Mathematical poetry, visual and verbal

The beginning of a year is, at its core, a mathematical event. A certain number of seconds have passed by since the last turn of a year, and we are left with the mathematical inevitability of a new year. Some years (such as the one we've just begun) contain a leap day to help fill up the time and keep our calendar in line with the cosmos. Other years have but a leap second, a span of time so small that we never even notice it, unless someone tells us it's there.

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So this must be the time to delve, ever so shallowly, into the world of mathematical poetry. Much of my day today will be devoted to working on my "Historical Dictionary of Verbo-Visual Art," and I've begun by working on entries concerning mathematical poetry, largely because a couple of booklets of mathematical poetry came into my possession at the very end of 2003.

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My draft definition of "mathematical poetry" is "a verbo-visual or purely verbal poetry that uses numerals and mathematical formulae and symbols as part of its text." I'll leave the reader to fathom the difference between "verbo-visual" and "purely verbal."

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Karl Kempton's recent book of mathematical poems has a title I cannot adequately present in HTML. The title is a numeral three followed presently by a superscript numeral three, so we might read the title as "three cubed" or "three to the power of three." The fact that we receive the title as a piece of mathematical text allows us different ways to translate it into language, but its ultimate meaning ("twenty-seven") is immutable. Mathematically, it is the value of two tens and seven ones; linguistically, it is a series of choices.

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When Karl combines mathematics with poetry, numbers with language, we are thrown into a tumble of thoughts. Mathematically, these poems are poetic—they suggest the processes of mathematics and use mathematical concepts to create poetic gestalts. Poetically, these poems are puzzles that we must figure out--in the first sense of that compound verb. These texts don't read or mean as standard texts—rows of letters broken up by spaces and punctuation—do.

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Flip thru Karl's book and you will be struck first by the beauty of its contents. Beauty precedes meaning here, which is the secret of the visual poem. Textual poetry presents us with blocks of text that we must interpret before we can hear and see their beauty, but visual poems exist on page or screen or stone, and we love their shape before we love their sense.

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The most amazing transformation I've ever seen in a visual poet—tho one easy to understand in retrospect—is that of Karl Kempton from typewriter poet to "computer" poet. Once the most talented typogrammarian, a man who could control the shape of a poem typed to a page better than anyone else, Karl has become a great designer of visual poems using his computer. Remarkably, the computer has allowed Karl to continue to produce visually balanced pieces (much like his typoglifs of the 1970s and '80s) as the same time that he expands and enriches the visual form of his poetry. Just try to look at his "2 solutions for buddhist mathematics" and try not to be swept into a mesmery.

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Not all of these poems, however, are visual; some are textual poems that use common Kemptonian techniques like tmesis and spilleng (creative respelling) to provide certain, small verbo-visual effects and to identify the voice of the poet. One of these poems (originally published by my press, dbqp, but not credited) is "year of the dragon lemniscate skape," a quiet and brief reflection on time and space.

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But most people will be drawn to the verbo-visual mathematical poems, poems like the "first mathematician woman" sequence, which verbally, visually, and mathematically examines the concept of woman as a lifebringer tied biologically to the cosmos. One need not agree with any of Karl's obvious cosmological or biopolitical points of view to enjoy how he represents them. Actually, you don't always need to understand the mathematics either, tho occasionally my mathematical ability (stunted, it ceased to grow beyond algebra) left me unable to interpret Karl's designs.

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What we are left with in this book is more than poetry and much more than mathematics. We are left with wonderful ruminations on meaning and life, on chaos and order. You can purchase a copy ($5 postpaid) of Karl Kempton's "3[cubed]: mathematical poems, 1976-2003" from The Runaway Spoon Press, Box 495597, Port Charlotte, FL 33949; or email Bob Grumman, the publisher, at bobgrumman@nut-n-but.net.

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