Canadian poet Madhur Anand is also an Environmental Scientist; her love of nature and concerns for preserving a habitable climate pervade her work -- and she also scatters throughout it some mathematics. You can imagine my delight when I found in her new collection (A New Index for Predicting Catastrophes) a poem (included below) that features the identity matrix. Read on!
No Two Things Can Be More Equal by Madhur Anand
In undergrad I learned about the identity
matrix. Ones on the main diagonal and zeros
elsewhere. Anything multiplied by it is itself.
Showing posts with label lines. Show all posts
Showing posts with label lines. Show all posts
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Homage to Euclid
In my preceding post (20 March 2014) Katharine Merow's poem tells of the new geometries
developed with variations of Euclid's Parallel Postulate.
Martin Dickinson's poem, on the other hand, tells of richness within Euclid's geometry.
Homage to Euclid by Martin Dickinson
What points are these,
visible to us, yet revealing something invisible—
invisible, yet real?
Labels:
apple,
circle,
Euclid,
infinity,
Innisfree,
lines,
Martin Dickinson,
math,
Nora School,
oblong,
parallelogram,
poetry,
points,
postulates,
rhomboid,
space,
sphere
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Latitude, longitude, and inauguration
Elizabeth Bodien now lives in a rural area in eastern Pennsylvania -- settling there after other lives in California, in Japan, in West Africa. Here is a narrative poem using the geographic numbers of latitude and longitude drawn from the years that she was a childbirth instructor in West Africa.
Zero-Zero by Elizabeth Bodien
Zero-Zero by Elizabeth Bodien
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
Word Play -- "Of Time and the Line"
Charles Bernstein, poet and teacher, experiments with poetry and prefers "opaque" and "impermeable" writing -- to awaken readers "from the hypnosis of absorption." In the poem below he does, as mathematicians also do, multiplies ideas by playing with them -- here using "line."
Of Time and the Line by Charles Bernstein
George Burns likes to insist that he always
takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
is a way of leaving space between the
lines for a laugh. He weaves lines together
by means of a picaresque narrative;
Of Time and the Line by Charles Bernstein
George Burns likes to insist that he always
takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
is a way of leaving space between the
lines for a laugh. He weaves lines together
by means of a picaresque narrative;
Labels:
angle,
Charles Bernstein,
line,
lines,
math,
poem,
postmodern,
word play
Friday, October 26, 2012
Geometry of Trees
Donna Masini, one of my poetry teachers at Hunter College, offered this rule of thumb for use of a particular word in a poem: the word should serve the poem in (at least) two ways -- in meaning and sound, or sound and motion, or motion and image, or . .. .
Richard Wilbur (1921 - ) is a former US Poet Laureate (1987-88), a prolific translator, and one of my favorite poets -- and perhaps this is because he seems to maximize his word-choices with multiple uses. When I read Wilbur, I see and hear and feel -- and, after multiple readings, these sensory impressions coalesce into understanding. Here is one of his sonnets, a poem of the geometry of absence:
Richard Wilbur (1921 - ) is a former US Poet Laureate (1987-88), a prolific translator, and one of my favorite poets -- and perhaps this is because he seems to maximize his word-choices with multiple uses. When I read Wilbur, I see and hear and feel -- and, after multiple readings, these sensory impressions coalesce into understanding. Here is one of his sonnets, a poem of the geometry of absence:
Labels:
Donna Masini,
Geometries,
Hunter College,
lines,
multiple meanings,
parallel,
Richard Wilbur,
sonnet,
square
Saturday, November 20, 2010
More from Guillevic
My October 13 post presented three small poems by the French poet Guillevic (1909-97). Strongly drawn to his work, I have purchased the collection Geometries (translated by Richard Sieburth, Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010); Guillevic has found in each geometric figure a personality and a voice. Buy the book and enjoy!
Here are three additional samples from Geometries:
Here are three additional samples from Geometries:
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