Both my first and my last encounter with Bob Grumman involved Mathemaku No. 10.
I wrote poetry from a very young age, almost as soon as I learned to read and write. I also always liked mathematics. In college, as I learned more advanced mathematics, I developed a serious interest in exploring it; and after graduation, I continued my education in this direction. Throughout graduate school and for the first ten to fifteen years of my career as a mathematics teacher and researcher, poetry took second place to mathematics. I still had an interest in it, but I stopped writing poems. I came back to writing poetry in 1992. By then mathematics has been an integral part of my world for many years, and the poetry I have written since that time is strongly influenced by my life as a mathematician. Still, a poet in a mathematics department is an outlier, and I was constantly searching for kindred spirits, poets who love mathematics, mathematicians who love poetry, and mostly, people who write mathematical poetry.
In the early 2000s, my search led me to a website Bob maintained that featured several of his black and white Mathemakus, including the above version of Mathemaku No.10 (Grumman, 2008). It is hard to describe the magnitude of the impact this poem had on me. It was the poem that expressed how I felt about following my heart and letting poetry into my life again. My “existence” underwent “somewhere, minutely, a widening.” The heart image and the words themselves; their musicality and massage made me happy. On closer inspection, I noticed the long division shape and symbols and realized that I entered a mathematical world. The symbols of mathematical language were invented to express mathematical ideas and concepts, and their manipulation follows precise rules and yields precise results. Here the mathematical symbols became vessels filled with words, the long division manipulation is metaphorical, to be interpreted by a combination of mathematical rules, non-mathematical meaning of words used for mathematical operations, and the reader’s imagination. Mathemaku No. 10 reads: Poetry multiplied by love is equal “somewhere, minutely, a widening,” which when subtracted from existence leaves mere existence as a reminder. To paraphrase, reading the poem from the bottom up, which Bob said “is legal” (Grumman, July 2013), we interpret the addition of “somewhere minutely, a widening” (a quantity which is the product of poetry multiplied by love) to mere existence, as that which turns mere existence into something more special, existence italicized. For this poem mathematical language is the universe in which it lives and breathes, the medium whose organizing principles allow it to offer a meaning that will be up to the reader to fully unravel.
I sent Bob an email expressing my appreciation of his poem and thus started a ten-year long connection that included email correspondence and invitations to participate in each other’s projects. Among those, I count the inclusion of Mathemaku No. 10 in the poetry anthology, Strange Attractors, Poems of Love and Mathematics, I edited jointly with JoAnne Growney (Glaz & Growney, 2008), and Bob’s inclusion of several of my poems in his Scientific American Blog posts (see, for example, Grumman, August 2013).
The last contact I had with Bob was in 2014 when I guest-edited the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics (Glaz, 2014). In response to my invitation, Bob sent me the article “Viseomathematical poetry, the triply-expressive poetry” (Grumman, 2014). This article discusses the use of metaphor in poetry that employs more than one “language” besides words, such as visual images or mathematical expressions. Along the way the article makes suggestions on how to read poems that are strongly visual and mathematical. The article contains many lovely poems including two of Bob’s Mathemakus. Below is the “The long division of creativity” that Bob had chosen to include and comment on in this paper (Grumman, 2013).
I wrote poetry from a very young age, almost as soon as I learned to read and write. I also always liked mathematics. In college, as I learned more advanced mathematics, I developed a serious interest in exploring it; and after graduation, I continued my education in this direction. Throughout graduate school and for the first ten to fifteen years of my career as a mathematics teacher and researcher, poetry took second place to mathematics. I still had an interest in it, but I stopped writing poems. I came back to writing poetry in 1992. By then mathematics has been an integral part of my world for many years, and the poetry I have written since that time is strongly influenced by my life as a mathematician. Still, a poet in a mathematics department is an outlier, and I was constantly searching for kindred spirits, poets who love mathematics, mathematicians who love poetry, and mostly, people who write mathematical poetry.
In the early 2000s, my search led me to a website Bob maintained that featured several of his black and white Mathemakus, including the above version of Mathemaku No.10 (Grumman, 2008). It is hard to describe the magnitude of the impact this poem had on me. It was the poem that expressed how I felt about following my heart and letting poetry into my life again. My “existence” underwent “somewhere, minutely, a widening.” The heart image and the words themselves; their musicality and massage made me happy. On closer inspection, I noticed the long division shape and symbols and realized that I entered a mathematical world. The symbols of mathematical language were invented to express mathematical ideas and concepts, and their manipulation follows precise rules and yields precise results. Here the mathematical symbols became vessels filled with words, the long division manipulation is metaphorical, to be interpreted by a combination of mathematical rules, non-mathematical meaning of words used for mathematical operations, and the reader’s imagination. Mathemaku No. 10 reads: Poetry multiplied by love is equal “somewhere, minutely, a widening,” which when subtracted from existence leaves mere existence as a reminder. To paraphrase, reading the poem from the bottom up, which Bob said “is legal” (Grumman, July 2013), we interpret the addition of “somewhere minutely, a widening” (a quantity which is the product of poetry multiplied by love) to mere existence, as that which turns mere existence into something more special, existence italicized. For this poem mathematical language is the universe in which it lives and breathes, the medium whose organizing principles allow it to offer a meaning that will be up to the reader to fully unravel.
I sent Bob an email expressing my appreciation of his poem and thus started a ten-year long connection that included email correspondence and invitations to participate in each other’s projects. Among those, I count the inclusion of Mathemaku No. 10 in the poetry anthology, Strange Attractors, Poems of Love and Mathematics, I edited jointly with JoAnne Growney (Glaz & Growney, 2008), and Bob’s inclusion of several of my poems in his Scientific American Blog posts (see, for example, Grumman, August 2013).
The last contact I had with Bob was in 2014 when I guest-edited the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts, Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics (Glaz, 2014). In response to my invitation, Bob sent me the article “Viseomathematical poetry, the triply-expressive poetry” (Grumman, 2014). This article discusses the use of metaphor in poetry that employs more than one “language” besides words, such as visual images or mathematical expressions. Along the way the article makes suggestions on how to read poems that are strongly visual and mathematical. The article contains many lovely poems including two of Bob’s Mathemakus. Below is the “The long division of creativity” that Bob had chosen to include and comment on in this paper (Grumman, 2013).
The long division of this poem is more difficult to unravel than that of Mathemaku No 10. In Bob’s own words: “What times winter gives us a close approximation to creativity? The answer, according to my poem, is a sky’s skillful mistakes, which multiplies it into the graphic shown.” The explanation continues by enumerating the many ways the sky can make skillful mistakes in the winter. Those include, raining rather than snowing, or a bright sunshine. And so, Bob continues “you see where the poem is going: the product of winter times a sky’s skillful mistakes is a form of spring, a quantity not much less in value than, and similar to, creativity.” The G-clef appearing as the reminder of the poem’s long division is the music of nature at spring time “coming up” (Grumman, 2014).
Is another reading of this poem possible? If you love winter and snow, you might consider a sky’s skillful mistakes to be an excess of winter, too much of a good thing: heavy snows, blizzard conditions, winter at its full creative best. A multiplication of such weather conditions produces a blurred graphic whose red and brown speckled greens are the evergreens and the colors of frolicking humanity peeking through dense whiteness, and whose song is the cheerful howling of the wind and the merry tunes of holiday makers. I admit that this interpretation is less plausible, but it is not impossible. Bob would have rejoiced. A mathematical operation with two different, even conflicting, outcomes. In his own words, taken somewhat out of context, ”… a mathematical operation operating with unmathematical deliberation… this is an image not possible to express except through mathematics” (Grumman, 2014).
Given the special meaning Mathemaku No. 10 has for me, I asked the Journal of Mathematics and the Arts to place it on the cover of the Special Issue. Craig Kaplan, who served as the journal’s editor in chief at that time, and is a computer scientist and visual artist, worked with Bob to adapt the poem to the cover. The result is reproduced below, with permission from Craig Kaplan.
Thank you, Bob for the gift.
References
Sarah Glaz (guest-editor), Journal of Mathematics and the Arts Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics, Taylor & Francis, 2014
Sarah Glaz & JoAnne Growney (editors), Strange Attractors, Poems of Love and Mathematics, CRC Press, 2008
Bob Grumman, April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now, Otoliths 2008
Bob Grumman, Scientific American Blog: M@h*(pOet)?ica ― Music and Autobiography, July 27, 2013
Bob Grumman, Scientific American Blog: M@h*(pOet)?ica ― Play Day, Part One, August 24, 2013
Bob Grumman, ChrismasCardPoem, Runaway Spoon Press, 2013
Bob Grumman, “Viseomathematical poetry, the triply-expressive poetry,” in: Journal of Mathematics and the Arts Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics, Taylor & Francis, 2014
Sarah Glaz (guest-editor), Journal of Mathematics and the Arts Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics, Taylor & Francis, 2014
Sarah Glaz & JoAnne Growney (editors), Strange Attractors, Poems of Love and Mathematics, CRC Press, 2008
Bob Grumman, April to the Power of the Quantity Pythagoras Times Now, Otoliths 2008
Bob Grumman, Scientific American Blog: M@h*(pOet)?ica ― Music and Autobiography, July 27, 2013
Bob Grumman, Scientific American Blog: M@h*(pOet)?ica ― Play Day, Part One, August 24, 2013
Bob Grumman, ChrismasCardPoem, Runaway Spoon Press, 2013
Bob Grumman, “Viseomathematical poetry, the triply-expressive poetry,” in: Journal of Mathematics and the Arts Special Issue: Poetry and Mathematics, Taylor & Francis, 2014
Comments
Post a Comment