Art / Poem / Numbers (posted 7/14/13, then lost)

     Recently I discovered a typo in my posting on July 14, 2013 of "Poem 25" by Kurt Schwitters.  My attempt to fix my typo led to accidental deletion of that post and so, I offer again this diagram-poem.  The poem -- IS THIS REALLY A POEM? --  appears in Numerals: 1924 - 1977 -- gathered by Yale Professor of Art History Rainer Crone (1942-2016), published 1978 by the Yale University Art Gallery. 

Poem 25 (elementary)     by Kurt Schwitters, 1923

A final comment -- when I read this "poem" aloud, I like the sounds of the words!

A sonnet with numbers

     Sonnet: Now I see them    by Michael Palmer

          Now I see them sitting me before a mirror.
          There’s noise and laughter. Somebody
          mentions that hearing is silver
          before we move on to Table One
          with the random numbers. I look down
          a long street containing numbers.

"The Mathematician"

     Here is a selection from "The Mathematician," a long poem -- found in its entirety in The Rumpus -- by Oregon poet Carl Adamshick and recommended to me by poet R Joyce Heon  --  for a sample of her ekphrastic poems, follow this link and go to pages 37-42.  And this link leads to more poems (in this blog) starring mathematicians --- and a few of them are women!!

from   The Mathematician     by Carl Adamshick

What I do is calculate.
I’ve always seen the world as numbers,
buildings and trees factors,
math as a language better suited for explaining
how things work
than the formula of grammar.

Math is Brewing . . .

For one of my granddaughters who likes poems, I recently purchased If You're Not Here, Please Raise Your Hand:  Poems about School by Kalli Dakos (Aladdin Paperbacks, 1995).  It's hard to find school poems that are non-critical of math -- but this one, at least, has some rhyming fun while cooking it.

Math is Brewing and I'm in Trouble     by Kalli Dakos

       Numbers single,
       Numbers double,
       Math is brewing
       And I'm in trouble,

       If I could mix a magic brew,
       Numbers, I'd take care of you.

Things to Count On

Tomorrow is my mother's birthday.  Born in 1912, she has been gone for several years now -- and tomorrow my sons and I will travel to Indiana, Pennsylvania to visit her grave and the farmhouse where I grew up.  In honor of my mother, I post this poem (also posted on October 1, 2010) that enumerates ways that numbers were vital in my early life.

Things to Count On            by JoAnne Growney  

A portrait of TB in numbers

Poet Sarah Browning recently directed me to "Tuberculosis in Numbers," a fine poem by M. Brett Gaffney that appears in the latest issue of Rogue Agent.  The poem opens this way:

Tuberculosis in Numbers     by M. Brett Gaffney

        “In the past, we have been unable to get a true picture of the TB situation
        in Louisville due to the method of keeping statistics.” – Dr. Oscar O. Miller

Two weeks coughing when the mother’s only son
finds three bloody tissues—thinks of maple leaves.

Ten days at the sanatorium, four ribs taken. One father teaches
his boy how to wait by filling in crossword puzzles—
twelve across, seven letters: to eat or devour.  

The boy’s mother dies four months after his thirteenth birthday.
Tuesday morning at nine, it rains. His father smokes one cigarette, two.
Men come and take her body away. Under the sheet, ten toes.

One priest. Four lines of scripture. . . .

Gaffney's complete poem is available here.

The mathematician, she . . . .

     Tomorrow, March 8, is the International Day of the Woman -- and I celebrate the day with mixed feelings.  YES, there are many women I want to celebrate. BUT WHY are they not celebrated daily, equally with men? And a more specific concern, WHY, when the word "mathematician" is used, is the person assumed to be a man. (There is, on the other hand, a nice non-gendered neutrality in numbers -- as in this first stanza of "Numbers," by Mary Cornish, found below.)
      In this posting I celebrate Grace Brewster Murray Hopper (1906-1992) -- a mathematician with a doctorate from Yale, a navy admiral, a computer scientist who led in the development of COBOL, an early (c.1959) programming language.  A person I had the good fortune to meet when she visited Bloomsburg University in 1984 to receive an honorary Doctor of Science Degree.  Hopper was imaginative and articulate; here is some poetry found in her words.

                               If it's a 
                               good idea,
                               do it.  

The numbers say it all . . .

The title of my posting today, "The numbers say it all" comes from the final line of "After Leviticus," by Detroit poet Philip Levine.  Levine (1928-2015) died this past Saturday.  Often termed "a working class poet," this fine writer won many awards for his work. 

     After Leviticus     by Philip Levine

     The seventeen metal huts across the way
     from the great factory house seventeen
     separate families. Because the slag heaps
     burn all day and all night it’s never dark,
     so as you pick your way home at 2 A.M.
     on a Saturday morning near the end

Poetry from the words of Lord Kelvin

Do not imagine that mathematics 

is hard and crabbed, and repulsive 

to common sense. 

It is merely the etherealization

of common sense.

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. 

A poetry album by Lucille Clifton

March is Women's History Month and here, today, I celebrate by acknowledging a special woman, Lucille Clifton (1936-2010).  From 1979–1985 Clifton served as Poet Laureate of Maryland.  Her poetry celebrates both her African-American heritage and her womanhood.  Here is "album," a poem in Clifton's spare and un-capitalized style -- and containing a few numbers to help us keep track of the times that are changing.

album     by Lucille Clifton

Sociology of Numbers

Robert Dawson is a mathematics professor at St Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia -- an active mathematician who complements his research activity with mathematics education and with poetry. The following Dawson poem appeared here in 2013 -- in the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, a journal whose every issue contains some poetry-with-mathematics.

Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers     by Robert Dawson

The ones you notice first are the natural  numbers.
Everybody knows their names; they are the anchors,
the stars, the alphas, the reference points. And of course
the rational numbers, who hang out with them,
sit next to them in arithmetic class.

Six Million

       Sometimes numbers become labels for particular events.  When I was growing up, all of us knew 1492 as a label for the discovery of America.  And 1941 recognized Pearl Harbor.  The following selection from a poem by Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) reminds us of the awful importance of 6 million. 
       While mentioning this poem of witness and remembering, I want also to remind you of the very special Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness, to held in Washington, DC, March 27-30, 2014. (Early-bird registration ends on Valentine's Day, February 14th at midnight.)  Hope to see you there. 

Ah, you are a mathematician

Thanks to Arturo Sangalli of the Writer's Union of Canada -- and fellow-participant in a recent Banff creativity conference --  who reminded me of this poem.  And thanks to Bill Dunham who has spread it widely by including it in The Mathematical Universe  (Wiley, 1997).  These brief stanzas were written in the early 1990s  when many of us kept our financial facts in checkbooks rather than online; still current, however, is the mistaken image of mathematicians as those whose task it is to keep numbers clean and orderly.

          Misunderstanding     by JoAnne Growney

          Ah, you are a mathematician,
              they say with admiration
              or scorn.    

Iceland -- poetry, stones

British translator and editor David McDuff blogs at "Nordic Voices in Print" -- a site that he uses as "a way of making some of my translations of Nordic poetry and prose available online."  Here is "stones" -- the third of a group of ten poems he has posted by Icelandic poet Sjón.  This one involves a few numbers and I present it here as a math-poetry token of the fascinating land I am planning to visit: a five-day Iceland vacation adventure, traveling with my Eastern Village neighbors Priscilla and Glenn. 

stones     by Sjón (translated by David McDuff)

Algebra cadabra

It was my good fortune to meet Colette Inez back in the early 1990s when she was poet-in-residence at Bucknell University. Then, as now, I was collecting poems-with-mathematics, and I have long loved this poem that weaves figuring into forests.

Forest Children     by Colette Inez

We heard swifts feeding in air,
sparrows ruffling dusty feathers,
a tapping on stones, mud, snow, pulp
when rain came down, the hiss of fire.
Counting bird eggs in a dome of twigs,
we heard trees fall and learned
to name them on a page for school. 

A poem with two numbers

My friend Carol Ann Heckman has studied with Denise Levertov and feeds voraciously on her work.  For many years I have loved Levertov's "The Secret" and today, rereading an email from Carol Ann, I went looking for a mathy poem by this beloved poet.  I found the following -- with two numbers (and a hint of recursion):

     The Mockingbird of Mockingbirds     by Denise Levertov

     A greyish bird
     the size perhaps of two plump sparrows,
     fallen in some field,
     soon flattened, a dry
     mess of feathers--
     and no one knows
     this was a prince among his kind,
     virtuoso of virtuosos,
     lord of a thousand songs,
     debonair, elaborate in invention, fantasist,
     rival of nightingales.

This poem rests on my bookshelf in Levertov's collection, Breathing the Water (New Directions, 1987).

Counting on numbers

Alan Michael Parker's anthologized and highly regarded poem "Family Math" begins in the style of a typical word-problem from Algebra -- and continues with a weaving of the ways that numbers describe our lives.

Family Math     by Alan Michael Parker

I am more than half the age of my father,
who has lived more than twice as long
as his father, who died at thirty-six.

Balancing an Equation

     I grew up on a farm and spent my middle life in a small town and now live in a city.  A sort of immigrant.  A farm girl who became a professor.  A balancing act.
     Some years back, one of my math department colleagues posted on his office door a quote from George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) :   

     The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists 
     in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends 
     on the unreasonable man.

At one time I much agreed with the Shaw quote.  Now (perhaps because I am older or because I now live near to Washington, DC and contentious party politics) I am more admiring of balance than unreasonableness.  Here is a lovely poem by Caroline Caddy about balance and numbers. 

Mathematics and Mexican Food

Recently Rattle posted a wonderful mathy poem by Diana Rosen entitled "Mathematics and Molé." Here's the first stanza:

     Mathematics and Molé     by Diana Rosen

     Numbers flicker in front of my eyes as
     I give him my full attention.
     Differential geometry explains the black hole, he says.
     It’s very obvious.
     I lean forward to catch his words,
     my chin in cupped hand,
     eyes intent on his, yet
     thinking of Mexican food.

     Mathematics is the language of science, he says.
        . . .

Rozen's complete poem is here.