Mathematics of Family -- in a Poem

     Split This Rock is an activist poetry organization that calls poets to a greater role in public life and reaches out to a network of socially engaged poets; the organization is  centered in Washington, DC but reaches all over the world . . .   One of their ongoing activities is the selection of a Poem of the Week -- and one of their recent choices was a challenging and fascinating poem that included frequent uses of mathematical notation to express its ideas.

Hunger -- portrayed in poetry and numbers

      Since 2003, SPLIT THIS ROCK has been an activist poetry organization that protests war and injustice.   Besides readings and conferences, Split this Rock also connects members by emailing a POEM OF THE WEEK series.  Most often, these poems are not mathematical in nature -- but one of the recent offerings is a verbal picture that uses numbers -- "meat market" by New York multidisciplinary artist Lara Attallah.  I include a portion of this poem below.   

    meat market    by Lara Atallah

             after Lebanon, a country with one of the worst economic crises since the nineteenth century

    the price of bread has gone up again. throngs of cars
    slouch towards shuttering gas stations. the currency, a farce

    with each swing of the gavel, numbers
    soar. fifty thousand pounds by day’s end,  

Prove it . . .

This post's title "Prove it" occurs several times within the poem,

DREAMers Mark Themselves     by Maricielo Ampudia Gutiérrez,

a poem (found here, followed by an author bio) that arrived in a recent e-mail from the socially-engaged poetry group, Split This Rock -- and I have been reflecting on its use of the term "prove it" as compared with mathematical usage.  The poem by Gutiérrez is included in a rich poetry database maintained by Split this Rock.

     One of the editors of the online journal Better Than Starbucks, Joseph E. Petta, has let me know of his liking for poems with links to mathematics and encourages submissions.  Petta's "Experimental & Form Poetry" section of the July August 2020 issue contains a thoughtful a thoughtful matrix poem, a word-prison:

Freedom        by Stuthi Iyer

Both of these poems offer ideas for thoughtful contemplation -- for math people and for others!

Split This Rock Poetry Festival, April 19-21, 2018

For poems and poets that speak out FOR rights, AGAINST injustice, 

attend the biennial SPLIT THIS ROCK Poetry Festival!

Festival information is available here.  

Split This Rock maintains a hugs poetry database, available here.

One of this year's Festival's featured poets is Sharon Olds who was, a few years ago, my poetry teacher.  This link leads to an introduction to Olds and to a stanza from one of her poems that celebrates math-girls.   

. . .

indivisible as

a prime number

. . .

Poems that count: Eight Buffalo

     In mid-April at the Split This Rock Poetry Festival, one of the sessions I attended and valued had the title " "Eco-Feminist Poetry, Intersectionality, & the End of the Earth."  In the midst of my concern about ecology and women is my addiction to mathematics -- and a poem by Cecilia Llompart started me counting.  See if you, too, count the word "buffalo" eight times during this poem; and shudder when you read the final word.

       Eight Buffalo      by Cecilia Llompart

       An obstinacy of buffalo 
       is not to say that the buffalo 
       are stubborn. No, not like 
       a grass stain. More that 
       the very bulk of one— 

Counting into the Future . . .

     Remember that you have only until November 1 to submit a winning "poem of provocation and witness" to the Split This Rock Poetry Contest.  If you don't already,  you will want also to subscribe to Split This Rock's Poem of the Week.  This week's poem ("Past Tense" by Sam Taylor) opens with these numbers:

       In the Great Depression of 2047,
       a time of sorrow rivaled only
       by the Global Unification Wars
       of Spring 2029 to 2033,
       in the Merlona Plague of 2104, 
       in the year of the forest die-off,
       after the atmospheric hue reduction . . . .

From Nude Descending an Empire (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014).  Apatelodes merlona is a species of moth.

Can poetry change the climate for frogs?

      Poems affect our spirits as well as our minds. And Split This Rock is looking for poems that protest and witness, world-changing poems.  Go here for information about their Eighth Annual Poetry Contest (with submission deadline November 1, 2014).
     Here in this blog, as I present connections between poetry and mathematics, I provide some poems of protest and advocacy.  I advocate attention to problems of climate change -- to keep our world habitable; I advocate full recognition of women in the sciences -- for a not dissimilar reason.  We must not waste our resources.

And Now I See . . .

     One of the ways we overcome our nervous shyness about our disabilities is by talking about them, and writing about them.  And by encountering the poetry of Kathi Wolfe.  I enjoy her work out-loud -- she is a frequent performer of her poems at local DC-area venues  -- and on the page.
     Kathi's "Blind Ambition" (in which she speaks of the monsters in arithmetic) is offered below; I first discovered this poem when it was posted by Split this Rock as poem of the week.  

Two-line poems -- Landays -- from Afghanistan

Celebrate Activist Poetry -- At Nov. 1 Event

BE THERE on November 1, 2013 at the Goethe-Intitut in Washington DC when poet and journalist Eliza Griswold is  honored with the Split this Rock Freedom Plow Award (register here for this important event) for Poetry and Activism for her work collecting and introducing the folk poems of Afghan women to America.  The June issue of Poetry Magazine is entirely dedicated to landays -- two-line poems by Afghan women that capture dark, funny, and revealing moments that few outsiders ever witness.  (Edited and introduced by Griswold, the poems are magnificently supplemented by photographs by Seamus Murphy.)

Here are three landays from Griswold's Poetry collection, each selected for inclusion here because it includes at least one number: 

Start with a number . . .

     April celebrates both poetry and mathematics -- this month that is the gateway to spring is also National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month (with theme "Mathematics, Statistics, and the Data Deluge").

     Last month (March 22-25), mathematics and poetry met at the DC Poetry Festival, Split this Rock where several of us gathered for a workshop, "Counting On" -- where writers were encouraged to use a number (or numbers) as a focal point for a poem. During the workshop hour, several of us picked numbers that mattered to us and started the process of forming a poem; here are lines from Sonja deVries, Yael Flusberg, Janine Harrison, Jaime Lee Jarvis, Margaret Rozga, and me.

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.

Langston Hughes could do anything!

In the 1970s when I was a new professor (at Pennsylvania's Bloomsburg University), a particular colleague and I would chat occasionally about our teaching methods and compare them with the ways we'd been taught. We agreed that many of our teachers seemed to dump mathematics on us in any manner whatever -- supposing that, if we were smart enough, we would pick it up. We thought we were better teachers than our predecessors and yet I am haunted by knowing that the privileged -- whether by wealth or education or birthplace or whatever -- seldom see their advantage over those who are different. Still, some of us survive unlikely odds, being lucky enough to have an "I can do anything" attitude like that expressed by poet Langston Hughes (1902 - 1967) in "I, Too":

2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival -- March 22-25

Earlybird registration ends February 22 for the 2012 Split this Rock Poetry Festival in Washington, DC, March 22-25.  Honoring poet June Jordan, the four-day festival will feature more than a dozen noted poets whose work speaks out against indifference and injustice.  One of these is is Minnie Bruce Pratt -- and here is her "Someone is Up," one of the poems featured in the Spring 2012 issue of the Beloit Poetry Journal, published in support of the Split this Rock Festival and presenting work of festival poets.  As in many poems of provocation and witness, numbers provide the specifics that pin down the message.  (See also poetry by Festival Director Sarah Browning in the February 5 posting.)

Strength from Numbers

During March 22-25, 2012, the third Split This Rock Poetry Festival:  Poems of Provocation and Witness will be held in Washington, DC. This year's festival honors activist poet June Jordan (1936  - 2002) but the festival would not be happening without the vision and untiring efforts of DC poet Sarah Browning, Director of Split This Rock and DC Poets Against the War, and author of Whiskey in the Garden of Eden.  Like any good protester, she makes effective use of the specificity of numbers in her poems.

Continuing Climate Concerns

     Split This Rock, an activist confederation of poets concerned with vital human issues, has directed attention to environmental concerns by publishing my "Mitigation of Toxins" as their poem of the week for this final week in October; please follow the link and enjoy this poem and others their archive offers.  ("Mitigation of Toxins" first appeared in Innisfree and also is included in my new collection, Red Has No Reason .)
     In continued support of climate concerns--which seem to me often to fit a square-poem format -- here is "Arctic," a 5x5 square by poet Linda Benninghoff, author of six chapbook collections.