Poetry-with-math in Baltimore -- 17 Jan 2014

At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore (January 15-18, 2014), the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (under the leadership of editors Mark Huber and Gizem Karaali) will sponsor a poetry reading.  Mark your calendar now! (And be sure to scroll down past the reading announcement to poems from last year's JHM reading in San Diego by poets Katie Manning and Karen Morgan Ivy.)

 Friday,  January 17, 2014. 4:30 - 6:30 PM

 Room 308  Baltimore Convention Center  

 All poets whose work connects with mathematics -- in structure or content --

and all who would like to be an audience for this work are invited. 
 Share your poetry or simply enjoy the company of poetry-math people!   

Though we do not discourage last-minute decisions to participate, 

we invite and encourage poets to submit in advance 

poetry they propose to read (≤ 3 poems, ≤ 5 minutes) and a bio  -- 

and, as a result, be listed on our printed program.  

Inquiries and submissions (by November 30, 2013) 

may be made to JHM editor Gizem Karaali. (gizem.karaali(at)pomona(dot)edu)

This poem by Katie Manning (first published in THRUSH Poetry Journal, 2012) has its syllable counts governed by the Fibonacci numbers:

Week by Week     by Katie Manning

At

this

time your

offspring is

invisible. Now

a speck, the dream of seed and root.

Baby is a dime, quarter, increasing in value—

golf ball, gerbil, your own palm—then more sports equipment: 

          soft ball, football, racquetball court.

By this point your baby is a train, a field, a city, an ocean. This week 

          baby is the sky. Now a hemisphere. Now a blurry world.

Karen Morgan Ivy's poem "my mathematics" appears in the July 2013 issue of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.    Here are several of my favorites of her lines:

    from stanza 8:

          hello my name is karen

          and i am a mathoholic 

     from stanza 11:

          i offer my mathematics in hopes you will discover

          that speaking mathematics

          doesn't require living and loving undercover 

I am one who often keeps quiet with a new acquaintance about my connections to mathematics.  Too often I have experienced an awkward silence or even a confession -- "I was always lousy at math" -- from a new acquaintance and it has seemed that coming out of the math-closet was not the best thing to do at first meeting.  In her poem, however, Karen Ivy does come out of the closet -- she speaks of "emancipation" and "revolution."    Below I offer her stanza 4; enjoy its rhythm and its message:

stanza 4 of "my mathematics":

     no, my mathematics isn't always the greatest translation
     but think of it like emancipation
     like a civil right
     a "we the people" fight
     understanding that the enlightenment
     only manifests and beckons the call
     when there is liberty and justice for all

Please go here to JHM for Karen Morgan Ivy's complete poem.

And plan to attend the Baltimore reading for more mathy poems such as these! (I expect to be there  -- and am assisting JHM editors Huber and Karaali in organizing the event).