Worried about Climate Change

     When working with students in poetry workshops I often ask them to write to satisfy a constraint -- perhaps a Fib or a square poem -- in order to help them focus their thoughts.  This morning -- in the middle of a heat wave -- I focused my thoughts squarely on my growing concerns about climate.

       Steamy weather.  I count
       the degrees.  I count on
       air conditioning.  But
       my cooling system adds
       to global warming.  What
       is the right thing to do?

 Here is a link to previous postings in this blog that offer climate concerns.

Sum of moments

Here is a 3x3 square poem -- inspired by a recently-found margin-note I made in Differential and Integral Calculus (by Ross R Middlemiss) when it was my text for an introductory calculus course at Westminster College all those years ago:

          The sum of

          the moments

          is zero.

While the pages of text near the note go on with discussions and diagrams of slices and sums and limits -- they introduce the centroid, the moment of inertia, and the radius of gyration, and are importantly informative -- it is the margin-note that has today delighted me.  I wonder if the girl who wrote it saw it as I do today. I like the mystery.

Poems with Numbers

      Hats off to the organizers and presenters at the 2012 Split This Rock Poetry Festival held in DC this past weekend.  Great poets, great programs, fantastically good company all around!!!

      Saturday at the festival,  Denny Shaw and I led a panel-workshop, "Counting On," in which we encouraged poets to use numbers to illuminate their poems of witness and protest.  Our samples of vivid effects of numbers included:  "At Arlington" by Wiley Clements, "The Idea of Ancestry" by Etheridge Knight, "Numbers for the Week" by Joan Mazza, “On Ibrahim Balaban’s Painting ‘The Prison Gates’” by Nazim Hikmet, “The Stalin Epigram” by Osip Mandlestam, “Bosnia, Bosnia” by June Jordan, “The Terrorist:  He’s Watching” by Wislawa Szymborska, and “Four Five Six” by Rosemary Winslow.

     Poetry from our workshop participants will be posted here when it is gathered.  We focused on humanitarian and political concerns -- and used our workshop writing times to try for  poems that use numbers in their imagery.  Here are two samples from me (both syllable-squares).

     Our jails hold

     5 times more 

     blacks than whites.

Counting the women

     The stimulus for this posting appeared a few weeks ago in the Washington Post -- in an article that considers the loneliness of women in STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, math). 
     For me, it was never a conscious thing -- the counting.  It simply happened.  The numbers are small and you know, if you are a woman and a mathematician in a room full of mathematicians, how many women are in the room.  Any room.  It is a small counting number.  Sometimes it is 1. 

Best words in the best order

     Writers of mathematics strive for clear and careful wording, especially in the formulation of definitions. Well-specified definitions can enable theorems to be proved succinctly. For example, the relation "less than" (denoted <) for the positive integers {1,2,3,...} may be defined as follows:

     If  a  and  b  are integers, then 
               a < b  if  b - a  is a positive integer. 

     Although the simple definition of "less than" as "to the left of" in the list {1,2,3,...} is intuitively clear, the formal definition above is better suited for mathematical arguments. It defines "less than" in terms of the known term, "positive." This sort of sequencing of definitions is common in mathematics -- one may go on to define "greater than" in terms of "less than," and so on.
     Saying things in the best way is also a goal of poetry. Well known to many are these words of poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834): 

Symmetric 4 x 4 square

Martin Gardner (1914-2010) studied philosophy and was interested in everything.  For 25 years he wrote the "Mathematical Games" feature for Scientific American.  At Magic Dragon Multimedia, Jonathan Vos Post has collected many of the poems Gardner featured in his column over the years.  Here is a symmetric square poem from February, 1964.

            C U B E
            U G L Y
            B L U E
            E Y E S

5 x 5 and 6 x 6

Many poets have found the sonnet to be an ideal poetic form -- its iambic pentameter lines are like five heartbeats assembled in a single breath;  its fourteen lines are a good number for considering a matter carefully. My own frequent form is different -- not a sonnet but a square of some or another dimension.   Here are two of my recent syllable-squares.

     I squint with tension,
     puzzle over this:         
     dissatisfaction's
     itchy appetites
     are my happiness.

"M" is for Mathematics and . . .

Today's poem by Miroslav Holub (1923-98) is square, having 5 lines of 5 letters each; it describes the letter M by using what is "not M" -- a style of reasoning often used to good effect in both poetry and mathematics.        

Celebrate Constraints -- Happy Birthday, OULIPO

Patrick Bahls and Richard Chess of the University of North Carolina at Ashville have organized a "Conference on Constrained Poetry" to be held on November 19-20 in celebration of the 50th Anniversary of OULIPO (short for French: OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle), founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. The group defines the term littérature potentielle as (rough translation): "the seeking of new structures and patterns that may be used by writers in any way they enjoy." Constraints are used to trigger new ideas and the Oulipo group is an ongoing source of novel techniques, often based on mathematical ideas -- such as counting letters and syllables, substitution algorithms,  permutations, palindromes, and even chess problems.

Squares of Climate Concern

The square (with as many lines as syllables per line) is a poetry-form that has existed  for centuries and is now enjoying a revival.  Here are three small squares that come from my concerns for the precarious imbalances we humans have created within our natural environment. 

      There is no                           
      place to throw                     
      that's away.                          

From "Red Has No Reason" -- a poem about the nature of mathematics

My new poetry book, Red Has No Reason, is now available (from Plain View Press or amazon.com).  Several of the poems mention math--and one of them comments on the nature of mathematics.  Ideas for "A Taste of Mathematics" (below) came from a mathematics conference in San Antonio, TX (January 1993) where it was announced that the billionth digit in the decimal expansion of  π  is 9.  Recently an amazing  new calculation record of 5 trillion digits (claimed by Alexander J. Yee and Shigeru Kondo) has been announced.

Square comment on shoe styles

     Recently I have returned to Silver Spring from a trip to Latvia, traveling with a friend who was born there.  My effort to find poetry with mathematics there was stymied by the fact that little Latvian literature has been translated into English.   
     The Latvian capital, Riga, is a charming city--and its cobblestone streets do not deter women from wearing elegant tall-heeled shoes.  The sight of them reminded me of a little poem I wrote a few years ago--a square poem--which comments on this stylish sort of shoe (in which I've never been able to walk). 

A Square for Earth Day

Greetings on EARTH DAY.  Earth's inhabitants today pay a price not only for our own careless habits but also for earlier ignorance about the fragility of our world. (As Garrett Hardin has said, "There is no away to throw to.")  The April 20 edition of  the Washington Post had an AP article about the risks of trash to wildlife in the Atlantic that provoked me to write the following square poem.

April: along with baseball we celebrate poetry and mathematics

Is it coincidence or design that

     April  is  National Poetry Month
            
           and

   April  is  Mathematics Awareness Month
          (This year's theme is  "mathematics and sports")

In my own reading, baseball is the sport for which I have found the most poetry.