On X (Twitter) today I found the following quote posted by poet Ilya Kaminsky -- quoting recently deceased poet Fanny Howe (1940-2025). Howe's poetic statement, quoted below, is one that applies (for me, at least) to both poetry and mathematics:
One way to understand your own condition is to write something and spend a long time revising it.
In revising you teach yourself. You find your own information buried in your body. It is still alive until you are not.
Here, at PoetryFoundation.com, are more than twenty of Howe's poems; I offer one of these below:
Infinite nesting
pushes all matter
towards emptiness:
child-nodes,
tree-droppings
with a root element of null.
None is always included
in every cluster
of children.
Nothing in nothing
prepares us.
Yet a fresh light was shed
on immortality
for me climbing the stairs
firm foot first.
Everything was in the banister:
crows on branches, crickets,
architects, handsaws and democrats.
Red moon at 3 am.
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