Mathews retells Dowland (with permutations)

 In my post for 6 September 2013 I presented Oulipian Harry Mathews' poem "Multiple Choice" -- a poem whose alternative story lines might be represented by a tree diagram.  That poem was but one of 29 variations (or "Exercises in Style") by Harry Mathews as he retold again and again a tale first offered by lute-player and composer John Dowland (1563-1626), a musician whose work still finds audience today.   Here is Dowland's tale, from which Mathews created 29 alternative versions.  (See "Trial Impressions" in Armenian Papers, Poems 1954-1984 (Princeton University Press, 1987, out of print) and in A Mid-Season Sky:  Poems 1953-1991 (Carcanet, 1992).) 

Split This Rock 2014

     Plan now to attend the 4th national biennial Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation & Witness in Washington, DC, March 27-30, 2014.  The sixteen poets to be featured at the 2014 festival are:  Sheila Black, Franny Choi, Eduardo C. Corral, Gayle Danley, Natalie Diaz, Joy Harjo, Maria Melendez Kelson, Yusef Komunyakaa, Dunya Mikhail, Shailja Patel, Wang Ping, Claudia Rankine, Tim Seibles, Myra Sklarew, Danez Smith, and Anne Waldman.   The website SplitThisRock.org offers photographs and more information about the festival.  It will be awesome!  

Measuring the World . . .

     Yesterday afternoon, at the Goethe Institut in Washington DC, I saw a wonderful film, "Measuring the World." Based on a popular 2005 novel by Daniel Kehlmann, the story of a friendship between preeminent German mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855) and Prussian naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859).  The film offers a delightful interplay of personalities and ideas as it darts between the explorations of these two men -- one digging inside his head for mathematics and the other traveling over mountains, through jungles, across oceans. 

Sonnet -- To Science

Edgar Allan Poe's "Sonnet -- To Science" was the "Poem-A-Day" selection of poets.org last week on September 29.  The poem is in the public domain and I offer it to you below. As Poe speaks of science I wonder whether -- if he had not announced his subject -- we might as easily imagine he is speaking of poetry. 

Splendid Wake project

On Wednesday, September 25, more than one hundred poets met at the George Washington University Gelman Library's Special Collection Conference Room to show support for the Splendid Wake project -- an effort to document poetry in the Washington, DC area from 1900 forward. Initiated more than a year ago by Myra Sklarew and Elisavietta Ritchie, the project will honor poets associated with our nation's capital.  Interested persons are invited to visit the project's main page and to consider a submission -- biographies and information about poetry projects of all sorts (journals, reading series, websites, and so on).  Management of the project is being coordinated by GW Special Collections Librarian Jennifer King (jenking @ gwu.edu).
     In celebration of this project, here is "Monuments," a sestina (a poetic form involving permutations of the line-end-words) by Myra Sklarew that honors some of DC's past poets.

Averaging . . . geometry of the center

Perhaps partly due to his experience as an Air Force pilot during World War II,  Harold Nemerov (1920 - 1991) uses geometry with deft precision as he describes phenomena around him.  Here is a poem inspired by a 1986 news item.

Found Poem     by Howard Nemerov 

           after information received in The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 4 v 86

The population center of the USA
Has shifted to Potosi, in Missouri.

The calculation employed by authorities
In arriving at this dislocation assumes

That the country is a geometric plane,
Perfectly flat, and that every citizen,

A poet re-envisions space

University of Pennsylvania professor Robert Ghrist, in his September 19 lecture ("Putting Topology to Work") at the MAA's Carriage House, credited poet John Milton (1608-1674) with the first use of the word space as an abstract entity -- and, Ghrist asserted, by so doing, Milton opened a door to the study of abstract space (known in mathematics as topology).

The following material is a 24 September correction

from my 23 September posting.  For I discovered -- in a thoughtful email from Ghrist --

that the proper citation of "space" was not from line 50 of Book 1 but from line 89 of Book 7.  

(I invite you go to Project Gutenberg for Paradise Lost in its entirety.)

Here, below, I have replaced my original posting of  lines 44-74 of Book 1 

with lines 80 - 97 of Book 7 --  lines taken from my shelf copy of Milton's Paradise Lost,

 the 1968 Signet Classic Edition, edited by Christopher Ricks.

In the selection below and throughout his epic, Milton replaces past visions of hell down-in-the-earth and heaven up-in-the-sky with more complex and abstract configurations.

BRIDGES poems, from 17 poets

Due to the hard work of mathematician-poet Sarah Glaz, poetry has been an important part of recent BRIDGES-Math-Art Conferences. And, under her editing, a Bridges 2013 Poetry Anthology has been released, featuring poetry from these poets who participated in one or more of the three most recent BRIDGES conferences (Enschede, Netherlands, 2013; Towson, Maryland, 2012; Coimbra, Portugal, 2011). 

Perfect circle, Haiku

          Perfect circle round
               the moon
          In the center of the sky

by Jack Kerouac (1922-1969), from Book of Haikus  (Penguin, 2003).  Thanks, Francisco.

PS.  If Kerouac were a mathematician he'd have noticed that "perfect" is implied by the definition of "circle" and is unnecessary.  But Kerouac was a poet and he saw a different necessity.

Consider Pascal

     Mathematician Blaise Pascal (France, 1623-1662) is known for his explorations with computing machines, for his ideas concerning probabilities, for trying to make rational a decision to believe in God and eternal life, for his explorations of the cycloid and the limacon (curves generated by rolling circles) and a host of other topics.
     I was introduced to Melbourne poet, novelist, and mathematician (he teaches at Victoria University of Technology), Tom Petsinis by South-African editor of Poetry-International, Liesl Jobson.  Here from Petsinis' collection, Naming the Number (Penguin, 1998) is "Pascal's Tooth," (a poem also available at the Poetry-International site).  In the grip of severe pain, Petsinis ponders the ideas of Pascal.  

Kaplansky sings Kaplansky (and Pi)

     I first knew of mathematician Irving Kaplansky (1917-2006) through his monograph, Infinite Abelian Groups -- it was one of my texts for a graduate seminar (with Gene Levy) at the University of Oklahoma in the 1960s.  Later I knew Kaplansky as a songwriter, author of new lyrics for "That's Entertainment."  Kaplansky's adaptation, "That's Mathematics," dedicated to his former student, math-musician-songwriter Tom Lehrer, and to his daughter, singer Lucy Kaplansky, is given below.
      In 1999, in Science News, writer Ivars Peterson (now Director of Publications for the MAA -- Mathematical Association of America) wrote an article about Kaplansky's songwriting in which he mentions  his daughter, Lucy Kaplansky, a singer who frequently performs her father's songs.  A YouTube recording of Lucy singing "The Song of Pi" (in which there is a correspondence between musical notes and the first fourteen digits of pi) is available here.  (Lyrics for "The Song of  Pi" and information about the correspondence are available in Peterson's article.)