Shaping Poems … with Visual Forms and Counting
Year: 2017 Authors: JoAnne Growney
Core claim
Formal constraints in poetry, including visual structure and counting, can generate richer language and link poetic practice with mathematics.
Topics
pattern poetry, syllable counting, visual form
Domains
Fibonacci numbers, counting, combinatorial constraints, poetry, visual layout, constrained writing
Methods
poetic examples, form analysis, reference survey
Media
text poems, web links, archive references
Paper text
The text below is the locally extracted OCR/Markdown version of the paper. Raw PDF files remain local and are not published here.
Bridges 2017 Conference Proceedings
Shaping Poems … with Visual Forms and Counting
JoAnne Growney 7981 Eastern Avenue, #207 Silver Spring, MD 20910 USA Professor Emerita, Bloomsburg (PA) University Blog: http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com Webpage: http://joannegrowney.com Email: japoet@msn.com
Abstract
Since books and computer screens make poetry accessible without memorization – not so in the early days of verse – rhyme, a memory aid, is no longer necessary. Furthermore, visual accessibility means that word patterns may rely on the eyes as well as the ears to achieve recognition as poetry. Herein, we examine shaped structures such as the square stanza, the snowball, and the Fib and consider their adaptability to a variety of poetic situations. It should be observed that format constraints in poetry – constraints as basic as counting syllables – may lead a writer to unexpected arrangements of words and a richness of meanings unavailable without them. The article ends with a nod to the Bridges Archives and its rich selection of articles that feature poetry – and offers a variety of weblinks for those who wish to explore math-poetry similarities.
Many of us began our relationship with poetry through poems that rhyme. That pattern that we could hear – and tap our fingers to — identified a poem. As in these lines by Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) [12]:
Faster than fairies, faster than witches, Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches; And charging along like troops in a battle All through the meadows the horses and cattle …
Some of us have gone beyond enjoyment of rhymes in adjacent lines (as in Stevenson’s stanza above) to greater complexity of forms – enjoying, for example, the sonnet with its lines measured in five-heartbeats and one breath and its various rhyme schemes. Some of us also have explored and come to love the permutation patterns and repetitions that enable villanelles and pantoums to delight our ears. (Readers who would like to review the defining characteristics of “sonnet,” “pantoum,” or “villanelle” – or other poetic terms, including those introduced below — are invited to visit and SEARCH the website given in [6]. Examples also are provided at that site.)
Before printed copies of poems were widely available, verses often were memorized and transmitted orally— and the patterns of rhyme and repetition aided memory. Eventually, however, widespread availability of books meant that the design of a poem on the page could be part of its art and twentieth century poet E. E. Cummings (1894-1964), who began his career with sonnets, later created arrangements that varied much from ordinary text — like this opening stanza from “Songs, 1” [4].
Growney
the sky was can dy lu minous edible spry pinks shy lemons greens coo 1 choc olates.Easy access to computers has vastly increased the variety and popularity of poems with special spatial arrangements. (For example, the poetry reading at Bridges 2017 will feature poems by Kaz Maslanka and Mike Naylor that rely importantly on spatial displays of their words [2]. Sarah Glaz’ 2012 article, “Mathematical Pattern Poetry,” shows some of the variety that has become available [1].)
An organization that has greatly influenced the forms poetry may assume is the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) – a group of writers and mathematicians who first gathered in France in 1960 and challenged themselves by choosing constraints (such as writing without using the letter “e”) to focus their efforts [9]. One of the Oulipo poetic forms is the snowball in which line-lengths increase or decrease by one unit at each step. (The interested reader may search [6] for more information on the contributions of Oulipo.) Here is a simple growing-melting snowball of mine:
I am low down first then get up IAnd here is a growing-only syllable-snowball (also mine) in which the structure and the content complement each other:
One added forever joined by zero, paired to opposites-- these build the integers, base for construction of more new numbers from old : ratios, radical roots and transcendentals, transfinite cardinals--constructions bold!
Shaping Poems – with Visual Forms and Counting
A Los Angeles writer, Gregory Pincus, celebrated the opening of National Poetry Month in April 2006 by sharing this six-line, 20-syllable poem called a Fib [11]. The syllable counts for the lines follow the Fibonacci numbers by beginning with 1 and 1 and having the lengths of succeeding lines be the sums of the two prior lengths.
One 1
Small, 1
Precise, 2
Poetic, 3
Spiraling mixture: 5
Math plus poetry yields the Fib. 8
The Fib has become a favorite poetry-form for me to use when I wish to introduce poetry-writing to persons new to the art. The precise and growing syllable counts often work well with hesitant writers, exploring creation of a poem – selecting first one word, then another, gradually developing complexity. Moreover, the care that is required to choose words to meet syllable count restrictions often leads to the lovely surprises that we look for in poems.
Here, next, are a pair of Fibs I have written – and, after you reflect for a moment on the effects of the structure, I invite you to use the space beside them to write your own; write about the weather or an item in today’s news or the theorem you have just proved . . . or . . . Enjoy!
My Fibs:
Your Fibs:
Math
words
chosen
carefully
are poetical –
syllables built into poems.
Air,
trees,
water,
fossil fuels—
we use resources
carelessly--what of tomorrow?
Another useful syllable-structure is the square stanza. Like the Fib, it offers boundaries for the writer so that she or he is not left to flounder with too many possibilities. Recently, reading some words by pioneering astrophysicist Vera Rubin (1928 -2016) that were quoted on National Public Radio [10] following her death last December, I was moved to shape some of her words into syllable square poems.
World wide, half
of all brains
are women's.
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Growney
There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that can't also be solved by a woman.
About Congress, Rubin noted:
We need senators who studied physics, representatives who can understand earth's ecology.
In recent months I have been delighted to have access to the Bridges Archives [1] with papers dating back to 1998. My search of the archive using "poetry" found 44 papers. Several involve "poetry" and "geometry". The earliest of these articles, from 1998 and 1999 by Solomon Marcus, thoughtfully discusses the deep similarities between mathematics and poetry – reaching back to a pioneering book by Scott Buchanan [3]. Readers who want to browse similarities between poetry and mathematics even further are invited to explore an entertaining Scientific American quiz by Evelyn Lamb [8] or my brief article [5] on which the quiz was based. Finally, [6] and [7] offer a host of examples for those new to poetry-math connections.
### References
[1] The Bridges Archive, available at http://archive.bridgesmathart.org/ (as of April 18, 2017).
[2] The 2017 Bridges Poetry Reading Announcement – AND complete Bridges Poetry Reading Archives are available at this link: http://bridgesmathart.org/bridges-2017/events/poetry-reading/ (as of April 18, 2017).
[3] Scott Buchanan, Poetry and Mathematics (J.B. Lippincott, 1962).
[4] E. E Cummings, The Complete Poems, 1913-1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972).
[5] JoAnne Growney, “Are Mathematics and Poetry Fundamentally Similar?” American Mathematical Monthly, February, 1992. At http://joannegrowney.com/MPQUOTES-1992Monthly.pdf (as of April 18, 2017).
[6] JoAnne Growney, “Intersections: Poetry with Mathematics” at http://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com (as of April 18, 2017).
[7] JoAnne Growney, “Mathematics in Poetry,” http://www.maa.org/press/periodicals/loci/joma/mathematics-in-poetry (as of April 18, 2017).
[8] Evelyn Lamb, “Can You Tell Mathematics from Poetry?” https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/roots-of-unity/mathematics-or-poetry-take-the-quiz/ (as of April 18, 2017).
[9] Warren Motte, Jr., OULIPO, A Primer of Potential Literature (Dalkey Archive Press, 1998).
[10] National Public Radio, http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/12/26/507022497/vera-rubin-who-confirmed-existence-of-dark-matter-dies-at-88 (as of April 18, 2017).
[11] Gregory Pincus, http://gottabook.blogspot.com/2006/04/fib.html (as of April 18, 2017).
[12] Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894), A Child's Garden of Verses, opening lines of “From A Railway Carriage,” http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/25609 (as of April 18, 2017).
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