Mathematics of love . . .

"Mathematics of Love" is the title poem of a collection by John Edwin Cohen (1941-2012), published in 2011 by Anaphora Literary Press and presented here with press permission.  Cohen has used mathematics playfully and does what a mathematician never dares to do, use a mathematical term with other than its precise meaning. Still, perhaps, even math folks may enjoy this application of geometric shape and poetic license!

Mathematics of Love     by John Edwin Cohen

1.   

       Engine of joy
       arithmetic and sincere
       holding the hemisphere
              and geometry of
              youth

The Geometry of Poetry

     Some poems lie around for A LONG TIME waiting for me to pick them up.  Or I pick them up and put them down in a special place and then place something else on top of them.  Such is the case with Janet Kirchheimer's "The Geometry of Poetry" -- several years ago Janet and I corresponded and then I didn't follow through with posting her poem.  And now, this week, I am working on a paper for Bridges 2017 -- a math-arts conference to be held in Waterloo, Ontario at the end of July -- and my working title is the same as the title of Janet's poem.  AND, this coincidence helped me to FIND her poem to give you to enjoy.

     I first read "The Geometry of Poetry" by Janet R. Kirchheimer online in Poemeleon -- and her work also has appeared in many other journals, anthologies and websites. She is currently producing AFTER, a film that explores poetry written about the Holocaust.  Thanks, Janet, for this poem with its mathy comparisons.

The Geometry of Poetry    by Janet R. Kirchheimer  

Miroslav Holub, poet and scientist

Miroslav Holub (1923-1998), Czech poet and immunologist who excelled in both endeavors, is one of my favorite poets.  He combines scientific exactitude with empathy and absurdity.  Here are samples:

The Corporal Who Killed Archimedes

With one bold stroke

he killed the circle, tangent

and point of intersection

in infinity.

Angles in Alaska

Last Thursday evening I was honored to read in Takoma Park's Third Thursday poetry series -- along with poets Judy Neri and Kathleen O'Toole -- and my reading focused on poems of my times in Alaska.  The brilliant geometry of  our 49th state affected me strongly and "Angles of Light" became the title poem for a chapbook I published with Finishing Line Press in 2009.  Here is section 3 (of 7) from that poem.

Love Triangle . . ..

     One day, looking online for Edwin Abbott's 19th century classic, Flatland, I found not only Abbott's tale but some poetry.  At the website of Jerome White, a New Orleans math teacher, I found his mathy poem "Love Triangle," about which White says:    "Love Triangle" was inspired by my disappointment that Flatland: A Romance In Many Dimensions was deceptively devoid of "romance" in the modern sense of the word. 
     With White's permission, here is the poem -- offered with a preparatory remark:  the poet is sometimes explicit as he describes the geometry of sexual attraction.

Love Triangle      by  Jerome A. White

A trio of three-sided polygons sprawled across
the two-dimensional space of my notebook page
capturing my singular focus

The one on the left I tried to seduce
Only to find her obliquely obtuse
Her oversized angle symbolic
of the diverging vectors our lives would follow    

Geometry of Love

     A couple of weeks ago my "Google Alert" linked me to a posting of a science poem concerning "the geometry of love."  The posting -- at The Finch and Pea -- is a poem that is both elegant and precise (and one that has been included in the anthology, Strange Attractors:  Poems of Love and Mathematics, that Sarah Glaz and I collected and edited several years ago).  Here it is:

The Definition of Love     by Andrew Marvell (England, 1621-1678)

My love is of a birth as rare
As ‘tis for object strange and high;
It was begotten by Despair
Upon Impossibility.  

Hate Math -- 21 Reasons (NOT) . . .

Two four-letter words that I want NEVER to be used TOGETHER are hate and math.  A lively contradiction to my wish is provided by the following piece by slam poet Shappy Seasholtz.

(For details on the World Poetry Slam to be held in Washington DC on Oct. 7-10, 

scroll down to the bottom of this posting.)

21 Reasons Why I Hate Math     by Shappy Seasholtz

1 - It's my worst subject.
2 - I failed Algebra in high school.
3 - When I retook Algebra in high school during the final exam the principal announced that the space shuttle had just blown up.
4 - The space shuttle probably blew up because of a mathematical error. 

Personal geometry

We have recently passed the first anniversary of the death (6 May 2010) of Elena Shvarts, one of Russia's finest contemporary poets. Here is her "Poetica -- More Geometrico" (translated into English by Thomas Epstein).

Coleridge: A Mathematical Problem

 "A Mathematical Problem" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- found online at Elite Skills Classics -- uses verse to describe construction of an equilateral triangle; Coleridge introduces the poem with a letter to his brother telling of his admiration of mathematics, a view rather rare among poets.   

A Mathy-Poetic Trajectory

      Carol Dorf is a retired math teacher and poet -- and at New Verse News I have discovered one of her recent mathy poems, "TRAJECTORY," posted on 10/09/2023.   I offer its opening lines below.

from   TRAJECTORY     by Carol Dorf

          The problem set gives us: a stone, force, an angle.
          Given this, predict when the stone will hit the ground.
          Outside the book this problem grows more complex
          even if there are no dragons to interfere with the trajectory.
          Imagine a missile. No don’t. There’s no need to imagine:
          haven’t you opened the paper today? Imagine a war
          where children’s bodies form the location of the necessary
          violence. Don’t authorities always say necessary?

                . . . . .              Dorf's complete TRAJECTORY is available at this link.

Carol Dorf is a Zoeglossia fellow, whose poetry has been published in several chapbooks and in a wide variety of journals; and she is a founding poetry editor of Talking Writing.  

Here is a link to the New Verse News website -- a collection of many, many poems.  This link leads to poems at that site by Carol Dorf, including "Trajectory." 

Geometry of baseball

Many poems are written of baseball; a few of them involve mathematics --  see the posting for April 9, 2010 for math-related baseball poems by Marianne Moore (1877-1972) and Jerry Wemple; see the posting for September 18, 2011 for one by Jonathan Holden.
     Today I feature the opening stanza from a baseball poem by Pennsylvania poet, Le Hinton.

from   Our Ballpark    by Le Hinton

       This is the place where my father educated us:
       an open-air school of tutelage and transformation.
       This is where we first learned
       to count to three, then later to calculate the angle
       of a line drive bouncing off the left field wall.
       We studied the geometry and appreciated the ballet
       of third to second to first, a triple play.
              . . .

Crocheting mathematics

Charlotte Henderson majored in mathematics and English at Wellesley College and has applied her dual interests as an editor for A K Peters, Ltd (a science and technology publisher that is now part of CRC Press).  Several manuscripts on which she has worked at A K Peters have drawn her to the connections between mathematics and art, including needlework. She is particularly interested in the diverse possibilities of crochet, which she learned after working on Daina Taimina's book, Crocheting Adventures with Hyperbolic Planes.   Charlotte has turned this interest into art and into a poem: 

Intersecting lines of math, the arts, and justice

       A multimedia interdisciplinary project linking mathematics, the arts, and language -- and entitled  Rhythm of Structure -- was begun in 2003 by versatile mathematical artist and writer, John Sims.  I first learned of the project in 2010 when I was one of a group of writers invited to a weekend event at the Bowery Poetry Club at which Sims was then resident poet.  A catalog of the art and poetry gathered by Sims during that year is entitled Rhythm of Structure:  Mathematics, Art and Poetic Reflection, Bowery and Beyond and is available at this link.  

      Before moving on to a poem I am compelled to mention a recent instance of racial injustice; from May, 2021 this headline:

Political artist John Sims detained, handcuffed by S.C. police in his gallery apartment

found at this Yahoo site.  Sims, a black man and artist-in-residence at the Center for Contemporary art in Columbia, South Carolina, was arrested as an "intruder" as he entered his own apartment and gallery.  PLEASE, let us work together to end racially biased behavior! 

                                                               *   *   *

One geometry is not enough

Writer Katharine Merow is in the Publications Department of the Washington DC headquarters of the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) and she is one of the poets who participated in the "Reading of Poetry with Mathematics" at JMM in Baltimore last January.  Here is the engaging poem Merow read at that event -- a poem that considers the 19th century development of new and "non-euclidean" geometries from variants of Euclid's fifth postulate, the so-called parallel postulate:

       Geometric Proliferation    by Katharine Merow

Word Play -- "Of Time and the Line"

Charles Bernstein, poet and teacher,  experiments with poetry  and prefers "opaque" and "impermeable" writing -- to awaken readers "from the hypnosis of absorption."  In the poem below he does, as mathematicians also do, multiplies ideas by playing with them -- here using "line."

     Of Time and the Line     by Charles Bernstein

     George Burns likes to insist that he always
     takes the straight lines; the cigar in his mouth
     is a way of leaving space between the
     lines for a laugh.  He weaves lines together
     by means of a picaresque narrative;

The view from here -- or there

From Nashville math teacher and blogger, Tad Wert, I learned of this poem, "Geometry, Lost Cove" by his Harpeth Hall School colleague, Georganne Harmon; in it, Harmon examines the contrasts in appearances when objects are seen from different distances. (And the mathematician goes on to say, Ah, yes -- in other words, some mappings of a space do not preserve distance.)

    Geometry, Lost Cove     by Georganne Harmon

    The ridge across this cove
    is straight as a ruled line,
    its bend as pure as an angle
    on a student’s quadrilled page.
    Beyond it another ridge lies
    straight-backed, as well,
    drawn off by its touch with sky.

Focus on FOUR

     Numerous poems by Canadian poet Alice Major connect to science and mathematics, and Major has connected me with Ottawa poet and mechanical engineer Sneha Madhavan-Reese -- who has shared with me not only poetry but also the new-to-me fact that her home city of  Ottawa lies on the traditional and unceded territory of the Algonquin Nation.  Here is Madhavan-Reese's poem, "Four," a thoughtful reminder of the vast versatility of mathematical notions.
   

       Four     by Sneha Madhavan-Reese

               Is 4 the same 4 for everybody? -- Pablo Neruda, The Book of Questions

       My mother draws her four with a right angle;

       my father's is pointed on top.  My daughter's four,

       half the time, is backwards.  Her sister signs,

       tucking a thumb into her raised palm.   

Euclid and Barbie -- and attitudes toward math . . .

     Teacher-poet-musician Glen Brown has shared with me his mathy poem that has for its epigraph a controversial line once spoken (back in 1992) by Mattel's Teen Talk Barbie.   Brown makes playful use of a variety of math terms but with an somewhat sexist point of view.

     Euclid and Barbie      by Glen Brown
                                Math class is tough.
                                                            --Barbie
     Sure it doesn’t add up:
     countless camping and skiing trips with Ken,
     swimming and skating parties without danger,
     dancing and shopping engagements
     with Midge and Skipper
     like an infinite summer vacation.
     Nothing here hints at a dull math class
     for integral Barbie and her complex playmates!

Mathematics of desire

Last Monday evening, I listened with pleasure to Pennsylvania (Fogelsville) poet Barbara Crooker read at Cafe Muse (with Meredith Davies Hadaway and Erin Murphy). Barbara writes fine poems -- and reads them well. Although she offered no mathematical poems that evening, hearing her reminded me to hunt for her love poem "The Irrational Numbers of Longing . . " and to offer it to you here:

Poets at BRIDGES

These seven poets will be reading math-related poems at the upcoming (July 27-31) BRIDGES Conference in Enschede, the Netherlands; biographical information about the coordinator, Sarah Glaz, and each of the poets is available here. With each poet's name I have offer a date that is linked to one of my postings of his/her work:         
          Michael Bartholomew-Biggs    19 October 2012
          Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya   10 March 2013
          Carol Dorf   31 May 2011
          Sarah Glaz   7 November 2011
          Emily Grosholz  24 September 2010
          Alice Major   30 December 2012
          Eveline Pye 12 April 2012
Here (and also to be offered at BRIDGES) is an elegant and thoughtful poem by Alice Major  -- "For Mary, Turning Sixty" -- that compares mathematical meanings of terms with personal ones.