M@h*(pOet)?ica – Mathematics and Love

I have been an interested reader of poems and thoughts by Bob Grumman (USA) (poem above) for sometime, introduced by posts on Ron Silliman's blog. (I've learnt a lot there, thanks, Ron.) Here Bob is as guest blogger for Scientific American  - a posting on mathematics and poetry. Well, sort of. It is not dry as one may expect - he's a vibrant bloggist. Here is a small quote:

#StorySaturday is a Guest Blog weekend experiment in which we invite people to write about science in a different, unusual format – fiction, science fiction, lablit, personal story, fable, fairy tale, poetry, or comic strip. We hope you like it.

I know, I shouldda had math and love as my subject last month. But I’ve been reading essays lately against having Valentine’s Day in the cold, cold month of February. I don’t like it there, either—because I don’t like it competing with the only important holiday in that month (or the year, for that matter!), Groundhog Day, the day I was born. In any case, this entry will feature poems from Strange Attractors, an anthology edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney, containing 151 poems (by my count) that are mathematical or about mathematics, and concerned with love. Not necessarily romantic love and courtship, although many are. Among the funniest ones of these (and included are more than a few very funny ones about those topics) is a limerick by Bob Kurosaka concerning a young maiden named “Lizt” who “turned both her lips/ Into Mobius strips . . .” His poem ends with “kissed,” happily exemplifying the anthology’s principal theme. (With the important bonus of two “ips”-rhymes sharing a 5-rhyme poem with 3 “ist”-rhymes!)

Two other poems about kissing in the anthology with an equally entertaining silliness are otherwise notable for having been written not by poets but by those who did consequential work in mathematics. One was Frederick Soddy (1877–1956), a radiochemist who won a Nobel Prize (the first Nobelist, I believe, to have also achieved a place in this blog!) He, with Ernest Rutherford, Wikipedia informs us, explained that radioactivity is due to the transmutation of elements. The other, an English lawyer, Thorold Gosset (1869–1962), was noted for discovering and classifying the semiregular polytopes in dimensions four and higher. (Sorry, I don’t know what polytopes are, either. I’m tempted to say it’s a four-side, 6-dimensional hectosphlidge to spur some expert or other to correct me in a comment; this blog is not getting comments, the only thing about it that bothers me. Well, except its tendency to go off on tangents like this. But “tangent” is an irreproachably mathematical word, so I shouldn’t be bothered.

Oh, it's a fun read, so read more at
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2013/03/09/mhpoetica-mathematics-and-love/

Poem as Screenplay: Six Video Collaborations

What's the difference between a poem and a screenplay? According to these filmmakers, not much. We've compiled a list of six video adaptations of poems by Wanda Coleman, Rita Dove, Allen Ginsberg, Amy Hempel, Mark Strand, and Anne Waldman—including cross-genre collaborations with Juan Delcan, Ryan MacDonald, Gus Van Sant and more. No need to read—just sit back and watch: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/23387

How Guyanese People queue!

Clever? How would our boots and high heels look here?

RIP Maria Ann Smith

Wednesday, March 9, 1870. : Granny Smith (on the left, I think), who gave her name to the Granny Smith apple, dies.

Granny Smith is a variety of apple with green skin and tart flesh, originating in Australia around 1865 from a chance seedling propagated by Maria Ann Smith, aka Granny Smith. Granny Smith was born Maria Ann Sherwood in Peasmarsh, Sussex, England, sometime in late 1799. The daughter of an agricultural labourer, she later married a farm labourer. They emigrated to New South Wales in 1838 after being recruited by government agents looking for people with agricultural skills. They settled in the district of Ryde, Sydney, which was an intensive fruit growing area. The Granny Smith apple came about when 'Granny' Smith discovered a seedling apple, which had developed from the remains of some French crab apples grown in Tasmania, growing by a creek on her farm. It was not commercially developed in her lifetime, but the apple continued to be cultivated by local orchardists.

Maria Ann Smith died on 9 March 1870 and was buried in St. Anne's cemetery, Ryde, where her headstone can still be seen. The year after her death, in the 1891 Castle Hill Agricultural and Horticultural Show, the 'Granny Smith seedlings', as they were known, were awarded the prize for the best cooking apples.

Doctors recommend Granny Smiths, and some scientists say they should be chosen over other apples because of their high level of antioxidants

The Real Through Line: A Poetry Symposium

MonashConferenceCentre  Friday, 5 April 2013 · 09:00 until 20:30

 

Presented by Monash University Centre for Australian and Postcolonial Writing and RMIT   This cross-institutional, multi-disciplinary symposium brings together leading scholars and practitioners interested in the poetry of the real world. The symposium proposes viewing and celebrating the poem as a medium of formal aesthetic production with a discernible content. Such a view could account for some of the most exciting and ground-breaking works of recent and contemporary poetry in which the Real has entered, transformed and has in turn been transformed, by the aesthetics of the poetic space. This event brings together scholarship and creative works that testify to the potential of the poetic line to extend and multiply our conceptions of non-fiction writing. It intends to celebrate/discuss/interrogate a literary mode in which poets   openly engage with auto/biography, history, politics, economics, mathematics, cultural analysis, science, the environment, and all other aspects of real world experience, recollection and interpretation. Followed by readings at Collected Works Bookshop Level 1/37 Swanston Street, Melbourne 6.30pm-8.30pm Participants Louis Armand is an editor of VLAK magazine and lectures in the Philosophy Faculty of Charles University. He has pub- lished seven collections of poetry, most recently, Letters from Ausland and Synopticon (with John Kinsella), as well as four novels and a number of volumes of criticism. Jill Jones is a senior lecturer at the University of Adelaide. She is the author of 14 books, the most recent being Ash is Here, So are Stars and Senses Working Out. π. O. is a founding member of the Poets’ Union and has edited many works, including Off the Record for Penguin. His most r ecent book of poetry is Big Numbers: New and Selected Poems. Felicity Plunkett is the poetry editor at University of Queensland   Press as well as a research consultant at the University of Queensland. She has published two books, Vanishing Point and Seastrands. Jordie Albiston is a prominent Melbourne poet and academic. She has written six books, the most recent of which are Vertigo: A Cantata and the sonnet according to ‘m’. Justin Clemens is a senior lecturer at Melbourne University. His latest works include The Mundiad and Villain while a new work, Psychoanalysis is an antiphilosophy, is due to be released in 2013. Ann Vickery is a senior lecturer at Deakin University. She has   published numerous scholarly works, the most well-known of which is Stressing the Modern: Cultural Politics in Australian Women’s Poetry. Patrick Jones is currently completing his doctorate at the University   of Western Sydney. He has edited the anthology Words and Things and his work has appeared in multiple well-known journals. Kate Middleton‘s first book Fire Season won the Western Australian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She was the inaugural Sydney poet in 2012. Jessica Wilkinson (convenor) is the editor of RABBIT: a journal for non-fiction poetry and a lecturer in Creative Writing at RMIT. Her latest book is the full-length collection marionette: a biography of miss marion davies. Ali Alizadeh (convenor) is a lecturer at Monash University and was shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards in 2012. His latest work is Transactions, due for release in mid-2013. Registration: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1jFPiDV0vtCWOXqiTfFFEJ_ AupAutlQynuk50gLjI84k/viewform?pli=1

 

Spring Book Launch in Toronto

Many moons ago George Bowering, Canadian poet and author, came through Perth and Fremantle, when I lived there (most of my life!). It was some event with readings and a workshop, etc. Others present were Mark O'Connor, Lee Knowles, Alan Alexander, Wendy Jenkins, Andrew Lansdown, Shane McCauley, and ... my memory fails at that point.

After a workshop at Freo Arts Centre, we drove up Stirling Highway dropping in at many a hotel on our way back to UWA in Crawley. Jean Bedford, Australian novelist, joined us at one point - lovely people. This was one of those pleasant literary occasions that stay in your mind for many a year. I think of it every time I hear what George Bowering is up to - through the wonders of the electronic social media.

I wish I could just scoot over to Toronto now to say 'hello'. Perhaps poets should be awarded wings after a certain amount of time :-)

paper wasp flies again

Main

paper wasp haiku group

The paperwasp haiku group now meets every two months at Brisbane Central Library at North Quay in Brisbane City. Email Duncan Richardson for dates, times and meeting room details: dunc.rich@uqconnect.net

Grammar

Poetry Translation Centre

An Introduction to The Poetry Translation Centre and a link:

"Welcome to The Poetry Translation Centre’s website. We’re a small organisation dedicated to translating contemporary poetry from Africa, Asia and Latin America. To date, we've translated 358 poems written in 27 different languages by 79 poets from 38 countries. On our website you'll find all these poems both in translation and in their original language, plus photos and videos of our events and information about what we do and how we translate."

Read on at http://www.poetrytranslation.org/

haiku larf

Australian Love Poems 2013 edited by Mark Tredinnick

We are looking for poems that explore all aspects of love: the dark and the light of it; the holy mess of it; the beginning and the end; the ferocity and tenderness; the way it unmakes us, as we make it; the emptiness it leaves when it leaves.

There are many species of love, but it is ‘amatory love’ (as Octavio Paz puts it) we’re most interested in here. We want poems of eros and phillia, desire and devotion and longing and loss—love of the Dido and Aeneas kind; the love Neruda sang; the sort of thing Jonne Donne never stopped exploring; the territory Leonard Cohen never stops walking; the bittersweet, remorseless affection Sappho and Catullus wrote; the love Auden mourns when he wishes the clocks would stop; the oceanic but plainer-sailing kind of affair Emily Dickinson imagined.

Love stays, sometimes; love grows old; and we’re interested in love like that, too. Love that flares and burns and dies; love that is kind—or complicated—and long.

Submission Guidelines

• You are eligible to submit poems to this collection if you live in

          Australia or are an Australian citizen living overseas

• You can submit up to 3 poems that have never been published

          before

• Your poems can be no longer than 40 lines
• Your poems will be accepted until midnight April 26
• Please layout your poems in 12 point font with 1.5 spacing
• Email submissions preferred. Please send poems in a MS Word
• Document to info@inkermanandblunt.com. Send hard copy
• submission to P.O. Box 310, Carlton South, 3053
• Include: the title of your poem, your name, your email and
• postal address, phone number and a 50 word biography

We are able to pay $80 for poems selected in this manuscript and
each poet will receive a copy of Australian Love Poems 2013.
We expect to publish this collection by July 2013.
All poets will be notified of their acceptance by 30 June 2013.

Please do not send your submissions to the editor of this volume.
All submissions must be sent to info@inkermanandblunt.com
or they will not be considered.

 

Mark Tredinnick: author of the award winning landscape memoir The Blue Plateau (UQP 2009) Australia’s Wild Weather (National Library 2011). Known for his books on the art of writing: The Little Red Writing Book, The Little Green Grammar Book and with Geoff Whyte, The Little Black Book of Business Writing (UNSW Press) he has recorded his poems with River Road Press on the CD, The Road South and his first poetry collection Fire Diary (Puncher & Wattman 2010) won the Western Australian Premier’s Award. Tredinnick’s honours include the inaugural Montreal Poetry Prize, the prestigious Cardiff Poetry Prize, the Blake Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize (twice) and the Calibre Essay Prize.

What Is a Poet For? from HUFFPOST CULTURE

"The extension beyond function becomes art and we can all argue for hours about the merits and pitfalls of art, whether we can or should define what it is or what it is for. Is it enough for language to dance and be beautiful, to entertain? Does it even need to make sense in the generally understood meaning of the word? Or should these elements be by-products of a medium that has teaching as it's aim?

"What seems certain now, with everybody afforded nearly even footing on world reaching platforms, is that merely speaking or writing to an audience is no longer enough. We can all do that without publishers, without (much immediate) political intervention, and as we all try to drum up interest in our own light on the stage, the whole scene is becoming saturated, blanked out in a white noise of options.

"The new poet, I believe, becomes more than ever before a listener and a watcher, a person able to tune in to what is really going on beneath the white noise, and form pockets of peace from it, still moments in which human beings can swim, however they wish to. Rather than being restricted by attempting to 'find the light' of publishing, or fame, or audience, the maze of source material spreads out before us, and the methods of forming that material into a 'poetry' grow just as fast."

- Rick Holland read the entire article HERE

Larf

Welcome to The Sydney Review of Books

The Sydney Review of Books is an online journal devoted to long-form literary criticism. It is motivated by the belief that in-depth analysis and robust critical discussion are crucial to the development of Australia’s literary culture. We decided to embark on this project because of our concerns about the reduced space for serious literary criticism in the mainstream media, and the newspapers in particular, given their uncertain future. We intend the Sydney Review of Books to be a venue in which Australian writers and critics can engage with books at length, a venue in which to rediscover the intimate connection between the art of criticism and the art of the essay. The Review’s focus is Australian writing, but it will also consider the work of overseas authors.

The present site is a pilot that has been developed with the support of the Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney. To begin with, the Sydney Review of Books has been conceived as a free online publication, in order to maximise its reach. After the initial posting of essays, new critical articles will be added at weekly intervals over the next two months. The funding of such an initiative is beyond the resources of the Centre alone. In offering you this selection of high quality criticism, by some of the best critics and writers in the country, we hope to enlist your support as readers, and that of funding agencies and sponsors, to ensure that the Review can continue as a dynamic contributor to our literary culture.

If you like what you read here, if you feel that we are offering essays that you are unlikely to find elsewhere, please tell your friends, family, colleagues, students and fellow-students, everyone with an interest, to visit this site. And don’t forget to leave your email address, so that we can contact you with news of each update.

Letters to the editor are welcome.


James Leyeditor@sydneyreviewofbooks.com

For further information about the SRB’s rationale see James Ley’s interview in Meanjin.

Novel Workshop in Ohio

International Ear & Sound Day in Ireland

*3X DISTILLED,
8:00 p.m.,
3 March 2013,
Smock Alley Theatre,
Dublin, Ireland

_____________________________________


Join us on International Ear and Sound Day
for three unique live performances in the
Boys School at Smock Alley Theatre, each
featuring a collaboration by a poet and a
sound artist. Scheduled as part of the
Collaborations Festival 2013, this show
will include experimental sound performances
by poets Kit Fryatt, Annemarie Ní Churreáin,
and Christodoulos Makris, with sound artists
Elizabeth Hilliard, Ed Devane, Keith Lindsay.

_____________________________________


Entrance €5 (Tickets available on the door)
For additional information ...
E-mail : Creativeceardlann@gmail.com
http://www.facebook.com/events/427916617284437/
http://wurmimapfel.net/

Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings Next Monday

Events: Monday Salon

Ali Alizadeh

 

When: Monday the 4th of March, 2013; 7:30pm
Where: Evening Star, corner of Cecil and York Streets,
South Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Cost: Free Entry

Port Phillip Gilgamesh Readings invites you to their Salon on Monday.
Ali Alizadeh will be reading from his upcoming novel transactions,
and Matt Hetherington will be discussing “Haiku.”
The MC for the evening is Steve Smart.

Drinks and tapas are available at fair prices, and there is
an open mic section.

This information is courtesy of John Leonard Press.

Nature Writing Prize Shortlist Announced!

 

The Nature Conservancy Australia is delighted to announce the shortlist for the second biennial Australia Nature Writing Prize. The inaugural Australia Nature Writing Prize was awarded in 2011 to Annamaria Weldon for her piece 'Threshold Country'. The winner of this $5,000 biennial prize will be announced on Wednesday 13th March in Melbourne. Short listed for this year's award are: Liam Davison Lindsay Simpson Margaret Barbalet Stephen Wright Tamsin Kerr The competition's judges Geordie Williamson—literary critic with The Australian—and Dr Janine Burke, distinguished biographer, art historian and author of The Nest, found the standard of entries so extraordinarily high that determining the short list was a significant challenge. Congratulations to our shortlisted applicants and to everyone who submitted an essay. Stay tuned for the winner next month! Click here to learn more about the prize and our work in Australia.

ODE TO THE BEETLE THAT DROPPED ON YOU - by Glen Phillips

(or, a revelation under the Writers Tent)

Later I saw it limping in the grass,

but still strenuously struggling on

while first-time authors questioned

earnestly the great poet, celebrated

still, despite mane of silver and Johnny

Walker hue. He swept up microphone

from the platform’s trestle table, announced:

My gift also is my awful burden. Sooner

would I squeeze drops of blood from my

fair forehead than write, to order, some

subtle ode to sunsets! Look upon me

and look upon my slim but mighty

volumes and despair! Just then I saw

your beetle suddenly fly into the air,

circle once above nodding heads and

perch on that noble lorikeet brow.

                                                Glen Phillips