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23 September 2005: Today, a taxonomical puzzle:
The above is from Richard Kostelanetz's 1974 tabloid collection, Numbers: Poems & Stories. I love it. But what is it? Yes, I know: an oddity. But it is also an artwork, because presented as one (not just labeled as one, but put on a page and given a title. On the one hand, it's all numerals, so I don't want to call it a poem. On the other hand, numerals are words--i.e., "9" is the same as "nine" semantically, as much as "&" is "and." Furthermore, the numerals are terms involved in mathematical operations (although the mathematical operators, the plus and times signs, are not shown).
Taxonomically, the problem here is much the same as the one with visual poems that are all textual (although some of their texts are treated graphically) and those that have atextual graphics, as well. Off the top of my head, I propose that Kostelanetz's "Ambiguity" is a "solinumerical mathematical poem." Mathematical poems with words in them could be called "seminumerical." I continue to want to limit mathematical poems to those poems that carry out mathematical operations, as Kostelanetz's implicitly does. There probably needs to be a term indicating poems whose terms are in part or wholly anumerical, as in my long divisions of verbal or graphic images. "Sur-operandic mathematical poetry?" Am I kidding? Who knows?
In case it isn't clear, by the way, "Ambiguity" shows an addition reversing the product of two numbers, or a multiplication reversing the sum of two numbers--9 times 9 equals 81, for instance, while 9 plus 9 equals 81's palindrome, 18. And, in this case, the whole implicit equation--"18 = 9 9 = 81"--forms a numerical palindrome (as Nico Vassilakis reminded me shortly after I posted the previous version of this entry). A found order. For me, also, a near-visual/tactile experience of a machine see-sawing (eternally) back and forth between non-identical but correct "answers."
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