Ars poetica: hello!

[primeideal]

Hello! I'm primeideal, and I'll be sharing a few "ars poetica" poems I enjoy this week! :) A fair warning that there might not be much in the way of diversity among poets on offer (although I do hope to include some of my own poems towards the end, alongside published ones), but maybe I'll have a different range to choose later on.


Let's see, I guess I'll introduce myself as an aspiring mathematician. That might seem an odd way to get into poetry, but for me it reflects the emphasis that form and structure have in creating enjoyable poems. In the last few years I've had the fortune to study more poems in-depth and am very slowly developing an appreciation for, say, line breaks in free-er poems. But a lot of the poems I enjoy are somewhat reactionary and/or playful in their approach to other poems.

One style of poetry I've just been getting into are the metro poems of Jacques Jouet--poems mentally composed between train stops and written down, line by line, at stops. Again, this is a structure I probably won't be sharing this week, but it's another cool example of how interesting formal constraints can create new and (for me) engaging poems.

Hope you enjoy! Feel free to say hello in the comments and share suggestions. :)

(Admins, let me know if I've made a mess of the tagging!)

Comments

[lnhammer]

Math and poetry make sense to me.

---L, math and physics degrees.

[primeideal]

Sounds excellent! I enjoyed high school physics but unfortunately struggled to keep up at the college level.

[alee_grrl]

A connection between math and poetry makes a lot of sense to me. I will never really understand why people seem to think that maths and sciences have nothing to do with the arts. The head of my art department was a mathematician. I also attended a math, science and the arts boarding school (the only one in the U.S. to offer both math and science and the arts rather than splitting them into separate schools). It was great because we could combine our loves, and so often there was a great amount of crossover. I may have moved more heavily into the humanities and arts as I went through school, but to this day I still find math and science fascinating and beautiful.

The tags look fine to me. :)

[primeideal]

Good to hear re: tags. :) Had no idea that there was just one combined boarding school in the US, it seems important to me that students learn to draw on both sides! One of my choices will poke some fun at the unfortunate divide between arts and sciences...

[alee_grrl]

At least of the "specialist" boarding schools we were unique for having all three specialties. Louisiana School for Math, Science and the Arts is also fairly unique in that it is a public school, though I don't think it is the only public boarding school in the US. The divide between the arts and sciences is so very unfortunate. We have so much to learn and gain from each.

[lnhammer]

I will never really understand why people seem to think that maths and sciences have nothing to do with the arts.

In my experience, it is usually arts people who insist that they do, whereas science people will make frequent connections between the two. And, in general, understand the arts better than the sort of arts people that make those sorts of statements get science.

---L.

[alee_grrl]

In my experience, it is usually arts people who insist that they do, whereas science people will make frequent connections between the two.

Sadly very true.

I will admit that I don't always get the science behind things, and I most definitely don't always get the math.

[bookblather]

That metro poem idea fascinates me. Do you maybe have a link to a few of those poems, or are they not available online?

[primeideal]

Yeah, there's one here as part of a long Jouet section: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?GCOI=15647100508100&fa=customcontent&extrasfile=A1261237-B0D0-B086-B63E9B256309BA11.html

If you have JSTOR access, try this article as well. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3685757

[bookblather]

Thank you very much! As soon as I find my university ID I'll read that second one.