into which the interpretative faculty is thrown when two dissimilar languages are thrown at us without a guidebook.
Works Cited
Grumman, Bob. Mathemaku 6-12. Light and Dust. 1994. Web. 7 Nov 2009. <http://www.thing.net/~grist/l&d/grumman/lgrumn-1.htm>.
Grumman, Bob. “Daily Notes on Poetry & Other Matters.” Comprepoetica. 22 Dec. Web. 7 Nov 2009. <http://comprepoetica.com/newblog/blog01675.html>.
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A very insightful text!