Upcoming in Washington -- National Book Festival

     The BOOK WORLD section of this past weekend's Washington POST offers the program for The Library of Congress National Book Festival that will occur next Saturday, September 1, 2018 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center.  The festival has a Poetry Stage and two of the poets who will appear have been featured in past postings in this blog.  The posting on August 2, 2018 featured "American Arithmetic" by Natalie Diaz and back on June 14, 2017 was posted a section of "Life on Mars" by Tracy K. Smith.  (Smith is Poet Laureate of the Library of Congress, currently in her second term in that position.)
     Numbers can be powerful in describing hardships of poverty -- as in this stanza from "Theft" -- a poem that appears (pages 57-62) in Tracy Smith's collection duende (Graywolf Press, 2007).

from Theft     by Tracy K. Smith

Equation after equation, smiling . . .

       Today's news offers the exciting announcement that Tracy K. Smith is the new Poet Laureate of the United States.  I have not found much of mathematics in her work BUT there are these (offered below) provocative lines of Section 6 from the title poem of  Life on Mars:  Poems  (Graywolf Press, 2011).  This Pulitzer Prize-winning collection is an elegy for Smith's father, a scientist who worked on the Hubble telescope.  

from  Life on Mars       by Tracy K. Smith

     6. 

Who understands the world, and when
Will he make it make sense?  Or she?

Maybe there is a pair of them, and they sit
Watching the cream disperse into their coffee

Like the A-bomb. This equals that, one says,
Arranging a swarm of coordinates  

Celebrating Women who write Mathy Poems

       Now in March -- in Women's History Month -- many writers are taking a bit of extra time to explore the history and achievements of women.  It was my delight to find a March 6 posting here on the Poetry Blogging Network with a list of celebrated women in poetry that includes several writers of mathy poems.  Of the ten poets listed, the following five have been included in this blog -- in earlier postings.  For each, I include a mathy sample and the poet's name is linked to earlier postings that include their work.

     Adrienne Rich   from Planetarium 

             a woman      ‘in the snow     
             among the Clocks and instruments              
             or measuring the ground with poles  

            in her 98 years to discover    
            8 comets