Remembering Pennsylvania Poet Harry Humes

     A Pennsylvania poet whose work I enjoyed and learned from has recently passed away --  Harry Humes, who taught literature and film at Kutztown (PA) University and produced and edited  (until his retirement in 1999) a bi-annual poetry journal, Yarrow.

     Humes' poetry was not mathy  but I connected with it deeply because we had Pennsylvania in common,  Back in 2010, in the early days of this blog, I posted Humes' poem "The Butterfly Effect" at this link.  Here is a screenshot of the poem's opening lines:   

Butterfly Effects

An equation or system of equations is said to be "ill-conditioned" if a small change in input data can produce a very large change in the output.  This inverse relationship between input and output has become popularly known by the phrase "butterfly effect."  Two poets from Eastern Pennsylvania, Gary Fincke and Harry Humes, have written poems about this phenomenon.