Entry 532 — A New Conquest by Math Poetry
Yesterday I posted “A Page for Mrs. Lasher’s Class” after a teacher in San Antonio e.mailed me that she had introduced her elementary schoolchildren to mathematical poetry, using one of mine as a demonstration specimen. Very nice to get the e.mail. My problem is that I always over-react to such things: just about as soon as I’d read the e.mail, I was organizing a tour of the nation’s elementary schools, and picking poems I’d present and speak about. I got over that quickly enough. I’m in friendly contact with Mrs. Lasher, and do expect to do other things with her and her classes. They have a slide show of their poems up at http://blogs.neisd.net/dlashe. I hope to comment on them–but, yow, how difficult it is (again, although I feel moderately chipper) to get myself started on what should not be all that hard. In fact, it should be fun, and contribute toward the book of and about pluraesthetic poetry I’ve always had it in the back of my brain to put together (and have occasionally written short pieces I thought might go into such a books, including a Powerpoint Presentation of one of my full-scale visio-mathematical poems, which has been one of the recent jobs I started then dropped during the past month or so.
It’s around ten in the morning as I write this, by the way. I just took two APCs and a pain pill with some opiate in it to see if it would help. First time in a week or so I’ve fallen off the wagon. I’ll be very upset with myself if I don’t get anything done. I think the boost is beginning: I’m now going to write a reply to a letter from Jody Offer I should have gotten off to her three weeks or more ago. I can use what I’ve typed above for part of it! Without double-use, I don’t think I’d ever get anything done! Almost all my poems start with, or or significantly advanced, by scraps from earlier poems (used or discarded), or other people’s poems. My letter will also repeat the one letter I did get done this week–to Arnold Skemer.
Wow, now I’[m excited about something I should be excited about–although it’s one more bit of evidence how backward I am: I found I hadn’t saved my letter to Arnold so found the hard copy of it I had saved, meaning to copy it–with my typing fingers. Then I remembered seeing “OCR” in conjunction with my new printer/scanner, and how it had then occurred to me that my scanner might be able to convert printed text to a computer file. So I tried it and it did! As I expect everyone reading this will have known. It’d really be terrific if it worked with cursive texts but I doubt that it would. I’d love to convert my old diary entries to a computer file. My diary is incredibly boring but does have a few items of interest. I’ve always wondered if it had enough such items for any kind of autobiographical sketch long enough to be worth doing. Other than that, I could search it for various trips I’ve made when wanting its date or the like. I could not bear reading through them to find something like that.
Gah, I got so excited about scanning my diary pages that I jumped and went to the file drawer I’d had them in for fifteen or more years. Naturally, they were not there. I’d organized them to who-knows-where. I was going to test one.
How I wish I could get ten or fifteen of my visual poetry friends like Geof to visit me and go through my house to find out exactly what was where–or maybe just Geof, because he’d love to do it.
* * * * It’s now noon, and I have written a letter. The day will not be a complete wipe-out.
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