Along the north branch of the Susquehanna River in east-central Pennsylvania lies the town of Bloomsburg -- known for Bloomsburg University (where I taught math for a bunch of years) and for the Bloomsburg Fair -- an annual celebration that attracts hundreds of thousands of people during each last week of September.
I grew up loving fairs -- in my hometown of Indiana, Pennsylvania, the last week of August brought the Indiana County Fair where we celebrated, with livestock and a carnival, the end of summer vacation.
More than twenty years ago I gathered some of my Bloomsburg Fair memories in a poem. The entire poem is found at this link; below I offer a sample of the mathy imagery from the poem.
from The Bloomsburg Fair by JoAnne Growney
. . .
In front of side-show tents,
a barker barks his come-on-ins.
Why don't my students receive theorems
as willingly as passersby
accept his lies?
. . .
If parallels will never meet—
then here's a man with snakes for hair,
and there's a woman with three eyes.
This poem appears in the anthology, COMMON WEALTH: Contemporary Poets on Pennsylvania, Edited by Marjorie Maddox and Jerry Wemple, (2005, PSU Press).
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