The question of what it means to think is never far from my focus -- and is particularly on my mind during these days that the computer Watson is competing on the TV game show, Jeopardy. Here is a poem I like a lot -- "New Math" by Cole Swensen -- in which the poet (writing more than 20 years ago) considers the limits of computation (and whether it could aid persons unable to recognize faces).
New Math by Cole Swensen
As if the word everything
meant everything
as all words do.
We refer again to "prosopagnosia"--
that condition in which
the victim cannot distinguish
between faces.
If we could compute the numerical value
of a turning wrist, a sense of shock,
toast on a plate,
paint by number
one picture in a single dimension.
Both portrait and landscape
can trace their ancestry
back to the point.
If every breath
is a separate equation
and yet they all equal zero,
that egg with a vacuum inside,
that insensible which we
sense and call invisible
has succeeded in imaging a new circle,
imagine
any thing in which
each point lies the same
distance from any other.
Swensen's "New Math" is found in her collection by the same name, New Math (William Morrow, 1988).
I think this is what I'm trying to explore with my students: can thinking about something like poetry be measured in any tangible, accurate and useful way? Emma
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