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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