In a recent posting -- 6/08/2022 -- I tell of mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz and link to her website that has a collection of links to works by various mathy poets that have participated in BRIDGES math-arts conferences. Glaz not only offers connections to poet-information, she also offers links to YouTube recordings of poems -- and recently, to supply her with that, I worked with my granddaughter, Serena Growney, who has just finished her freshman year at high school and knows a lot more about using YouTube than I do. Here's a link to our Growney-Growney YouTube collaboration. (I had intended for Serena to focus on the book cover and not to catch my elbow, etc, in the background -- but perhaps all of that makes it more interesting.) For viewers who like to see the text of a poem as well as to hear it, here is a link to a blog posting of "Things to Count On" -- and below I offer the text of the poem (a very new one), "A Tragic Mathematical Romance."
A Tragic Mathematical Romance by JoAnne Growney
Abscissa, my darling, what is the
basis for your discontent? When I
calculate the
distance between us, I
even have trouble seeing it as
finite – its growth has a steep
graph, climbing out of my
hemisphere with an almost
infinite slope,
jumping with impossibility like the
Koenigsburg Bridge problem,
multiplying my sadness until I am
negative – no
odd or even integer is the
perfect number to describe my
quantity of distress – I
rotate and reflect,
substitute and subtract, try to find a
theorem that will remove my
uncertainty. I follow the
vector directing my heart
toward the origin, where the
x-axis and the
y-axis and the
z-axis meet. Abscissa, please come back and greet me at zero.
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