Counting Syllables, Shaping Poems: Reflections

Abstract

One of my mental habits is to try to find connections between disparate facts, events, and preferences and a consequence of this habit is that I find more and more links between two of my favorite subjects, poetry and mathematics. My career was in mathematics (a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania) but I have also been able, after my children were grown, to find time for reading and writing and sharing poetry. In retirement, I’ve investigated a variety of math-poetry linkages, including the French group OULIPO, a group of mathematicians and poets who engaged in and invented some new math-and-literature connections. My growing desire to share what I’d been learning led me to begin, in 2010, a blog, “Intersections – Poetry with Mathematics,” which continues to this day (with more than a thousand postings).

Girls who change

lightbulbs change

everything!

One of my mental habits is to try to find connections between disparate facts, events, and preferences and a consequence of this habit is that I find more and more links between two of my favorite subjects, poetry and mathematics. My career was in mathematics (a professor at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania) but I have also been able, after my children were grown, to find time for reading and writing and sharing poetry. In retirement, I’ve investigated a variety of math-poetry linkages, including the French group OULIPO, a group of mathematicians and poets who engaged in and invented some new math-and-literature connections. My growing desire to share what I’d been learning led me to begin, in 2010, a blog, “Intersections – Poetry with Mathematics,” which continues to this day (with more than a thousand postings).

Some mathematical patterns in poetry are pleasing to the ear and match with body rhythms. The ten-syllable lines of the sonnet each occupy one breath—with each line composed of five iambs (da-DUMs), matching the beats of the human heart. The fourteen-line sonnet thus draws the reader not only into an excursion for the mind but also for the physical self. Occasionally I attempt the difficult task of writing a sonnet or a villanelle (which has the same ten-syllable-per-line pattern as the sonnet and has also some repetition of lines) and feel proud when I achieve that complex blend of sound with meaning.

But poetic patterns simpler than the sonnet suit me better when I have an idea that I want to shape and share quickly AND in well-chosen words. I have observed that by following a pattern of syllable counts my word-choices are constrained in a way that helps them to be imaginative and effective. As a sample of this, I offer below a couple of syllable-square poems from a collection published about a year ago by Math Horizons under the title, “Give Her Your Support.” Here are two samples from that article:

Little Women	Smart Girl Speculating
In school, many Gifted math girls. Later, so few Famed math women!	Last Sunday’s paper had an essay by a clown who said “as long as I play dumb people let me do what I want.” And I cannot stop wondering.

To publicize my math-poetry blog, I have often posted links on Twitter; during the pandemic Twitter became even more special—particularly in April which is National Poetry Month. National Public Radio (to which I often listen) regularly celebrates the arts and in April, NPR issued a call for poetry postings on Twitter (requiring poems with less than 280 characters). And I began to explore, including some thoughts about the coronavirus AND some notions focused on April as National Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month.

My Twitter handle is @MathyPoems and here are several of my tweets.

• On April 2: A Coronavirus Fib

Don’t

touch

me with

your fingers—

use your heart—we must

keep bodies distant and stay safe!

A “Fib” is a 6-line poem whose syllable-counts follow the Fibonacci numbers.

• On April 3: A Fib for the Season

Birds

sing.

Trees bud.

Daffodils

and tulips open.

My eyes and nose and heart love spring!

• On April 4: Smart Girl Speculating (shown above, offered on Twitter untitled)

• On April 13: Pandemic (a Haiku)

Exponential growth:

small numbers doubling quickly—

a world upended!

• On April 17: The 3 × 3 syllable square with which this article began appeared as a Tweet

• On April 24:

Quarantine—

that other world

in which no moments

notice where I am.

• And so on …

One of my ongoing concerns is climate change and I can’t resist voicing that concern here and sharing a poem, “The Other Place,” that appears on a poster in my study—a poem that was a contest winner in 2018 and appeared on busses in Arlington, Virginia.

For Twitter explorers I invite visits to my postings found using my Twitter handle @MathyPoems, and I encourage all with a bit of interest in the many connections that exist between mathematics and poetry to visit my blog, “Intersections – Poetry with Mathematics.”

FormalPara Additional Notes

Information about the establishment of National Poetry Month (which happened in 1996) is available at the website for the Academy for American poets at this link.

President Reagan in April, 1986 established National Mathematics Awareness Week and this celebration in 1999 evolved into National Mathematics Awareness Month and in 2017 grew into Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month. Details for the 2020 Celebration are available here.

JoAnne Growney