Friday, September 9, 2022

Enriching Poetry with Mathematical Ideas

     An important leader in the community of writers who link mathematics and poetry is Sarah Glaz -- a scholar who is not only a mathematician and poet but also an organizer, participant, publicist, and recorder for numerous math-poetry events.  Glaz is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut and her UConn webpage is a vast source of mathematical and poetry treasures.

     I first came to know Sarah well as we worked together on an important project -- gathering poems for the anthology Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters / CRC Press, 2008).  A preview of this collection is available here.   Here, from that collection, is one of my favorites -- a thoughtful poem about parenting and attitudes (love? or not?) toward mathematics:

Love Story     by Sarah Glaz

       If I ever write about you--
       he said--
       it will be a love story
       a story about
       how much you want to be loved.

       Father, do you love
       your little girl?
       I brought you
       a soup full
       of numbers
       formulas chopped to perfection
       integrals fried to a crisp 

       Father, is it algebra
       you wish
       for supper
       or higher mathematics?

       I would lie at your feet
       looking up
       at your busy mouth
       waiting for a smile to appear
       a few words of approval and praise
       one word of love

       How long can one wait?

       A lifetime if necessary--

       even beyond

When you want to explore math-poetry, the materials developed and collected by Glaz offer wonderful opportunities.  An active participant in BRIDGES Math-Arts conferences, Glaz has produced papers and poems and books -- and organized poetry readings -- and much is available at this link.  Her poetry collection Ode to Numbers (Antrim House, 2017) offers wonderful reading (and a sample may be found here.)

AND . . . Glaz' work has been mentioned many (more than 20) times in this blog; here's a link.

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