A Lecture on the Cube

     Summer weeks spent teaching English to Romanian students have helped me to learn of several of the country's fine poets and to get involved in a bit of translating.  Romanian mathematics professor, Gabriel Prajitura (now at SUNY Brockport) -- whom I first met at Pennsylvania's Bucknell University when I was teaching nearby at Bloomsburg University -- worked with me to translate several mathy poems by Nichita Stanescu (1933-1983).  The Summer/Autumn 2004 issue of Circumference:  Poetry in Translation included "A lecture on the cube" and "A lecture on the circle."  My blog posting on April 18, 2014 -- available at this link -- shares "A lecture on the circle" -- and I offer the other below:

     A lecture on the cube     by Nichita Stanescu

        You take a piece of stone,
        chisel it with blood,
        grind it with Homer’s eye,
        burnish it with beams
        until the cube comes out perfect.       

Reflections on Logic

Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Czech poet and immunologist who excelled in both endeavors, is one of my favorite poets.  He combines scientific exactitude with empathy and absurdity.  Here is a sample:

       Brief Reflections on Logic     by Miroslav Holub

                                     translated by Stuart Friebert and Dana Habova

       The big problem is everything has
           its own logic.  Everything you can
           think of, whatever falls on your head.
           Somebody will always add the logic.
           In your head or on it.  

A Cento from Arcadia

Last week I had the enjoyable privilege of visiting with mathematician-poet Marion Cohen's math-lit class, "Truth and Beauty" at Arcadia University -- and the class members helped me to compose a Cento (given below), a poem to which each of us contributed a line or two of poetry-with-mathematics.  Participants, in addition to Dr. Cohen and me, included these students: 
          Theresa, Deanna, Ian, Collin, Mary, Grace, Zahra, Jen, Jenna, 
          Nataliya, Adeline, Quincy, Van, Alyssa, Samantha, Alexis, Austin.
Big thanks to all!

Dimensions of a soul

In the poem below, Young Smith uses carefully precise terms of Euclidean geometry to create a vivid interior portrait.

     She Considers the Dimensions of Her Soul   by Young Smith

     The shape of her soul is a square.
     She knows this to be the case
     because she often feels its corners
     pressing sharp against the bone
     just under her shoulder blades
     and across the wings of her hips. 

Can you SEE the monument?

Links to non-intersecting celebrations of April
as National Poetry Month      and      Mathematics Awareness Month

are available here and here.

Recently I revisited my copy of Elizabeth Bishop:  The Compete Poems, 1927-1979 (FSG, 1999) and turned to "The Monument" -- a poem mathematically interesting for its geometry.  Here are the opening lines; the complete text and many other Bishop poems are available online here:

from  The Monument     by Elizabeth Bishop  (1911-1979)

     Now can you see the monument? It is of wood
     built somewhat like a box. No. Built
     like several boxes in descending sizes
     one above the other.
     Each is turned half-way round so that
     its corners point toward the sides
     of the one below and the angles alternate.  

To love, in perfect syllables

     While looking for Valentine verse with a math connection, I opened my copy of The Complete Illustrated Works of Lewis Carroll (Chancellor Press, 1982).  And found this one in which Carroll (a pen name for English mathematician Charles Lutwidge Dodson (1832-1898)) uses the word one twice and the word half twice and has counted sounds so that in each line the number of syllables is either a cube of an integer or is perfect.

        Lesson in Latin     by Lewis Carroll    (May 1888)   

Conversational mathematics

In recent weeks I have been experimenting with poems that use mathematical terminology, wondering whether -- since there are readers who are undaunted by unknown literary references (to Dante's Divine Comedy or Eliot's Prufrock, for example) -- some readers will relish a poem with unexplained mathematical connections.  In this vein I have offered "Love" (posted on on November 5) and now give the following poem, "Small Powers of Eleven are Palindromes":

Finding fault with a sphere . . .

     On November 9 I had the pleasure (hosted by Irina Mitrea and Maria Lorenz) of talking ("Thirteen Ways that Math and Poetry Connect") with the Math Club at Temple University and, on November 5, I visited Marion Cohen's "Mathematics in Literature" class at Arcadia University.  THANKS for these good times.

          This
          Fib
          poem
          says THANK-YOU
          to all those students
          from Arcadia and Temple 
          who participated in "math-poetry" with me --
          who held forth with sonnets, pantoums,
          squares, snowballs, and Fibs --
          poetry
          that rests
          on
          math.

      My Temple host, Irina Mitrea, and I share something else besides being women who love mathematics -- the Romanian poet, Nichita Stanescu (1933-83), is a favorite for both of us.  My October 23 posting ("On the Life of Ptolemy") offered one of Sean Cotter's recently published translations of poems by Stanescu and below I include more Stanescu-via-Cotter -- namely, two of the ten sections of "An Argument with Euclid."  These stanzas illustrate Stanescu at his best -- irreverently using mathematical terminology and expressing articulate anger at seen and unseen powers of oppression.

Poems of set paradox and spatial dimension

Universal Paradox     by Sandra DeLozier Coleman

     One gigantic set made of all that there is
     Boggles the mind with paradoxes.
     For it is greater than all, but smaller than this —
     The set which consists of the subsets of it.

Mathematics in poetry by Nichita Stanescu

     Though formerly a math professor, my recent teaching has involved poetry--and I have been fortunate to spend several summer months at Scoala Andrei Muresanu in Deva, Romania, teaching poetry and conversational English.       

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) -- The Circle of the Brain cannot be Squared

Margaret Cavendish (1623-73) was a writer who published under her own name at a time when most women published anonymously.  Her writing addressed a number of topics, including gender equity and scientific method.

Howard Nemerov's mathematical imagery

GETTING IT RIGHT IN LANGUAGE -- Poets and mathematicians alike are concerned with precise statement. Two-time US Poet Laureate Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) characterized poetry in a way that many mathematicians would likewise characterize their subject: POETRY is getting something right in language. Nemerov often used mathematical imagery in his poems. Here is a sample.