My Career As A Failed Poet - Part One
Below is a poem I wrote in my teens. It is not one of the poems I submitted to New American Library (as I mentioned in this post ) because nobody I showed it to, not even those few people who said they liked it, seemed to understand that it WAS A JOKE. I intended it as a satire of ... well I'll let you try to figure out what I was trying to satirize. I considered titling it AntiSonnet, by the way. You tell me if time has improved this bugger:
Transfinite Poem
Because we must prepare some sort of clearing
Where the new Numbers may safely disembark
We work all night, sometimes nervously peering
Up -- into the indivisible Dark.
The Numbers, we are told, will not resemble
Ideas of Sets of oranges or curves.
We must not stand to close as they assemble -
The merest whiff of us might bruise their nerves.
We cannot say what Systems of Equations
Apply to them; we must not think we know.
We may be awed, we may have reservations,
But THEY, we hope, oblivious, will grow...
Grow more complex, more beatiful each second --
but, given what they are, this can't be reckoned.
Comments
I wanted to comment more on the diversity, yet cohesion, of your recommended book selections. Very interesting. I certainly have food for thought with these.
Now, about the poem. I have, as I stated before, no idea what the intent of it, but if you want straight translation my daughter is a math major. She could probably do more justice to this than anyone else I know. Now that would be sarcasm, not satire!
Sheryl:
Thanks for your feedback -- about the books and about the poetry. Even sarcasm is welcome.
I think the fact that I chose to talk in math gobbledygook scares people off. You don't really need to know anything about mathematics, all you have to know is that numbers can't smell, can't "disembark". You can't really stand "too close" to numbers.
What I was trying (and failed) to satirize was the human inability to deal with abstractions in their own terms; we always tend seem to have to think of them in concrete terms, usually by anthropomorphizing. On the one hand it allows us to think about them more easily but on the other it leads us to attribute some ridiculous qualities to those abstractions if we are not careful.
As it happens, a couple of decades after I wrote the poem, George Lakoff and Mark Johnsone came out with several books about what they call Conceptual Metaphor Theory which explore the phenomenon in great detail. They are among the books in my list: Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy In The Flesh, With Rafael Nunez, Lakoff has written a book (which I have not yet read) entitled Where Mathematics Comes From which try to show how human beings move from very basic, concrete concepts (like measuring things with sticks or making collections of things) to difficult abstract concepts such as "infinity". I'm going to have to read that book.
Even though an advanced understanding of math isn't really necessary to understand this poem -- it just seems like it is -- if your daughter ever chooses to read the poem I'd be interested to know what she thinks, good or bad.
Your choice of subjects didn't scare me off but it does give me pause as I understand so little of the terminology. Math is NOT one of the things in life that makes sense to me. Funny both my kids are really 'into' it.