Wednesday, April 13, 2016
"The Giraffe" -- a poem for my pocket
The Giraffe by Ron Padgett
The 2 f's
in giraffe
are like
2 giraffes
running through
the word giraffe
The 2 f's
run through giraffe
like 2 giraffes.
Monday, April 27, 2020
National Poem-in-your-Pocket Day -- April 30, 2020
Keep a poem in your pocket
and a picture in your head
and you'll never feel lonely
at night when you're in bed.
This year's Poem-in-your-Pocket Day will be celebrated on Thursday, April 30. Here is a link to "Counting and Math Rhymes" -- a website that offers a variety of choices for young people's pockets. My own pocket -- and my mind, during these days of pandemic confusion -- will be holding lines from Carl Sandburg's "Arithmetic":
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
Poem-in-your-Pocket Day -- April 29, 2022
The following stanza by award-winning children's author, Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, (1914-2000), has led to an annual celebration in US schools of "Poem-in-your-Pocket" Day:
Keep a poem in your pocket
and a picture in your head
and you'll never feel lonely
at night when you're in bed.
The poetry that is in my my pocket is the opening stanza of "The Waking" by Theodore Roethke (1908-1963). As this previous posting indicates, Roethke's poem has not always been a favorite, but now -- as I stumble toward the later years of my life -- I cherish what it awakens in me and its first stanza (offered below) belongs in my pocket!
I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go.
Roethke's entire poem, with comments, is found here in this 2018 blog posting. And this link leads to a response to "The Waking" that I wrote-- entitled "Running."
Wednesday, April 29, 2015
A poem for your pocket
Hughes' poem "Addition" is found in Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics (A K Peters, 2008) and was first posted in this blog, along with other poems linked to Black History Month on February 20, 2011.
Thursday, April 26, 2018
A Poem for My Pocket
The Great Figure by William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.
Friday, April 19, 2013
A poem for your pocket
14 Syllables by JoAnne Growney
A hen lays eggs
one by one;
the way you
count life
is life.
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.
Monday, April 3, 2017
Math-Stat Awareness Month -- find a poem!
AND
National Poetry Month!
Celebrate with a MATHY POEM, found here in this blog! Scroll down!
Mar 28 Split this Rock, Freedom Plow Award, April 21
Mar 27 Math-themed poems at Poets.org
Mar 23 Remember Emmy Noether!
Tuesday, January 3, 2017
December 2016 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 31 Happy New Year! -- Resolve to REWARD WOMEN!
Dec 27 Celebrate Vera Rubin -- a WOMAN of science!
Dec 26 Post-Christmas reflections from W. H. Auden
Dec 19 Numbers for Christmas . . .
Dec 15 Remembering Thomas Schelling (1921-2016)
Dec 12 When one isn't enough ... words from a Cuban poet
Tuesday, January 16, 2018
Blog history -- title, links for previous posts . . .
Scroll through the titles below, browsing to find items of interest
among the more-than-nine-hundred postings since March 2010
OR
Click on any label -- a list is found in the right-hand column below the author profile
OR
Enter term(s) in the SEARCH box -- and find all posts containing those terms.
For example, here is a link to the results of a SEARCH using math women
And here is a link to a poem by Brian McCabe that celebrates math-woman Sophie Germain.
This link reaches a poem by Joan Cannon that laments her math-anxiety.
This poem expresses some of my own divided feelings.
Monday, March 18, 2019
Looking back . . . titles, links to previous posts
- March 13 An Interview of/by a Mathy Poet
- March 11 Celebrate Pi-Day on 3.14
- March 6 Celebrate Math-Women with Poems!
- March 4 Math in 17 Syllables
- Solving for X, Searching for LIFE
- Stories of Black Mathematicians (event postponed)
- All Numbers are Interesting . . .
- George Washington, cherry tree, lifespan . . .
- Musical sounds of math words -- in a CENTO
- If 2017 was a poem title . . .
- Mathematics and Valentine's Day
- Speed flunking math . . . NO, NO!
- Quantum Lyrics -- Poems
Thursday, January 2, 2014
2013 (and prior) -- titles, dates of posts
Dec 30 Error Message Haiku
Dec 26 The angel of numbers . . .
Dec 23 Ah, you are a mathematician
Dec 20 Measuring Winter
Monday, February 16, 2015
The numbers say it all . . .
After Leviticus by Philip Levine
The seventeen metal huts across the way
from the great factory house seventeen
separate families. Because the slag heaps
burn all day and all night it’s never dark,
so as you pick your way home at 2 A.M.
on a Saturday morning near the end
Saturday, January 2, 2016
2015 (and prior) -- titles, dates, links for posts
OR follow these year-number links to go to lists of posts through 2014, 2013, 2012 and 2011 -- and all the way back to March 2010 when this blog was begun. At the top of the column to the right is a SEARCH box for the blog and this link leads to a PDF file of searchable topics and names of poets and mathematicians presented herein. Scrolling down the right-hand column leads to a partial list of LABELS that are linked to a list of blogs that contain them.
Dec 31 Precision leads to poetry . . .
Dec 28 Can a woman learn science (or mathematics)?
Dec 24 And now welcome Christmas . . .
Dec 22 Let us not forget . . .
Dec 20 Who put the pie in Pythagoras?
Dec 18 A student writes poetry for a math class . . .
Dec 15 Generalized Pythagorean Theorem--a visual poem?
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Recursion . . . in a life . . . in a poem . . .
Sentence by Tadeusz Dąbrowski
It’s as if you’d woken in a locked cell and found
in your pocket a slip of paper, and on it a single sentence
in a language you don’t know.
Monday, May 17, 2010
Sense and Nonsense
Sunday, March 29, 2015
Science Verse
Wednesday, March 22, 2023
Antiparticular . . . and so on . . .
Writer and St Mary's University (in Halifax) mathematics professor Robert Dawson enjoys composing both poetry and fiction -- and his work has been included in a number of previous postings in this blog. Recently he has published several poems in Polar Starlight, a new Canadian magazine of speculative poetry; the poem below, "Antiparticular" -- in which Dawson plays with the meaning of "anti" -- appeared in the June 2022 issue. (All issues of Polar Starlight are available online at this link.)
Antiparticular by Robert Dawson
Physicists have produced, for many a day,
Anti-electrons, even antiprotons,
But nobody has yet, to my dismay,
Claimed the discovery of antiphotons.
They move (in theory) at the speed of dark,
They carry lethargy but have no mass.