Just after (or maybe just before) I came up with it, I got thinking about the word, "poetry," spelled with a zero replacing its o. That would be another specimen of poetry with a number in it that I feel no sensible person would want to call a mathematical poem. A main reason I thought of it, by the way, was that an e.mail from Karl Young that I'd just read spoke for a while on an amusing poem he once wrote but didn't know how to make effective: "0K." The font I'm using will not show it, but the first symbol is a zero.

To make my zero in "poem" obvious, I put a countdown above it--as I thought to do for Karl's poem but thought would not make sense for it, but which makes sense to show "poem" as a kind of blast-off. The first ten lines of the work below are what first resulted. It seemed perfectly to represent a counting poem, but not a mathematical poem, as I don't consider counting a form of mathematics. (I think I'd make two subclasses of numerical poems if I had time to really taxonomize, one for those that have passive numbers, and one for those with active numbers, numbers that count, for instance; passively numerical poetry and actively munerical poetry.)

At some point, with zero bouncing around in my Imagination, I realized I could make it ascend to value by giving it a zero exponent. The simple poem "zero to the power of zero" came into being. I soon fused it with my countdown poem--to make the latter, in my opinion, a mathematical poem since it should force a reader into the equation, "zero to the power of zero equals one." In any case, I like the poem that resulted.