This blog of poetry (and punditry) began after I stumbled across a replay of Robert Pinsky's ninety minute talk about poetry on C-SPAN.1
I think for the first time I began to think about what poetry is.
In my college and graduate school days I studied mathematics, not poetics. But now, in the midst of middle age, I am finding a newly focused appreciation for poems: their patterns of sound and of shape and of sense.2 Once I wrote theorems and programs. Now I write poems.
After all, isn't poetry the form of writing closest to mathematics?
Philip Thrift
poeticalbits.blogspot.com
May Day 2008
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1. Robert Pinsky: online C-SPAN Flash video
The poem he reads at the end of the C-SPAN talk—Samurai Song—can be found in a more dramatic form at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObaWkwvGT2g.
2. Discovering Patterns in Mathematics and Poetry
By Marcia Birken and Anne C. Coon
ISBN 9042023708, 9789042023703
http://books.google.com/books?id=uqGSvpLAYccC
Dear Mr. Mathematician turn-to poet,
ReplyDeleteI wouldn't agree more than what was written in your preface.
I'm a new blogger and happened to come across your blog today.
Thank you for sharing your poems.
Yuan