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.)

Nature poems -- at Stillwater

     As noted in my 5 August posting, the Stillwater poetry festival (organized by Kevin Clark) was scheduled for last Saturday, September 7 -- and I was (though delayed by the death of a car battery) able to attend.  A time to catch up with old friends -- River Poets Dave Barsky, Carol Ann Heckman, and Janet Locke, and Wilkes-Barre poet Richard Aston.  Poets and musicians featured at the festival included Lester Hirsh, Pamela Kavanaugh, James Pingry, Doug McMinn, Jack Troy, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, and Sheryl St. Germain. 
     The theme at Stillwater was Nature/Agriculture and my 5 August post included poems from conference organizer Clark and featured reader Kasdorf -- poems that involved both nature and mathematics.  Although found in Kasdorf's opening poem, "Double the Digits," mathematics was scarce.  Sheryl St. Germain, the final reader (currently a Pittsburgher, transplanted from New Orleans) briefly mentions computation and measurement in her "Hurricane Season ."   The full poem is available through St Germain's website; here is one of its stanzas. 

Mathematical structure and Multiple choice

     A sonnet repeats the iambic rhythm of the heart beat (da-DUM, da-DUM, . . .) with a line length corresponding to a typical breath (5 heartbeats); it thus seems easy to internalize the numerical structure that guides such a poem. 
     A decision tree offers a very different choice of mathematical structure for a poem -- displaying for a reader different choices among stanzas.  Originally proposed to the OULIPO by founder Francois Le Lionnais, and referred to as a multiple-choice narrative, such a structure allows readers of a poem to choose among subsequent events. Instead of reading the poem vertically, we may jump about, choosing the sequence we want to read.

Poetry-with-math in Baltimore -- 17 Jan 2014

At the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Baltimore (January 15-18, 2014), the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics (under the leadership of editors Mark Huber and Gizem Karaali) will sponsor a poetry reading.  Mark your calendar now! (And be sure to scroll down past the reading announcement to poems from last year's JHM reading in San Diego by poets Katie Manning and Karen Morgan Ivy.)

 Friday,  January 17, 2014. 4:30 - 6:30 PM

 Room 308  Baltimore Convention Center  

A square-root of dead weight . . .

     A poet  I love (Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013, 1995 Nobelist) has died. The NYTimes obituary for Heaney quotes one of my favorites of his poems, "Digging" -- also available at poetryfoundation.org.  Part of what I like about this Irishman's poetry is its design.  Not only do his poems offer musicality of language but they feel carefully constructed -- modeling real world phenomena as mathematical models do -- built with careful attention to structure and detail until varied factors have been erected into in integrated whole.  "Digging" ties together the physical activity of Heaney's father shoveling in the peat bogs of Ireland to his own probing with a pen for words. 

Poetry in a math text

     In the 1980s, all students at Bloomsburg University were required to take at least one mathematics course and I worked with colleagues to develop a suitable offering -- one that did not require expertise in algebra but which emphasized problem-solving.  Our course became "Mathematical Thinking" -- and I began to develop suitable materials -- eventually writing and publishing Mathematics in Daily Life:  Making Decisions and Solving Problems (McGraw-Hill, 1986).  Each of the twenty-two chapters of this textbook is introduced with a relevant quote.  Chapter 11, "Visualizing the Structure of Information with a Tree Diagram," opens with two lines by one of my favorite poets, Theodore Roethke:

               Once upon a tree              
               I came across a time.

Celebrating a math-woman

I am continually searching for poems that feature past and current math-women.
When you find one (or create one) I will be glad to have you send it along.

The lunar crater L Herschel is named for astronomer Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848) -- and I have celebrated this math-woman earlier with two fine poems:  "Letter from Caroline Herschel" by Siv Cedering , and "Planetarium" by Adrienne Rich.  Now Herschel is the focus of a forthcoming book by poet Laura Long, The Eye of Caroline Herschel: A Life in Poems, (Finishing Line Press, 2013).  Here, from that collection, is "The Taste of Mathematics:  Caroline Herschel at 31" -- this poem also appears, along with a note about the full collection, in the July 2013 issue of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics.  

Out of 100 -- in the Klondike Gold Rush

Adding to my recent post on 19 August I note that OEDILF is seeking submissions.   
Join the project:  submit limerick definitions of  (math)  terms for OEDILF consideration.

One of my favorite poets is the 1996 Nobelist Wislawa Szymborska (1923 - 2012, Poland); one of my favorites of her poems is "A Contribution to Statistics."  Szymborska's poem served as a model for a poem of mine shown below, about Gold Rush Days in Skagway, Alaska.  Written while I was poet-in-residence at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, (in Skagway), this poem draws on historical data from the park's library to paint a bleak picture of wealth and survival in those gold-mad days.  

Counting in the Klondike     by JoAnne Growney
   
                        after Wisława Szymborska

Of 100 who left Seattle for Skagway in 1898
40 made it to the gold fields
8 found gold.    

OEDILF - the Limerick Dictionary

     At this site  Editor-in-Chief Chris Strolin is coordinating development of OEDILF: The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form.  So far, definitions are available (and being submitted) for terms beginning with letter-pairs Aa - Fd -- and completion of the dictionary is predicted at the OEDILF website for 2043.
     I have mentioned OEDILF before -- on 5 December 2012 and 29 March 2010. And today I offer a draft limerick about "factors" -- I am at this point, however, dissatisfied with my use of the plural rather than simply "factor."  More work needed.

Pushkin inspires Seth -- novels in verse

      My enjoyment of novels in verse began to thrive when a friend and I determined to get into Vikram's Seth's The Golden Gate (Random House, 1986) by taking turns reading its sonnets aloud to each other. After several dozen aloud, I could hear the voice even when I read silently and I went on to finish alone. And I loved it. I have gone on to enjoy several more works by Seth -- none of them poems but all wonderful stories, well told.
      Seth has said that he was moved to write by the novel Alexander Pushkin's verse novel Eugene Onegin noted here on 10 August 2013 -- a novel of interest to mathematicians because of its link to Markov Chains. Seth's novel (reviewed here) also was made into an opera. These first two stanzas -- each containing the numbers 26 and 1980 -- introduce the novel's computer-guy, John:

Emily Dickinson

     Although I do not consider any of Emily Dickinson's poems "mathematical," I find that she does not shy from using the terminology of mathematics. For example, her repetition of the word "circumference" noted in an earlier posting.  (To search this blog for mentions of Dickinson (1830 - 1886) or any other poet or topic, follow the instructions offered in green in the column to the right.)
     Dickinson is on my mind these recent days following my opportunity last Saturday evening to attend a session of a conference held by the Emily Dickinson International Society.  A gracious invitation by Martha Nell Smith enabled me to attend a program that featured two long-time friends, actor Laurie McCants of the Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, performing a scene from her one-woman show, Industrious Angels, and Stephanie Strickland, a New York poet who, along with collaborator Nick Montfort, offered background and performance for Sea and Spar Between, a poetry generator that works with language patterns for these two writers.

Pushkin poetry, Markov chains

A Markov chain is a mathematical process that can be used to answer questions such as these:
          If the current letter I am reading is a vowel, what is the probability 
          that the next letter will be a vowel?  A consonant? 
Answers from these may be combined to create more lengthy predictions -- about the 3rd letter after a given one, or the 10th -- and so on. 
     A recent article by Brian Hayes in American Scientist (brought to my attention by Greg Coxson) alerted me to the fact that it is 100 years since the Russian mathematician A. A. Markov (1856 - 1922) announced his findings about these transition probabilities -- and, moreover, his work was based on analysis of poetry; the poetry was Eugene Onegin, a verse-novel in iambic tetrameter by Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837). Markov's analyis dealt with Pushkin's novel as a long string of alphabetic characters and he tabulated the categories of vowels and consonants for about 20,000 letters. (For a host of details, visit Hayes' careful and interesting article.)

Feynman Point poems

The Feynman Point is a sequence of six 9s that occurs in the decimal expansion of π -- these 9s are found in positions 762 - 767 following the decimal point.  When writing in Pilish (using word-lengths that correspond to digits of π), the Feynman Point offers a particular challenge since 9-letter words are infrequent.  I learned about the Feynman Point here.  AND I found a splendid database that makes the difficult task of choosing 6 9-letter words easily doable.   Here is my first Feynman Point poem:
 
      Scratchers sleepwalk --
      seriously screening sentences,
      slantwise.

Mike Keith's Pilish short story, Cadeic Cadenza, has this Feynman Point: 

Poetry on Back Roads -- Stillwater Festival

     On Saturday, September 7, a poetry festival will happen in Stillwater, PA (a small town not far from Bloomsburg where I lived and professored for many years).  From noon to 9 at the Stillwater Memorial Park (63 McHenry Street (Rt 487) Stillwater, PA), organized by Kevin Clark, held in a revival-style tent, the the reading will have nature and agriculture as its theme -- and featured poets will include Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Sheryl St Germain, and Jack Troy.  (And there will be two open mic sessions.)
     Offered below are two poems by festival participants -- these are poems of numbers and travels (and more):  "Double the Digits" by Penn State poet, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, and "Tag Clouds," by Stillwater festival organizer, Kevin Clark (contact using StillwaterPoetry-at-yahoo-dot-com). 

Nursery Rhyme Mathematics

During the last week of July I was in California, vacationing with family (including six of my grandchildren).  Most of these kids have grown past a fascination with nursery rhymes, but I still like them -- and think it's likely that memorization of rhymes helps with learning to read and count. 

Here is one of my favorites, "A Diller, a Dollar."

Number personalities

In his collection, Zero, Scottish poet Brian McCabe raises questions about numerical classifications.  He begins "The Fifth Season" with "Everyone talks of the four / -- none speak of the fifth." Another poem, "The Seventh Sense, " moves from a similar beginning " . . . none speak of the seventh" into a dreamy apprehension of the magical possibilities of items not yet classified. The following selection from Zero, "Triskaidekaphobia," offers remedies for the fear of bad luck brought by 13. 

Another 17-word Haiku

If a poet uses only one-syllable words, the resulting Haiku is a bit longer than usual -- as in this Haiku in which the word lengths also follow an increase/decrease pattern, 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1: 

I am the girl voice.
Drafts scribed -- thoughts stretched, smoothed, squared, sighed --
catch here now my I.

I have offered other 17-word Haiku in these postings -- 27 June 2013 and 16 July 2013 -- and the latter of these is my entry into the Haiku-to Mars contest.  To vote for that Haiku to be one of three sent to Mars by NASA on the Maven spacecraft next November, click here.  (Voting ends July 29.)