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24 April 2004. Today, I got invited to submit some mathemaku to a zine called The Canary. As expected, they could not afford to publish works in color, so I decided to see how my "Long Division into Poetry" series looked in black and white. Some looked fine, some not so hot. I think the very first may look better in color than in black and white:
Another craft lesson I learned--or, better, relearned--was the value of trying to explain one's work (except while in the act of composition). This happened while I was riding to a poetry reading I turned out to be a week early to, which is nothing unusual for me. I had brought a framed copy of the poem below:
I had a forty minute ride (to very close to where I substitute teach), so lots of time to think about what I would say about this poem to the people I expected to be showing it to. I was bothered, because I at first couldn't make great sense of the poem, though I was fairly confident it made some kind of sense. It was intended, as I believe I indicated in an earlier entry to my blog, to suggest love at first sight. But would it? I told myself that the heart in the upper left should make a benecipient consider "predestination" to mean "romantic predestination." All the rest would follow.
Sure. The divisor, "her dress" (all aflutter), would work with that, but what about the rest of the poem? The dividend was supposed to suggest some kind of final near-stasis, with "ocean" representing a state almost as geometrically eternal though properly emotionally roiled. The remainder, "r ck," was intended to add more stability to "ocean," to get it equal to the dividend. I thought the absent "o" brilliant but couldn't say why.
After much thought, I decided that I would call the poem, "Mathemaku No. 60: Love At First Sight" (as I think I half-decided I would when I composed the previous version of it). I liked the dividend as a near-stasis (made blithe by circles) and whatever else might be read into it, but felt it should be more pure, so redid it today without an aura. The remainder still worked for me by providing "ocean" with greater weight and over-all sameness, but I never was able to figure out what the point of the missing "o" could be, so dumped it. I wanted to replace it with something offbeat, though, so eventually went with an over-sized period--stasis, right? Which just now reminds me that this is not the first period I've substituted for an "o" in a poem--but it's the first giant "o" I've used!
I hope the result of my changes is an improvement feel I improved my poem, but who knows. (I do think the big blue period very effective visually.)
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