26 March 2004. Today I'm posting four more mathemaku from "Doing Long Division on Poetry." The first is the opening variation on my sequence's first mathemaku; the other three are from my subsequence for the fifth main mathemaku in my sequence. Only one of the mathemaku involved is "new," and even it is just a minor variation on its source. The other three are ones I posted a few days ago, then slightly modified. With the four, this record of "Doing Long Division on Poetry" is now entirely up-to-date.

I hope to continue adding to the sequence, but right now it's at an impasse. I could make more variations for it of the kind I've been making, moderately interesting ones, too-but it would be hard. I bring this up because I think I share a trait with certain other creative artists who seem to others too quickly to get bored with what they're doing. Once they establish a fruitful route to whatever it is they're after as artists, they drop it and either frantically search for some new route, or do nothing. For them and me, full exploitation of an established route seems hardly worth doing. Let others do that.

This, by the way, is why I sometimes seem--and probably am, in part and/or at times--contemptuous of those who spend their artistic careers in received forms, using nothing but received techniques. Sometimes they succeed wondrously well, but most of the time even the best of them seem not to go anywhere as poets, although they may have interesting new information to impart. I tend to feel superior to those who stay with their own original forms, too--unless they continually find new techniques to freshen it with (as John M. Bennett does in what strikes me as his main original form, which is a sort of admirably debased sonnet--but he overflows into all kinds of other forms, too, and may even have once or twice wrote real poums).

I'm not sure what I'm going to try next. Possibly some kind of representationalism. I'm incapable of any kind of competent photo-realism, but am semi-skilled at cartooning, so may try working people into my mathemaku. We'll see.