About her collecton, The Scottish Café (Slapering Hol Press, 2002), Susan Case offers this note:
This series of poems is loosely based upon the experiences of the mathematicians of the Scottish Café, who lived and worked in Lvov, Poland (now L'viv, Ukraine), a center of Eastern European intellectual life before World War II, close to the area from which my own ancestors emigrated to the United States. A book, known as the Scottish Book, was kept in the Café and used to write down some of their problems and solutions. Whoever offered a proof might be awarded a prize.
Here is "Fixed Points," the opening poem from Case's collection:
Fixed Points by Susan H. Case
At first they meet at the Café Roma in Lvov
on Saturday nights to discuss mathematics
and drink cognac
but Banach lives beyond his means
and is annnoyed that he can't work out something
with the proprietor about his debt
so he persuades the others to move
across the street
to Zielinski's place--the Scottish Café
where the food is not as good
the cognac is not is good
but the music is good
and the credit is better
and they begin to meet each day around five
Banach -- Mazur -- always the center
at a little table with a marble top
where they talk and write
and stare silently at the spaces in their minds
filled with even more formulas
than those written down on the marble table top
some of which later get written down
into a school notebook with a marble-pattern
cardboard cover
that Banach's adored wife Łucja
buys for two-and-a-half zlotys
at a drugstore in Lvov and into which Banach
who does not like to write things down
enters the first problem in nineteen-thirty-five
problems go on odd pages
solutions on the opposite pages
filling up the Scottish Book -- it is chaos sometimes --
arguing and writing and thinking
but chaos is better than order -- says Auerbach --
you can't lose anything in chaos
(or find anything either)
but a lot of mathematics
is found
at the Scottish Café
and lost too -- one session lasts seventeen hours
and results in a proof of a theorm
about Banach spaces
but no one writes it on paper
only on the table top
which is wiped off later by the janitor
after the Café shuts for the night
which still today no one can reproduce
Case's poem "Raisins," from the same collection, is available here (and a .wav file of the Case reading it is available here. A Polish-English version of The Scottish Café, Kawiarnia Szkocka, was published by Opole University Press in 2010. Thanks to poet Stephanie Strickland, a former editor for Slapering Hol Press, for alerting me to Case's work.
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