A poem with 90 lines, 269 words . . .

     A poet whose work I enjoy is Charles Bernstein  (editor at the electronic poetry center,  a vast and wonderful site to visit and browse)-- and one of my neighbors recently surprised me with a link to a new-to-me Bernstein poem, "Thank You for Saying Thank You," that he had found (audio at Poets.org).  Below I offer an excerpt -- and a link to the text of the complete poem.  And, because I first misunderstood and thought that my neighbor had heard the poem on NPR, I went to NPR.org and found this wonderful treasury of poems and commentary.  

My Math Teacher

     The 2016-2017 school year is drawing to a close.  Some are loving their math teachers and some are celebrating them with poetry.  Here are the opening stanzas of a poem by Mia Pratt about her teacher -- the complete poem is found at here (at PoetrySoup.com).

     My Math Teacher     by Mia Pratt

     My math teacher was such a colorful character
     she was the queen of Mathematics at our school
     she loved linear regressions and probability
     and permutations and combinations too!

     My math teacher loved to
     entertain us with her Listerine coated smile
     and her heart as pure
     as the golden sand on Small Hope Bay
     she loved making calculus and matrices fun for us
     while March 14th was her second Christmas
     and grading our exams was her New Year's Day!
              . . .

Poet and novelist John Updike (1932-2009) was a math teacher's son  -- here is a link to his sonnet, "Midpoint," about his father.  Additional poems about teachers may be found using the blog SEARCH.

"Mathematics" & "Poetry" in the same sentence!

Thanks to Google for helping me find things -- for example, this quote from Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun :

     Poetry is a form of mathematics,
               a highly rigorous relationship with words.

And this quote from American poet Carl Sandburg (1872-1962):

     Poetry is a mystic, sensuous mathematics of fire, smoke-stacks, 
               waffles, pansies, people, and purple sunsets. 

For more about Jelloun, here is a Wikipedia link.  

This link leads to my 2012 posting of Sandburg's poem, "Number Man."

Solve for X . . . and understand . . .

     In this morning's email, today's Poem-a-Day from poets.org has the mathy title, "Solve for X." Written by Oliver de la Paz  -- born in the Philippines and raised in Ontario, Oregon -- and teaching at the College of the Holy Cross, de la Paz introduces "Solve for X" with these words: 

“‘Solve for X’ is part of a sequence of poems about my son who’s on the autistic spectrum. I’ve been attempting to understand the way he perceives the world and I’ve been using cause and effect models as poetic templates. Word problems requiring the mathematician to solve for an unknown, thus, have become a metaphor for how we negotiate our relationship as father and son.”

Please go here to read (or to listen to) de la Paz's poem about trying to understand the unknown.

Links to poems and songs with STEM themes

     During April 2017, Indiana State Poet Laureate Shari Wagner teamed with Indiana Humanities to feature the work of Hoosier poets to celebrate April as National Poetry Month.  This humanities website posts a poem each day and in honor of  Quantum Leap -- a Humanities program focused on bringing together STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) and the Humanities - the poem featured each Monday in April had a STEM-related theme.

Using SONGS to teach STEM -- online conference

     A recent email from Greg Crowther has let me know of an upcoming conference that looks to be LOTS OF FUN -- an interdisciplinary virtual conference on the use of song in teaching STEM subjects.  The conference is "VOICES: Virtual Ongoing Interdisciplinary Conferences on Educating with Song"  -- the dates are Sept. 27-28, 2017, the conference is entirely online, the registration cost is $10.  Early registration is encouraged to allow time for preparation and submission of presentation proposals.

     Song lyrics often are poetry and in this blog we have included lyrics on a variety of occasions.  Here are links to several lyrics featured herein.
          "The Derivative Song" by Tom Lehrer,
           Lines from "Mandlebrot Set" by Jonathan Coulton,
          "Circle Song" and lines from "Hotel Infinity"  by Larry Lesser (who is one of the featured VOICES speakers),
          "Questions You Can't Ever Decide" and two others by Bill Calhoun.

Save the Climate, change STEM to STEAM

     Australian poet Erica Jolly is one of the leaders of the STEM to STEAM movement in Australia -- she has introduced me to The Conversation, and, in it, this interesting and relevant article, "Did Artists Lead the Way in Mathematics?"
     For many years a secondary school teacher in South Australia, Jolly has written Challenging the Divide:  Approaches to Science and Poetry (Lythrum Press, 2010) -- a book that is rich with citations and arguments for integrating the arts and the sciences -- and includes a variety of poems.  Also rich with math-science content is Jolly's poetry collection, Making a Stand (Wakefield Press, 2015).
     And here is one of Jolly's recent poems -- sent to me with this comment:   Here's a poem - it deals with numbers in my way. Someone can do the multiplication.   Best wishes  Erica

A Significant Cabinet Change by the Prime Minister
in this New Coalition Government                           by Erica Jolly

And reading “Lab Girl: A story of trees, science and love”
by Hope Jahren, published by Fleet, in the UK, 2016.
Professor Jahren was named in 2005 as one of the
“Brilliant 10” young scientists. Geobiology is
her area of study and she is now a tenured
Professor at the University of Hawai’i.   

Speaking out for Immigrants, McNish

        British spoken-word poet Hollie McNish has shouted out in verse in support of  immigration.  Her poem, from which I include some lines below, is entitled "Mathematics" and a video of McNish performing the poem is available here at the poet's webpage.  Thanks, Hollie McNish, for making important noise on this important issue.

from   Mathematics     by Hollie McNish
            . . .
       Man
       I am sick of crappy mathematics
       Cos I love a bit of sums
       I spent three years into economics 
       And I geek out over calculus    

March for Climate -- again!

       The lines below are copied from a posting made on September 20, 2014 -- posted as I finalized plans to travel to New York City for a climate march.  From that March I saw some positive action BUT I am grieving over the changes in the last 100 days.

     To have a small carbon footprint I will march tomorrow with only a small sign -- one that wears a 3x3-square reminder that dates back to a 1968 essay, "Tragedy of the Commons,"  by ecologist Garrett Hardin (1915-2003). 

       There   is   no
       place to throw
       that ' s   away.

WHY is it taking us so long to act to preserve a habitable planet?  Do we not care about the world we are leaving for our grandchildren?

Math-Arts Journal -- Free Access

     Sometimes an email contains a wonderful gift -- such was the case recently when I got a message from the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts giving me access AT THIS LINK to a generous collection of outstanding articles from the 10-year history of this important publication.  One of the articles relates to poetry:  Niccolò Tartaglia's poetic solution to the cubic equation, by Arielle Saiber of Bowdoin College in Maine.
     The collection of free articles notes this history of JMA:  "The journal took shape following a meeting arranged by the late Reza Sarhangi at the 2005 Bridges [Math-Arts] Conference, where Kate Watt from Taylor & Francis met with a group of interested conference participants. Following a group proposal led by Gary Greenfield, the journal launched in 2007 with Gary as editor for the first five volumes. Craig S Kaplan then took over as editor in 2012, until he handed the reins to current editor Mara Alagic at the beginning of 2017.  BIG THANKS to all of you for this noteworthy journal!

Here, from Saiber's article, are a few lines from 
          Veronica Gavagna's translation of Tartaglia's Quando chel cubo:

Poetry and Science -- Allies in Discovery

     Poet Jane Hirshfield read onstage as part of the March for Science in Washington, DC on Saturday April 22.   Science and poetry both arise from the same desire for exploration, Hirshfield opined.  “If you don’t think at all, you think of them as opposites,” she said. “They are allies in discovery.”
     Hirshfield's staged poem, "On the 5th Day," appeared in the Washington Post a few days before the march.    Here are its opening stanzas (visit the Post link for the complete work.)
 
       On the Fifth Day     by Jane Hirshfield

       On the fifth day
       the scientists who studied the rivers
       were forbidden to speak
       or to study the rivers.

       The scientists who studied the air
       were told not to speak of the air,    

Remembering Karl Patten

     From my Lewisburg, PA friend, Ruta Karelis, I have recently learned of the April 16  death of my beloved first poetry teacher, Bucknell professor and poet, Karl Patten (1927-2017).  Karl's oft-repeated phrase (and poem title) "Every Thing Connects"  -- found on my shelf in The Impossible Reaches (Dorcas Press, 1992) -- is on my mind daily.  Another poem from that collection -- "The Play" -- I am reading and rereading today, remembering the poet.  Here it is, from Karl Patten, for you.

The Play     by Karl Patten

You're tired?  I'm tired too.  Let's forget we're people, forget all that.

You be a horizon, infinite, flat, a forever-place,
I'll be double, gray-blue ocean, gray-blue sky, touching you, just. 

Poetry by Victorian Scientists

     Thanks to Greg Coxson who has recently alerted me to this 2011 article by Paul Collins in New Scientist, "Rhyme and reason: The Victorian poet scientists."  In the article, Collins is reviewing an anthology edited by Daniel Brown entitled The Poetry of Victorian Scientists: Style, Science and Nonsense (Cambridge University Press, Reprint-2015).
     The article has links to poetry by James Clerk Maxwell (1831-1879), William J. Macquorn Rankine (1820-1872), and James Joseph Sylvester (1814-1897).  Below I offer two of the eight entertaining stanzas from Rankine's poem, "The Mathematician in Love." (This poem and Maxwell's "A Lecture on Thomson's Galvanometer" also appear in the wonderful anthology that Sarah Glaz and I edited -- Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters/CRC Press, 2008, now available as an e-book.)

from  The Mathematician in Love     by William J Macquorn Rankine  

A Fib for Easter

     Recently a reader commented privately to me that she did not like the Fib as a poem-style since it seems to allow almost any prose statement to be formed into a poem.  My opposite reaction to her comment stems, in part, from my use of the Fib with workshop students -- many of them join me with delight at the way the Fib syllable-count format has guided them to pleasing word-selections.  
     As Easter approaches, my thoughts have been shaped into these lines:

          Soon
          comes
          Easter,
          holiday
          to celebrate spring's
          victory of life over death.