For some poets, counting is part of the language of the poem. For others, counting determines the structure. Here are two poems of the former sort -- "Counting" by British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and "Adding It Up" by New England poet Philip Booth (1925-2007) -- followed by opening stanzas of a poem for which counting is part of both content and structure: "Millennium" by mathematician Peter Cameron .
Counting by Philip Larkin
Thinking in terms of one
Is easily done—
One room, one bed, one chair,
One person there,
Makes perfect sense; one set
Of wishes can be met,
One coffin filled.
But counting up to two
Is harder to do;
For one must be denied
Before it's tried.
"Counting" appears in Larkin's Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1988) and in the anthology Strange Attractors (A K Peters, 2008); scroll to the end of this posting for a note on translations of "Counting." Booth's poem, which follows, may be found in Lifelines: Selected Poems 1950-1999 (Penguin, 1999).
Adding It Up by Philip Booth
My mind's eye opens before
the light gets up. I
lie awake in the small dark,
figuring payments, or how
to scrape paint; I count
rich women I didn't marry.
I measure bicycle miles
I pedaled last Thursday
to take off weight; I give some
passing thought to the point
that if I hadn't turned poet
I might well be some other
sort of accountant. Before
the sun reports its own weather
my mind is openly at it:
I chart my annual rainfall.
or how I'll plant seed if
I live to be fifty. I look up
words like "bilateral symmetry"
in my mind's dictionary; I consider
the bivalve mollusc, re-pick
last summer's mussels on Condon Point,
preview the next red tide, and
hold my breath: I listen hard
to how my heart valves are doing.
I try not to get going
too early: bladder permitting,
I mean to stay in bed until six;
I think in spirals, building
horizon pyramids, yielding to
no man's flag but my own.
I think of Saul Steinberg:
I play touch football on one leg,
I seesaw on the old cliff, trying
to balance things out: job,
wife, children, myself.
My mind's eye opens before
my body is ready for its
first duty: cleaning up after
an old-maid Basset in heat.
That, too, I inventory:
the Puritan strain will out,
even at six a.m.; sun or no sun,
I'm Puritan to the bone, down to
the marrow and then some:
if I'm not sorry I worry,
if I can't worry I count.
At Peter Cameron's blog, Cameron Counts, the July 14 entry contains the complete text to "Millenium," a poem that explores the uses of the ten digits in stanzas whose lengths count them. Here are the opening stanzas; follow the link to read the entire poem.
Millennium
An artefact
of ten fingers;
an accident
of dark age monks’
calendar lore;
a bonanza
for marketing
and preachers on
television.
Numbers beguile –
they turn in quite
another way from
sun, moon, planets
and wheeling stars.
. . .
A regular four-syllable line length adds another level of counting to Cameron's poem.
Larkin's "Counting" also has been included in Bryant McGill's World Poetry Translation Project and has been "translated" into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Korean, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese. Although the site embodies a helpful idea, a mathematician friend who is also a poet and translator has experienced the site as a commercialized purveyor of rather poor machine translations. A friend who studies French has recommended Reverso.
Today (July 30) I found a blog entry by New Zealand writer Kerryn Pollock entitled "The Mathematics of Poetry" (at http://blog.teara.govt.nz/2010/07/30/the-
ReplyDeletemathematics-of-poetry/). Pollock wrote in celebration of National Poetry Day in NZ -- reporting on her statistical analysis of the poems used in Te Ara – The
Encyclopedia of New Zealand, found at http://www.teara.govt.nz/.
One more way that mathematics assists poetry. Thanks, Kerryn.