A Life Made to Count

     The title of this blog-post is part of a headline from The Washington Post -- a headline for a review by GW Professor Lisa Page  of a posthumously published and recently released memoir by Katherine Johnson (1918 - 2020) :  My Remarkable Journey:  A Memoir, written with assistance from Joylette Hylick, Katherine Moore and Lisa Frazier Page (Amistad, 2021).

     As you might expect, numbers are at the center of Johnson's memoir -- numbers never intimidated Johnson — in fact, they thrilled her. The symmetry, the structural interplay of equations and formulas, were always in her head.  (Read a bit of the book here.)

     As Johnson looked back over her life of more than one hundred years, I too was prompted to looks back -- to an article of mine entitled "MATHEMATICS AND POETRY:  ISOLATED OR INTEGRATED?" and published in the Humanistic Mathematics Network Newsletter (forerunner of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics) in May, 1991 -- and available here.  And I can't resist quoting a bit from the article, sharing some phrases from the poem "Poetry" by Marianne Moore (1887-1972).

       . . . things are important not because a
       high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them
       but because they are useful . . . the same thing
       may be said for all of us—that we do not admire
       what we cannot understand. 

       [Not until we] can present for inspection,
       imaginary gardens with real toads in them
       shall we have it . . .

Moore's complete poem is available here.

Move beyond dislike to the genuine . . .

April celebrates National Poetry Month and

National Mathematics-Statistics Awareness Month

     One of the sad similarities between mathematics and poetry is that both are subjects many people dislike -- with reasons such as "I'm lousy at  ___" or "I don't get it" or "It's stupid -- who needs it?"  Lots of us are trying to change that.

     The title for this posting is the opening line of "Poetry"  by Marianne Moore (1887-1972) -- and the poem goes on like this:

I, too, dislike it.
     Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in 
     it, after all, a place for the genuine.

In my copy of The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (Penguin Books, 1981), there is a short version of this poem, "Poetry," that contains only the lines above and, here at Poets.org. we find a longer version that goes on for twenty-three more lines.

 Allow yourself to look for the special, to find it.  

 Celebrate the genuine       in poetry       and       in mathematics.  

The Icosasphere

Marianne Moore (1887-1972) has fun with the sounds of words -- including a number of math terms -- in her playful poem that celebrates inventive constructions from bird nests to a steel sphere-like icosahedron to the Pyramids of Egypt. 

The Icosasphere       by Marianne Moore

“In Buckinghamshire hedgerows  
     the birds nesting in the merged green density,  
          weave little bits of string and moths and feathers and
                                                                                    thistledown,  
              in parabolic concentric curves" and,  
     working for concavity, leave spherical feats of rare efficiency; 
          whereas through lack of integration,  

Marianne Moore -- counting syllables

     Currently (until 28 April, 2013) at the National Portrait Gallery is an exhibit of video and audio portraits of a selection of American Poets -- browsing on the gallery's website I found here today (and related to the exhibit) a recording Marianne Moore's "Bird-Witted."
     Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was one of my first-loves in poetry.  Her line in "Poetry" about presenting for inspection "imaginary gardens with real toads in them" became my goal also.  And when I discovered that her poems frequently were constructed by counting syllables I began to consider that strategy.  These opening stanzas of "The Fish," found in its entirety at poets.org, illustrate Moore's interesting stanza-designs based on syllable-count-patterns.

              The Fish     by Marianne Moore   

1            wade
3            through black jade.
9                 Of the crow-blue mussel-shells, one keeps
6                 adjusting the ash-heaps; 
8 or 9                opening and shutting itself like

Baseball, math, and poetry

The end of summer approaches and, with it, the end of the baseball season.  This blog celebrated the triplet (baseball, mathematics, poetry) on 9 April 2010, featuring samples from and links to poems by Marianne Moore and Jerry Wemple. Today we herald the same trio, this time with "Night Game" by Jonathan Holden.

Grasping at TIME

Different persons experience time differently -- as illustrated by the few lines included below (part II of  "Time" from my new collection, Red Has No Reason).  This musing is followed by the beautifully precise "Four Quartz Crystal Clocks" by  Marianne Moore (1887-1972).

April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics

Is it coincidence or design that

     April  is  National Poetry Month
            
           and

   April  is  Mathematics Awareness Month
          (This year's theme is  "mathematics and sports")

In my own reading, baseball is the sport for which I have found the most poetry.