How to Appreciate a Mathemaku
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Hi, Bob–
Thanks for the chance to look over your rationale–if that’s the word. Maybe “rubric,” as the departmental committeeists like to say these days. I certainly see what you’re doing here (like the kid who finally “gets” a long division answer right by himself), and follow your explanation o.k. I just want to note two things that work as a kind of impediment for me, which involve one comment about your explanatory process. First, just taking the thing at face value, trying to reason it out, I come up against the “heart” image–as you say, a valentine heart. You’re very aware of the great variety of associations individuals have to words, and here you have one word whose associations would surely differ in the norther and southern hemisphere, in temperate zones and near the equator, in mountains and in deserts (that’s “February”), one word whose associations mostly (I think) depend on cultural mythologies (still, does “Zanzibar” carry those mythologies for Africans as well as Americans?), and one word (actually several words–it’s a homonym) that in one of its manifestations is replete with a great variety of religious significances (you don’t seem to mean, though I don’t see why you couldn’t, a part of the head)–and these, I’d suggest, might be quite intense and quite various, differing for Jews, Buddhists, and Christians. And you have one visual symbol that, misreadings aside, I’d say, can only mean one thing: the division sign. You divisor, meanwhile, is that “heart” image, and here (at last) is my first concern: what does the “heart” image represent? Certainly not (except ironically) the same for me as for some dreamy teenager getting his/her first valentine’s card. The “heart” is also a _heart_–that is, if you aren’t simply swirling in a romantic daze, it calls to mind actual hearts, like mine, with its four stents and tendency to buck under certain circumstances. Your explanation certainly shows that you’re conscious of all these polyvalences and multiplicities, and your anchoring them to a sign that assumes definite properties of number might be read as ironic or “poetic” or simply perverse. But I don’t see how your explanations either explains or explains _away_ the huge variances that might emerge from all those associations. It doesn’t really tell me how I might “appreciate” that kind of compression of logic (the division sign) and imagery (the expression of constructions of the imagination), despite the indisputable fact that this dimension of your mathemaku is also a dimension of most poetry–a dimension notable for it variety of configurations, I’d say. My second point concerns your association of the form with haiku–a connection you carefully and correctly qualify as you offer it. Believe me, I see what you mean, and the fact that I don’t agree with your claim shouldn’t be seen in itself as a criticism of your mathemaku–I just think that haiku work very differently from the process of these poems, that the relation between logic and reason feels very different to me in the haiku and in what you’re doing. In fact, I think I see a kind of dissonance at the heart of your poems, a tension between the freeplay of the image and a desire for definitional/logical rigor represented by the mathematical element. It seems pretty alive to me–a good thing, as lots of poets go there to die, at least as poets.
Good luck with your show, Bob, and happy new year–I hope these comments turn out to be useful to you in some way. That’s certainly my reason for sending them along.
best,
Jerry
Thanks much for the most excellent probe, Jerry. I don’t think there’s much difference between your take on what I’m doing and mine, when I go deeper into it than I wanted to in this little guide of mine. My only comment back (for now) is that I generally take it for granted that my poems (usually) are by someone from Connecticut for North Americans (even though I now live in Florida). So, yeah, the Australian version will have to have “August” substituted for “February!”
all best, Bob
Bob,
I came here because of your post on New Poetry.
My first memory of what we now call ethnic conflict is the massacre and expulsion of Indians and Arabs accompanying Zanzibar’s independence – also my earlist memory of Zanzibar. I had just turned 11, just become interested in politics because of Kennedy’s assasination, the first few people I knew personally who died or were injured in Viet Nam, and the conflicts in Louisville (my hometown) over school and housing desegregation. And, as Jerry McGuire wrote above, Zanzibar was closely associated wth the slave trade — it was, in fact, East Africa’s most important slave port. So, for me, Zanzibar is, rather than a symbol of magic and mystery, a reminder of immense, deliberately caused human suffering. Multiplying Zanzibar and a Valentine’s heart, for me, could result in a temple only if it were a temple desecrated by the heart’s blood of a suffering people. But then, I don’t have a very high opininon of temples either. Until recently, they were among the most efficient causers of murder.
I think this points to a general problem with visual poetry – imagery is not discursive; its meanings are not bound with the same force with which verbal meanings are bound. Neither, of course, are bound with anything remotely like the precision of mathematics. In your mathematical visual poetry, you try to introduce something like syntax with mathemaical symbols, but the things you link in this way are simply not bounded in the way mathematical terms are. Your Zanzibar is not my Zanzibar, or that of any person with a serious interest in history or poiltics, or, for that matter, that of a commodities trader in the spice market or that of a lover of cloves, so placing it in a quasi-mathematical function will yield wildly different results for different “readers.” Integer division is not like that: even the repeating decimals resulting from operations like 10/3 can be precisely and uniquely located on a number line by constructive methods.
Not to say that verbal lyrics don’t have some of the same problems: we no longer sing “My Old Kentucky Home” with all of Stephen Foster’s words, even though Frederick Douglas thought those original words aroused “sympathies for the slave, in which anti-slavery principles take root and flourish.” (That last from the wikipedia article on the song)
Thanks for taking the time to comment, Mike. I would only say that I believe the context of the poem will eliminate the political connotations “Zanzibar” and “temple” have for you for those with a serious aesthetic interest in poetry. As for “things I link” with mathematics not being “bounded in the way mathematical terms are,” that’s a main point of my mathematical poems–exploitation of the tension between the poetic and the mathematical, or anti-poetic. And the mathematical elements (I wouldn’t call them “functions,” myself) are mathematical, not “quasi-mathematical.” The long division is long division–but long division of words rather than mathematical elements. Finally, though, my presentation is not intended to defend long division poetry, only to show what I hope is a way to appreciate it, at least for those of my temperament.
What, by the way, do you think of those who despise formal poetry because it seems to them fascist?
To answer your question – there is no historical connection between formal poetry and fascism. In fact, Ezra Pound, probably the most important proponent of of “new” forms of poetry, was an explicit supporter of Mussolini, the original fascist.
Here’s a question for you – if the mathematical elements are, in fact, mathematical, then where is the logical structure to show that its results are the necessary (even if only probabilistically so) consequences of initial premises and formal rules?
There doesn’t have to be a historical connection for formalism to be considered fascist, a philosophical one will do: the fact that rules are forced on people by both fascism and (strict) poetic form. But that’s beside the point, which is that some people subjectively consider formal poetry fascist or authoritarian and therefore flawed the same way you subjectively consider a poem with “Zanzibar” in it politically tainted and therefore flawed. In both cases one is unable to put aside political feelings that really have nothing to do with the poems involved. Obviously, I’m not writing a poem honoring a dictionary as being part of some war and/or slave-trading, nor do your sonnets have anything to do with fascism.
As for the logical structure you speak of, I’m not sure what you mean. What I believe is that the long division symbol, which I call the dividend shed, acts in my poem exactly the way it does in arithmetic: it states that what is inside it is to be divided by the term to its left. Or: it asks what the term on its left has to be multiplied to equal it, or almost equal it. The difference is that the terms are (usually) words; but they are metaphorically taken to act like numbers to reveal a relationship among them like numbers in a long division reveal how they relate to each other. Intuition takes over from pure reason, or pure reason sets up a situation allowing an intuitive (poetic) understanding of words (or whatever non-mathematical terms are involved, such as graphics) to find out something new about how they inter-relate–or something old arrived at in a refreshingly different way.
It’s mathematical poetry: half mathematics–the operation–and half poetry–the terms. Mathematics might be said to be taking over (in a way) for metrical form.
I would ask what is going on in the poems if nothing mathematical is. Surely the dividend shed is doing something.
Another thought: how would you take the following equation: agility times height equals success-in-basketball?
–Bob
Just a quick very partial response before unconsciousness – agility times height does does not equal success-in-basketball without thousands of hours of drill and practice. And the shed is a metaphor, not a bad metaphor, but not mathematics.
That should be “thousands of hours of drill and practice under the guidance of a very good coach and in the company of of other players, similarly talented and well-coached.”
The dividend shed is mathematics used metaphorically. As for the basketball equation, what I want to know is what you take it as, not how valid you think it. Is it in any way mathematical? But change “agility” to “potential,” if you want a greater degree of validity.
Bob, three messages back the “the mathematical elements are … mathematical, not ‘quasi-mathematical’,” now it’s “mathematics used metaphorically.” Which is it? And, for the life of me, I can’t see what difference it makes to substitute “potential”for “agility.” Mathematics is a formal system defined in such a way that the outcome of a set of operations performed on a particular set of properly formed inputs will necessarily produce such-and-such a set of results. Metaphors don’t work that way. Poetry doesn’t work that way.
I would never claim that what you do is not art — it’s sometimes very good art, which is all any of us can hope for. But it certainly isn’t mathematics, and while it sits fairly comfortably next to more traditional poetry, it should be no surprise to you that poets generally don’t feel it has much to do with their work — no more than you think sonnets have much to do with your work.
I’ve been thinking a little more about the connections between fascism and Ezra Pound’s dictum “make it new.” There was a sense in the early twentieth century that everything could be remade in more rational form – even, and perhaps especially, human nature. Fascism and Communism were both attempts to do this, despite their very different notions of the Good. Artists from both sides of that divide worked to discover new forms to encourage/model/engage what they felt to be the newly emerging human consciousness, and both sides, both politically and artistically, declared old forms to be “reactionary,” or “bourgeois.” Free verse was most definitely connected with this revolutionary spirit, and formal poetry definitely considered by the revolutionaries on both sides to be an affront to the new orders they respectively desired. Art is always messy, and there were certainly exceptions on both sides, but there is a way in which metrical verse is a celebration of the continuity of the human endeavor while free verse is a deliberate attack on that continuity: “Make it new.” Both Fascism and Communism, and the various poetics of the new poetries, assume that human nature is infinitely malleable — but it is not.
It isn’t as important that there be or not be rules for doing this or making that as it is that what rules there are arise from a delight in and a respect for human capacity and desire as they are revealed in spontaneous human interaction with their world, including the other people in it. Metrical verse, rhyme, and narrative, from their ubiquity in human culture, clearly are genuine expressions of that human capacity and desire.
Of course, so is war. But madrigals don’t kill people.
I give up, Mike–I see no way of making you see that my poems are mathematical, just not entirely mathematical. The dividend shed works the same way in my long division poems as it does in arithmetic. Its mathematical operation is then used metaphorically, but that doesn’t make it not mathematical. In fact, to work as a metaphor it has to remain mathematical.
As for free verse linking with fascism, a politics of slavery, I don’t see it. Again, though, I was not arguing that formal verse and fascism go together, but something else. (See preceding comment.)