From my Lewisburg, PA friend, Ruta Karelis, I have recently learned of the April 16 death of my beloved first poetry teacher, Bucknell professor and poet, Karl Patten (1927-2017). Karl's oft-repeated phrase (and poem title) "Every Thing Connects" -- found on my shelf in The Impossible Reaches (Dorcas Press, 1992) -- is on my mind daily. Another poem from that collection -- "The Play" -- I am reading and rereading today, remembering the poet. Here it is, from Karl Patten, for you.
The Play by Karl Patten
You're tired? I'm tired too. Let's forget we're people, forget all that.
You be a horizon, infinite, flat, a forever-place,
I'll be double, gray-blue ocean, gray-blue sky, touching you, just.
Showing posts with label Karl Patten. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Karl Patten. Show all posts
Thursday, April 20, 2017
Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Man Ray's "Human Equations"
Art lovers in Washington, DC have the opportunity (until 5/10/15) to see, on exhibit at The Phillips Collection, "Man Ray -- Human Equations: A Journey from Mathematics to Shakespeare." I visited the exhibit on February 19 on the occasion of a poetry reading by Rae Armantrout -- she presented work of hers that she felt captured the spirit of Man Ray's work. (Bucknell poet Karl Patten, whom I had as a poetry teacher years ago, insisted that "Every Thing Connects" and, indeed, this is the title of one of the poems in Patten's collection The Impossible Reaches. Both of these phrases that became titles for Patten seem also to describe Man Ray's and Armantrout's work: they have taken seemingly disparate objects and reached across seemingly impossible gaps to relate them. As often happens in mathematics.)
Monday, September 23, 2013
A poet re-envisions space
University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Ghrist, in his September 19 lecture ("Putting Topology to Work") at the MAA's Carriage House, credited poet John Milton (1608-1674) with the first use of the word space as an abstract entity -- and, Ghrist asserted, by so doing, Milton opened a door to the study of abstract space (known in mathematics as topology).
The following material is a 24 September correction
from my 23 September posting. For I discovered -- in a thoughtful email from Ghrist --
that the proper citation of "space" was not from line 50 of Book 1 but from line 89 of Book 7.
(I invite you go to Project Gutenberg for Paradise Lost in its entirety.)
Here, below, I have replaced my original posting of lines 44-74 of Book 1
with lines 80 - 97 of Book 7 -- lines taken from my shelf copy of Milton's Paradise Lost,
the 1968 Signet Classic Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks.
In the selection below and throughout his epic, Milton replaces past visions of hell down-in-the-earth and heaven up-in-the-sky with more complex and abstract configurations.
Labels:
abstract,
Cassius Keyser,
John Milton,
Karl Patten,
MAA,
mathematics,
Paradise Lost,
poet,
poetry,
Robert Ghrist,
space,
topology
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