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27 February 2004. Today's entry will be a break from my pontificating. It features my latest mathemaku, "Mathemaku for Crag Hill": 
This is one I started almost three years ago with a sketch I made 28 April 2001. I had the day off from subbing today so I decided to use my time with Paint Shop finally to finish it. As is my custom when making mathemakuical homages, I stole something major from the victim, in this case his transforms device--i.e., the portrait of one word or concept's evolution, step by step, into a second. The device was not invented by Crag, but I think he is the first to make major use of it--improvingly. The two concepts I used are similar to the kind Crag often uses. They were set from the start. I had only a vague idea of what my quotient would be--some sort of abstract-expressionist image, I thought. I had ".0005NOW" as my divisor and ".0005ONG" as my remainder. I liked them a lot, but switched them with each other because I couldn't see how ".0005ONG" could turn something near "thought" into "thought." Something harder was needed, or more abstract--like ".0005now," which has the added advantage of suggesting coldness, and of being able to freeze.
I made a attempt at an abstract-expressionist Paint Shop image for the quotient but gradually came to feel neither it nor any similar image would do. I needed something very solid to multiply by ".0005ONG" to get "feeling" hardening into "thought." The very obvious "STONE" plunked down in my . . . thought. It made ".0005ONG" seem too clever, or arch, so I dropped it for the very basic "sky. I undecimalled ".0005NOW" as no longer necessary for a sort of rhyme and also perhaps over-clever. I kept the "5," though, so as to keep "now" times "5," which I like--and to mathematize the word a tick. Since it's only a remainder and small, I didn't feel its cleverness would work against the over-all High Seriousness of the poem.
Forgive me, but I consider it very damned good, at the moment. I find it, on reflection, to be strongly influenced by the minimalist poems of Robert Lax, one of my favorite poets. One wouldn't think the use of a single, very commonplace word that another poet has used as a borrowing, but in the case of my poem's "stone," I think it is. I may have used it even if I'd never read anything by Lax, and I didn't think of his work when I chose it. But my use of it as a single, free-standing image in a poem with very little other words in it, is strongly Laxian, I think. Furthermore, "stone" is a key word in a poem by Lax that I analyzed in one of my essays. (I think it rare that I write an essay about a poem without stealing something important from what I've written about. Which demonstrates the value of poets' (if perhaps only those with a head for it) closely analyzing the work of other poets they admire.) Actually, on looking up Lax's poem, "Poem I," I find that Lax doesn't use "stone," but "the stone." So I'm more original than I thought! Wait--actually he uses "the stone" only in the beginning of his poem, alternating it with "the sea"; then he uses "stone" and "water." (The five different words mentioned are the only ones he uses in this poem, nonetheless managing with them to cover pretty much all of existence.) So I can't claim much originality, at all.
My poem shares Lax's poem's concern with archetypal dichotomies, too, mine veering from his only slightly, I think, by employing "sky" instead of "the sea" or "sea," and adding the parallel dichotomy that "feeling" and "thought" make up. (Question which I can't answer: which is more associated with thought, which with feeling, between "stone" and "sky?") Whatever small originality my poem may have, I'll be satisfied if it has caught at least some of the final serenity and inter-relatedness of all things that I feel is at the core of Lax's poem.
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