Got the chance not only to premiere my poem about Pi, but also to talk about poetry and equations, with a general nod towards poetry and mathematics.

 

(It was important to guide the discussion back towards equations, as one of my fellow guests Wendy Cope pointed out, because there is so much to say about poetry and mathematics. Wendy Cope had meticulously collected poetry about and like equations, and knew her stuff about mathematics generally. I was delighted that she had been really good at algebra at school, things like that make me feel I have someone to learn from and talk to, blazing on both subjects at once.)

 

I was trying to argue for the equation as a way of giving elegant shape to a mass of data, say a logarithm table. Wendy Cope mentioned the Fibonacci sequence, which informs some of the work of Ron Silliman, a big influence on me. For example, you can write an equation for the nth number in the Fibonacci sequence, starting at 1, as

 

(two before the nth) number + (one before the nth) number

 

In other words, the 5th number in the sequence is

 

3rd number + 4th number.

 

(The fifth number is 5, which equals 2 + 3, the 3rd and 4th...

So the number of sentences in Silliman’s successive paragraphs are 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55 etc).

 

Silliman makes you think about this equation through a literary device he uses in Tjanting, his major fibonacci inspired book. He returns to sentences from previous paragraphs, just as one does in the equation to work out how many sentences each paragraph should have.

 

When sentences reappear, he rewrites them slightly, and also has made a new context with all the new sentences needed to make each successive paragraph longer.

 

I find this a really interesting take on identity, in the literal sense: when you gather numbers together in a table, are all the 2’s identical to all the other 2’s, all the 3’s to other 3’s.

 

(As I once read in a primer book about number, why do we assume numbers go in order, ascending 1-9? Numeric poetry is a branch of numerology in that it establishes lateral connections between numbers, favourite numbers, elegant numbers. Dante’s association with 3, as a verse form, and the Trinity, for example.)

 

The Verb is broadcast on Dec 2nd, and is on the Listen Again part of the BBC’s website for a week after that. Email me if you want any more details.

 

More details about the Pi piece are to be found on an earlier entry in this blog, “Pilingual”.