To add two and two

     Today I call attention again (as in my post for 6 January, 2015) to the extensive  Science-Poetry collection edited by Norman Hugh Redington and Karen Rae Keck. Mathy (rather than bawdy) limericks are featured in the collection; for example, this one by an unknown author:

       There was an old man who said, "Do
       Tell me how I'm to add two and two?
            I'm not very sure
            That it doesn't make four --
       But I fear that is almost too few."  

Poetry as Pure Mathematics

A recent email from Portuguese mathematician-poet F J "Francisco" Craveiro de Carvalho brought a 40-year-old stanza to my attention. First published in the May, 1974 issue of POETRY Magazine, we have these enigmatic lines by William Virgil Davis.  Enjoy!

       The Science of Numbers:  Or Poetry as Pure Mathematics

       Whatever you add you add at your peril.
       It is far better to subtract.  In poetry,
       Multiplication borders on madness.
       Division is the mistress we agree to sleep with. 

Amounting to Something

From the Fall/Winter 2013 issue of Poet Lore, a poem by David Wagoner about the arithmetic of expectations:

     Amounting to Something     by David Wagoner

     You were supposed to do that
     by saving yourself up
               like coins in a pig rescued
               just in time sometimes
     from in front of the candy counter  
     or the desk in the corridor

A Prayer of Numbers

     Whether our language is music or mathematics, computer code or cookery --  as we learn to love the language and treat it with good care, we find poetry.  Because mathematics is a concise language, with emphasis on placing the best words in the best order, it often is described by mathematicians and scientists as poetry.  Alternatively, and more accessible to most readers than poetic mathematics, we find verses by poets who include the objects and terminology of mathematics in their lines.

     One of my favorite poems of numbers is the portrait "Number Man," by Carl Sandburg (1878-1967),  found in The Complete Poems of Carl Sandburg (Harcourt, 2003).  This poem also appears in Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008) -- a varied collection of math-related poems edited by Sarah Glaz and me.

     Number Man     by Carl Sandburg

          (for the ghost of Johann Sebastian Bach)

     He was born to wonder about numbers.

A puzzle with a partial solution

     When we have experiences near to each other, we may try to connect them. We form superstitions. "Bad things come in threes" -- and something similar for good things. And we make poetry -- offering new associations that delight and surprise.
     Gertrude Stein is one of my favorite poets. She was, like me, born in Pennsylvania (though she, unlike me, left and became Parisian).   She creates almost-meaning from unlikely juxtapositions.  I find in her work the delight of a puzzle to which I can find a partial solution. And come back for more. Here are two stanzas from Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" that play with some mathematical meanings.

Poets who Count

For some poets, counting is part of the language of the poem. For others, counting determines the structure. Here are two poems of the former sort -- "Counting" by British poet Philip Larkin (1922-1985) and "Adding It Up" by New England poet Philip Booth (1925-2007) -- followed by opening stanzas of a poem for which counting is part of both content and structure:  "Millennium" by mathematician Peter Cameron .