Embedding Maths in Poetry

This term I'm doing a teaching course at my local FE college. It's been very interesting so far, and because it's not subject-specific, I've met people who are teaching or training in widely differing subjects - Hairdressing, Health and Safety, Catering, Safeguarding, Personal Training and many others. In one of our assignments, we had to give examples of we would embed 'functional skills' into our own subject area.

Functional skills are English, Maths and ICT - and apparently we're pretty bad at them in the UK, so the Government wants teachers to take every opportunity they can to give learners the opportunity to use them. And - here's the rub - 'embedding' means the students don't notice you're doing it!

So, how on earth do I embed Maths in Creative Writing? After a lot of head scratching (and asking fellow poets for ideas) I came up with the following:

• Discussing word and syllable counts - simple, but counting is a maths skill
• Multiplying stanza length and number of stanzas to ascertain a desired line count
• Using Dadaist  and OULIPO  techniques to generate poems and discussion on probability and mathematical generation of material
• Discussion of the influence on poetry of Fibonnacci and the Golden Ratio
• Talking about probabilities and percentages in relation to the chances of getting published!

I'm sure there are many more, but it took me quite a while to get even these. But after I'd handed in my assignment, I remembered that the title of this blog comes from relating poetry to maths - you can read about it in my very first post, here. It turns out I've been embedding maths in my own musings about poetry for quite a while...

"Mandel zoom 00 mandelbrot set". Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Can I Do It? A Daily Blogpost for November

It's November, so lots of my friends are doing NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month. For the next 30 days my Facebook and Twitter feed will be full of posts about word counts and late nights, caffeine consumption and character creation. One of these days I will do it myself - after all, I have got two unfinished novels languishing on my hard drive - but I'm a bit committed at the moment, so it's not going to be this year.

This morning, though - just in time - I discovered there is an alternative! Thanks to Josephine Corcoran, I now know of the existence of NaBloPoMo: National Blog Posting Month. I'm not a very consistent blogger, as anyone running their eye down my archive will quickly discover. In fact, there hasn't been a single blog post for October this year (oh, the guilt). So it would be quite a challenge for me to post every day.

Is it a challenge to which I am equal? Only time will tell. But I'm going to give myself a few guidelines to make it more likely:

• Posts can be short. Even very short.
• Posts can consist just of a picture and a caption as long is it's at least tangentially relevant to the theme of this blog.
• If I have some spare time I can plan a few posts in advance.
• If I'm stuck I can use some of the prompts here and here, and any others I might find - as long as I make them relevant.

So, here's the plan. I'll take on the challenge. I might even succeed...

Well, that's Day 1 done. Anyone going to join me? 

Here's One I Prepared Earlier: The Fair Toxophilites

First published in Iota 80

The Fair Toxophilites, a painting by the Victorian artist William Powell Frith, depicts three finely dressed young women engaged in archery. It is part of the collection at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum in Exeter. When I wrote the poem in 2007, I was struck by the intensity of the main figure, and the way her clothes seemed at odds with what she was doing. It felt to me that the artist was not thinking at all about her thoughts or character, but more about the dress she was wearing. However, it also seemed to me that, in spite of this, some of her determination had made its way through his brush-strokes. So the poem became a comment on the way Victorian women were socially and physically constrained.

Today, looking for a link to the picture to post here, I found that RAMM's website has now got some information about the artist and the painting. And I discovered that I was right about Frith's attitude to the subjects. He decided to paint the picture after seeing some 'lady-archers' at the seaside, whose 'feats' had 'amused' him. He used his daughters, Alice, Fanny and Louisa, as models, and commented that 'the subject was trifling and totally devoid of character interest', but the clothes would be a record of 'the female habiliments of the time'. Well, he was right about the clothes, but I think the picture tells us a lot more than that, even if that wasn't at all his intention. I wonder what became of Alice of the determined jaw.

Chapbooks and Marc Woodward's 'A Fright of Jays'

I've just come across Maquette, a Devon-based publisher of chapbooks. Their list is small but, judging by the two pamphlets I've read so far, excellent. They have published four:  Kelvin Corcoran's Radio Archilochus, Jos Smith's A Plume of Smoke, Sally Flint's The Hospital Punch and Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays.

I like chapbooks and pamphlets. They create a different reading experience from that of a full collection: tighter and more focussed. The poet has the opportunity to explore a theme or subject in depth without it becoming overwhelming. Poems are able to 'talk' to each other more intimately. And they're not so heavy to carry around!

You can find my review of Marc Woodward's A Fright of Jays, here at Canto Poetry.

The Invisible Girl by EE Nobbs

First of all, I have to come clean - I know the poet whose book I'm recommending here. But that's not why I'm writing about it - I'm writing about it because it's great!

Elly Nobbs' The Invisible Girl won the 2013 Doire Press Competition, and reading it, one can see why. Her poetry is rooted in rural Canada, with poems about family, and cattle, and collecting firewood; but it zooms its way through science and science fiction as well, in poems ranging from the microscopic (amoebae) and the infinite (space).

In Re-Write, she raises questions about reality and truth; and what a poem is, and what it's for. The poem recounts a family disaster when the cows died, but starts

We're supposed to lie in poems:
so here's one 

Threading the poem through with repetitions of 'I suppose', and the dreadful concrete details of the cows' suffering -

...their stomachs
blew up like olive green balloons

and her father

stuck their bellies with Mom's carving knife,
let out the fermented gas, called the vet -
who couldn't help. Kaput. Like that.

- the speaker holds off till the very end to reveal which part of her story was the lie.

In The Cure, the small world of the speaker echoes the smallness of our everyday experience:

Days are like zoos. It's unnatural
and tiresome under the grey microscope
in this tiny room where I get paid 

to tally invisible dead
insects in brine...

but in Space Ship Captain, the poem from which the collection's title is taken, when a girl is assigned the task to

                    ...sort
invisible bits of
things into piles -
one room's for wings
with black holes; 

nonsclerotized bits with no pronotums
must go some-
where else

she decides to do something else with the bits, and makes herself an 'Apollo Saturn V rocket'. By Act II the 'Invisible Girl' is breaking into NASA, and by the end, she's off on her travels, and, at least to herself, invisible no more.

This collection is sparkling with wit and weirdness, and at times as playful as a puppy, but its concerns are deep and universal. It's a magical collection, and well worth ordering all the way from Canada. As Bill Greenwell says, 'Elly Nobbs writes like Emily Dickinson on Mescalin'. Who could ask for more?

The Invisible Girl is available here.

Epithalamium and The Poetry School

I'm very pleased to have a poem of mine here on the Poetry School's Campus website. It's a poem that had its roots in my daughter's wedding four years ago. My future son-in-law being an animal lover, the couple decided to theme their tables around animals that mate for life. Four years later, on a course tutored by the award-winning poet Steve Ely (Oswald's Book of Hours and Englaland are published by Smokestack) one task was to write an Epithalamium, a poem celebrating marriage. The brief was wide: it could be ironic, subversive, surreal, or an un-ironic and joyful celebration. This was the result, and I was delighted to be asked to share it on Campus .

'Epithalamium in Twenty Six Creatures' is very different from most of the stuff I've been writing recently; but that's the joy of courses and workshops - they can send you off in unexpected directions. And they're also great if, like me, you're recovering from a bit of a block!

In my commentary on the poem I talk about riddles. If you're interested, here's an early blogpost of mine (from 2011) on the subject of that and much more!

The 'Voices' Anthology

In Anthony Wilson's fantastic new anthology 'Lifesaving Poems' (Bloodaxe, 2015), there is a poem called 'The Picnic', by the American poet John Logan. Anthony recounts how this was the poem which was his gateway into the world of poetry, when an inspired English teacher read it aloud to his class of schoolboys. And when I heard Anthony read this poem at the Bodmin Moor poetry festival I had an instant flashback to my own school days.

I was thirteen - in what would now be called Year 8 - and the Lower School English Monitor. This role consisted of keeping the English stock room tidy, and had the work-related benefit of being able to spend every lunch time ensconced in a book paradise. It was a small room, in an old Victorian granite building with high church-like windows; every wall was covered with shelves upon which were stacked all the books that might be used in the first two years of the school.

To be honest, keeping the room tidy didn't take very long. So I spent most of each lunch-time reading. I often found the playground a difficult place - books were much more reliable companions. And the book to which I kept going back was a poetry anthology: Voices, the third book, edited by Geoffrey Summerfield. Before Voices, I had loved poetry, but the poetry I loved had been very limited. I'd been brought up on AA Milne and Lewis Carroll, with quite a bit of Kipling; I knew Allingham's Fairies in their rushy glen, and William Brighty Rands' 'The Pedlar's Caravan'. I had the 1973 Oxford Book of Children's Verse, (edited by the wonderful Opies) but that ended with Eliot's cats and a verse by Ogden Nash. I'd read and had read to me lots of poetry - but nothing like the poems contained between the covers of this book, with its picture of a candle-lit skull, and a moth perilously close to the flame.

I had never read anything like it before. This was real, grown-up stuff, stuff that hit me in places I didn't know I had. The poems seemed to encapsulate all I needed to know. Philip Larkin’s ‘Days’: such simple language, and the first time I had come across a poem which didn't tell me everything but made me realise it myself.  Wole Soyinka’s ‘Telephone Conversation’: just that, a conversation, shockingly introducing me, a child from the exclusively white society of rural Cornwall, to the reality of racism.  Thom Gunn’s ‘Jesus and his Mother’ which extended, and made me question, all I had taken for granted about religion. Suddenly I was reading Auden, Heaney, Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Denise Levertov, Wilfred Owen, Ted Hughes and many, many others. Charles Causley, Miroslav Holub, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Carl Sandburg: they all spoke to me, to me directly, through those black and white pages. A lot of them didn't rhyme, a lot used very plain language, some were instantly accessible, others took a bit more work. But they all set my head on fire.

Wole Soyinka (photo of Soyinka by Roger Mayne)

And there was 'The Picnic' by John Logan. This was a poem about teenagers. People not much older than me. Here, in this book. Not patronising, or didactic, or diminishing the experience of youth through the filter of the adult gaze. Just the words, freighting the experience of a life that a thirteen year old could imagine as their own.

Radio 4 once had a series called 'The Tingle Factor', in which musical, artistic, and literary personalities shared the things which made the hairs on the back of their neck stand on end. Hearing Anthony read 'The Picnic', I now know that this poem, along with Tchaikowsky's 5th Symphony, Beautiful South's 'Good as Gold' and several other pieces of music, has the Tingle Factor for me.

Voices is still one of my favourite anthologies. I bought my own copy during my teens and I still dip into it regularly. Now I am able to appreciate the skill of the editor, and the choice of challenging but incredibly apposite illustrations. 'The Picnic' is flanked by Edwin Morgan's 'Strawberries' and an anonymous C4/5th Chinese poem about a boy and a girl sent out to gather rushes and returning with none - a triptych of adolescent summers which to me as a teenage reader functioned almost like one of those triple mirrors one sees on dressing tables. Wilfred Owen's poems are preceded by Hardy, Hughes and Rosenberg on war, and then a six-page series of photographs of World War I: a pictorial narrative which concludes with pictures of a dead soldier and his horse, and a devastated town. Poems are also juxtaposed with art by Peter Blake, Elisabeth Frink, Hokusai, Hogarth and many others. Absolutely brilliant. Tingle-inducing indeed.

Last year I bought a second-hand copy for my thirteen year old niece. A quick peep into the Amazon Marketplace tells me that there are 47 copies on offer, mostly for a penny each plus postage.

Might I suggest buying two - one for yourself, and one for a Year 8 person you might know?

Peter Blake and Brian Patten

Emily Dickinson and Edvard Munch

Frink, Waley, Hopkins