Revolutions and singularities

     Early in June it was my privilege to hear poet Lesley Wheeler read as part of the Joaquin Miller Poetry Series on summer Sundays in Washington, DC's Rock Creek Park.  Lesley read from her wonderful 2015 collection, Radioland, in which I found this mathy sonnet, a poem of twists and singularities and rich with double meanings:

       Concentric Grooves, 1983     by Lesley Wheeler

       Every whorl in the floorboard spins clockwise,
       the grain widening round the stain, a stream
       of years circling a burn-brown knot.  Strum
       and crackly gap.  Music drowns a wheeze 

A mathematician's favorite poet

     A summertime gift book that I have much enjoyed reading is Love & Math: The Heart of Hidden Reality by Edward Frenkel (Basic Books, 2013).  I admire the way Frenkel's memoir braids mathematics together with the other threads of his life.  Including poetry.  Like me, he chooses E E Cummings as one of his favorite poets.  And he used lines from Cummings' 1931 poem "the surely" as an epigram for a 2007 book that summarized his work.
     Below I include the entire text of Cummings' poem, with Frenkel's epigraph highlighted in bold face.

the surely     

Cued
motif smites truly to Beautifully
retire through its english

the Forwardflung backwardSpinning hoop returns fasterishly

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,