A couple more examples of poetry as maths, or poetry as equation.
It pushes at some of the more difficult conjunctions (to use a grammatical term) of maths-equation-poetry. We were talking on The Verb about the haiku as a quadratic equation, a syllogism, and when a colon, say, implies an equals sign:
truth = beauty, beauty = truth (Keats)
In other words, when poetry is an equation, then parts of a poem, or parts of a sentence in a poem, its clauses, come to a head via a conjunction eg “because” or “therefore”.
Grammatically speaking, there are also connectives (eg “and” or “but”) that link up clauses until we get to the conjunction, after which comes the punchline. Thus, a haiku’s first two lines are joined by an invisible connective, and the third sums up after an invisible conjunction.
But this is all too simple. What Bob Grumman does is say: there are other kinds of connective than “and”, other kinds of conjunction than “therefore”. And, brilliantly, he shows connectives and conjunctions between not just clauses but between words. You don’t just read between the lines, but between the words, and between the letters.
I came across Bob Grumman’s work, not because he’d heard the radio show (he hadn’t) but coincidentally - because he’d blogged querying some of my online work unrelated to maths, and I replied, and got to know him. Imagine my surprise he was into maths and poetry!
I love Bob’s piece, above. The long division sign in it immediately makes me think of the page covered with working-out, all around the neat symbol, the simple words.
Division involves taking apart a number, by decimal places, by fractions, by tens, hundreds and thousands (or in base theory, by powers to the one, to the two, to the three).
This is exactly how a word relates to another word, a rhyme say, in a poem.
Also I have been reading Don Paterson’s Orpheus over Christmas. In his notes, he says that he always sees the sonnet form (which came up in our radio discussion) as to do with golden section (fibonacci) proportions; how the 8 line verse relates to the 6 line verse, and so on.
This idea of squaring up the two sections of a sonnet according to the golden section fascinated me. I’m interested in both, but hadn’t seen the connection before Paterson pointed it out.
Sunday, 7 January 2007
