Last weekend I attended a very special event at Live Garra Theatre in Silver Spring -- an event featuring poetry and drama from ascending citizens -- described in the image below.
Friday, March 3, 2023
FREE MINDS write and share . . .
Thursday, July 1, 2021
Looking back . . . to previous posts . . .
BROWSE and ENJOY!
Back in January 2020 I gathered a list of titles of previous posts and posted it here at this link. And below I offer titles of postings -- with links -- since that time.
you are invited to explore the SEARCH feature in the right-hand column
OR to browse the list of Labels (also to the right) -- and click on ones that interest you.
Wednesday, March 3, 2021
Free Minds add, count . . . and . . .
Free Minds is an organization that uses books, creative writing, and peer support to awaken incarcerated and formerly incarcerated youths and adults to their own potential. Learn more here about this vital organization -- and reflect on this poem by a Free Minds member:
Today’s Mathematics by JO
30 minutes of chaos
Plus 1 Public Pretender
Plus 1 judge
Equals 39 years
16 years, with about 5 of those drug and alcohol-induced
Produces a very impressionable mind
Countless days filled with violence
Equals a whole lot of trauma
Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Moorish Science, History
Plus studying mysteries
Equals a solid understanding
Empathy plus suffering
Equals a road to redemption
I found the poem at this link; the Free Minds Book Club and Writing Workshop website posting also offers the opportunity for readers to make comments.
Monday, August 13, 2018
Speaking, understanding . . . where is truth?
Also in recent news, the death of Nobelist V. S. Naipaul (1932-2018) -- and here is one of this writer's thought-provoking statements:
Non-fiction can distort;
facts can be realigned.
But fiction never lies. V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River
My own thoughts about language most often focus on the condensed languages of mathematics and poetry -- and the need for frequent re-readings before understanding arrives. Here, below, I include a poem by Stephanie Strickland that speaks eloquently of the struggles in which our minds engage concerning objects and the symbols that represent them -- struggles that are involved in creating and reading both mathematics and poetry . . .
Striving All My Life by Stephanie Strickland
Maxwell said: There is no more powerful way
to introduce knowledge to the mind than … as many different
ways as we can, wrenching the mind
Thursday, February 15, 2018
Sonnet for Bolyai -- and translations
Hungarian poet Mihály Babits (1883-1941) wrote a sonnet about Bolyai. I learned of this sonnet and its English translation (by Paul Sohar and offered below) from Osmo Pekonen, a Finnish mathematician who is engaged in the project of collecting translations of Babits' sonnet into as many languages as possible. (The original Hungarian version -- along with a Spanish translation -- is available here.)
Those puny things have remained prisoners.
Thought, the hungry bird of prey fought the curse,
but never breached its diamond bars' embrace.