Poems with Numbers

      Hats off to the organizers and presenters at the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival held in DC this past weekend.  Great poets, great programs, fantastically good company all around!!!

      Saturday at the festival,  Denny Shaw and I led a panel-workshop, "Counting On," in which we encouraged poets to use numbers to illuminate their poems of witness and protest.  Our samples of vivid effects of numbers included:  "At Arlington" by Wiley Clements, "The Idea of Ancestry" by Etheridge Knight, "Numbers for the Week" by Joan Mazza, “On Ibrahim Balaban’s Painting ‘The Prison Gates’” by Nazim Hikmet, “The Stalin Epigram” by Osip Mandlestam, “Bosnia, Bosnia” by June Jordan, “The Terrorist:  He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska, and “Four Five Six” by Rosemary Winslow.

     Poetry from our workshop participants will be posted here when it is gathered.  We focused on humanitarian and political concerns -- and used our workshop writing times to try for  poems that use numbers in their imagery.  Here are two samples from me (both syllable-squares).

     Our jails hold

     5 times more 

     blacks than whites.

Hikmet -- painting with numbers

Living is no laughing matter . . . 

These are words of Turkish poet, playwright, novelist and memoirist Nazim Hikmet (1902-63), who spent much of his life in prison or exile for his political beliefs.  In the following poem by Hikmet we see a portrait that builds from the numbers that characterize the landscape of Ibrahim Balaban's painting.  As you read Hikmet's poem, consider the value of numbers in portraiture.  Though they do not have the textures of color nor the movement of lines, numbers have shapes and edges that may much enrich our seeing.