Poet and painter and literary theorist Paul Hartal was born in Hungary, with higher-education experiences in Israel and the U.S. -- and is now a long-term Canadian. Recently Hartal contacted me to share a couple of his poems that involved mathematical topics -- and I offer one of these below, "Crisscrossing Infinity." Hartal's poem refers to a war memorial constructed using the pattern that first appeared in the sculpture "Endless Column" by Romanian artist Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) and is on display at New York's MA, Museum of Modern Art.
Crisscrossing Infinity by Paul Hartal
In the city of Targu Jiu, Romania,an abstract sculpture rises
30 meters high.
It is made of 15 zinc and cast iron
rhomboidal modules
(plus a half unit).
These repetitive,
double pyramidal shapes
form Constantin Brancusi's
'Endless Column',
a 1938 work honoring
the fallen Romanian soldiers of WWI.
The rhythmic rhomboid geometry,
metal vertebrae in the spine of time
indicate infinite expansion.
The Hungarian composer Gyorgy Ligeti
was inspired by Brancusi's
Coloana Infinita.
Ligeti's Piano Etude #14
features loud, ascending sounds
scaling chord sequences
that generate a sense
of upward flow, an ascending motion
that dissolves and vanishes
in the boundless space
of the cosmos.
Lots of poems by Hartal are available here at PoemHunter.com. Here is a link to "Saved by Mathematics." Found at another site, here is Hartal's almost mathy "Piano Tunes."
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