Visual Poetry -- Newton's Third Law

     One of the long-term and talented producers and advocates of mathematical visual poetry is Kaz Maslanka; his long-term mathematical-poetry blog is found here.  Maslanka is a featured participant in The Film and Video Poetry Society's 2019 program.  On Saturday, August 3, in Pasadena, CA, Maslanka will offer a presentation entitled "Mathematics and Digital Art."  In addition, work by Maslanka on display (July 11 - August 3) at the Los Angeles Center for Digital Art.  Kaz has sent me this photo of one of his featured (backlit) images:

Newton's Third Law in Karmic Warfare

by Kazmier Maslanka

Digital painting displayed as a Duratrans

Celebrating Visual Poetry

     One of my delights in both poetry and mathematics is the multiplicity of meanings that come from careful attention to a particular text.  Today I have been revisiting the work of visual-poets Robert "Bob" Grumman (1941-2015) and  Karl Kempton and loving the surprises as I rediscover them.  Visual-mathematical poet Kazmier Maslanka in his blog, "Mathematical Poetry,"  generously features the work of many other poets beside his own -- and here (from this link) is one of Kempton's poems:

by Karl Kempton

Visual-mathematical poetry

      The poems that I write and most of the poems that I include in this blog use mathematical patterns to structure their lines and stanzas or mathematical terminology in their content -- but blogger Kaz Maslanka is a mathematical poet who does something different:  his creations involve mathematical operations and symbols as well as words.  For example, the following visual poem -- involving symbols for "equals" and "divided by" -- comes from a recent posting (in his blog, "Mathematical Poetry") of what Maslanka calls an orthogonal space poem.

"Winning" -- a visual poem by Kaz Maslanka in a form related to the formula for the area of a rectangle,  A = lw or, alternatively, w = A/l.  (Double-click on the image to enlarge it.)

During July 29-August 1, 2015, Kaz Maslanka and I both plan to participate 
in the BRIDGES Math-and-the-Arts Conference at the University of Baltimore -- 
sharing our poetry and enjoying the work of others.  
Join us if you can; no registration fee is required for Friday "Family Day" events 
which include a poetry reading.

One type of "mathematical" poetry

When I began (in the 1980s) collecting examples of "mathematical poetry," I sought lines of verse that included some mathematical terminology.  More recently, my view has expanded to include structual, visual, and algorithmic influcences from mathematics; however, the two samples from the work of William Blake (1757-1827), presented below, fit into that initial category -- selected as "mathematical" because of their vocabulary -- one speaks of "infinity," the other of "symmetry."  (Blake was an artist as well as poet and his volumes of poetry were illustrated with his prints.)  The following stanza is the opening quatrain for Blake's poem "Auguries of Innocence." 

Visual Poetry -- from Karl Kempton

Poet Karl Kempton offers readers a great variety of visual poetry -- often including elements of mathematics. Kaz Maslanka's MathematicalBlogspot , Geof Huth's Visualizing Poetics blog, and Dan Waber's Logolalia offer introductions to the work of Kempton and other visual poets.  Here are three samples from Karl's collection,  3 Cubed: Mathematical Poems, 1976 - 2003  (Runaway Spoon Press, 2003). 

Poetry and applied mathematics

Back in the 1980's when I began taking examples of poetry into my mathematics classrooms at Bloomsburg University, I think that I justified doing so by considering poetry as an application of mathematics.  For example, Linda Pastan applies algebra to give meaning to her poem of the same title.  Here are the opening lines.

Poetry with mathematical symbols

On the internet and elsewhere a variety of viewpoints are expressed about the criteria poetry should satisfy to be "mathematical." Today I want to introduce samples and links for three writers:   Bob Grumman (Florida), Gregory Vincent St Thomasino (New York), and Kaz Maslanka (California).  Grumman and Maslanka write poems with a strong visual element and, as the blogs and comments for all three testify, they differ in their views of what may be properly called "mathematical" poetry..