Entry 1084 — Yet More Mathpo Thoughts
In the March entry of my Scientific American blog, I praised a poem of Rita Dove’s–with chagrin, because she’s one of poetry’s enemies, in my view, due to her having the status to bring the public’s attention to poetry outside of Wilshberia but doesn’t. Here’s what I said about her “’Geometry,’ which wonderfully describes the poet’s elation at having proven a theorem: at once, her ‘house expands,’ becoming transparent until she’s outside it where ‘the windows have hinged into butterflies . . . going to some point true and unproven.’ Putting her in the almost entirely asensual beauty of the visioconceptual part of her brain where Euclid doth reign supreme.” I bring this up to illustrate an important reason for my emphasis on the idea of a mathexpressive poem’s doing mathematics. It is, that if one of my long division poems does not do mathematics, there is nothing to distinguish it from a poem like Dove’s. If that makes taxonomical sense to anyone, so be it, but it doesn’t to me.
Needless to say, I very much want it believed that my poems do something special, but that doesn’t make my belief that they do necessarily invalid.
Going further with the idea of the value of doing something non-verbal in a poem rather than just discussing some discipline in which non-verbal operations occur, the possibility of doing math in a poem simplies the possibility of doing other non-literary things in them. Like archaeology. I’ve tried that in a few of my visual poems (as have others, whether consciously or not, I don’t know). I’ve suggested archaeology sites to what I believe is metaphorical effect, but only portrayed archaeology, not carried out archaeological operations. Not sure yet how that can be done but feel it ought to be possible. Ditto doing chemistry–as some have, I believe (although I can’t think of the unusually-named poet who I believe has, right now).
I’ve read of choreographical notation and feel confident that it could be effectively used in poetry. Don’t have time to learn it, my self, though. I’ve done music in poems–only at the simple level that I’ve done mathematical poems, but made poems that require the pocipient to be able to read music to appreciate them. There are all kinds of wonderful ways to go as a poet for those believing other ways of interacting with the world besides the verbal can be employed in poetry rather than merely referred to, however as eloquently as Rita Dove has referred to the geometrical.
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