<frontplate>

      Drawing Lines in the Sky
      (Martin Kingsley, 2006)

Preface

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

________________
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

Frontpiece

Poetry is not an expression of the party line. It's that time of night, lying in bed, thinking what you really think, making the private world public — that's what the poet does.

Allen Ginsberg

The poet takes from life that which is quite particular and individual, and describes it accurately in its individuality; but in this way he reveals the whole of human existence … though he appears to be concerned with the particular, he is actually concerned with that which is everywhere and at all times.

Arthur Schopenhauer