Poetry Friday: In Praise of Math Poetry

Are you following college hoops? Me either. My heart belongs to football (Ravens!) and my body belongs to yoga.

Give me a wall, I'll stand upside down
and perpendicular for you any time.
www.wholeliving.com

My mind? I am exercising it by participating in March Madness Poetry, cunningly organized by the brilliant and technically prolific Ed DeCaria at Think, Kid Think.

What is March Madness Poetry? Ed explains the competition here.

I was nervous and excited to be selected as a March Madness Authlete. Then, the words were announced. I pulled the sixth seed word "perpendicular."

It's been nearly a year since my last
athletic escapade.

Thus began a mad race to find rhymes for my word: curricular, particular, extracurricular.

And near-rhymes: triangular, rectanuglar, octangular, crecpuscular, caterpillar. Caterpillar? An idea was hatching. But first, attempt #1 -- 9 PM. (Admission, I have revised this poem since.)

Posture Perfect

When Mom wants us to stand up straight

she stacks our heads with dish and plate

and makes us march us around the room

from suppertime to rise of moon.

“But I have homework!” I complain.

“Quadratic angles to explain.”

Standing perpendicular

is entirely extracurricular.

Laura Shovan

But I couldn't get the caterpillar out of my mind. Among my list of possible words for the poem are two notes: "inchworm: perpendicular caterpillar" and "inchworm in math class."  I must have been inspired by all those words ending in angular.

"Okay, inchworm," I thought. "Let's give you a try." Here is poem #2, written at about 9:30 PM.

http://school.discoveryeducation.com/clipart/clip/inchworm.html

Worm-ometry

Angles and hexagons curdle my brain when I sit in math class,

but do I complain? Not when my tutor decides to stop by

with legs at both ends and a poppy-seed eye.

He measures rectangular sides with green ease,

inching along each new problem he sees.

His middle points up, perpendicular line.

Since my tutor’s an inchworm, my grades are just fine.

Which my daughter quickly labeled "confusing." 

She wrote her own math poem. (Maybe next year, Ed will have a junior authlete division. Julia is already in training.)

90 Degrees

Perpendicular means ninety degrees.
No more, no less, if you're eager to please.
Use a straight edge and proceed with care
if you wish to make a perfectional square.
A protractor measures exactly precise
from point A to point B the degree -- it's quite nice.
Be careful to place the dot in the right place,
or your square could turn out to be a disgrace.

by Julia Shovan

I went to bed impressed with her work, a little defeated about mine, but hopeful.

And I dreamed of perpendicular. Not perpendicular things like chair backs and hand stands. No. I had dreams about the actual, mathematical word in all its clumsiness. Oy.

The next morning, I decided to revise "Worm-ometry." In the new poem, a kid tells us about his  math teacher, who is an inchworm.

(You can read the final poem, as entered in the March Madness Poetry tournament. Be sure to vote for your favorite!)

Just in case I was on the wrong track, I got out my trusty tin of postcards and wrote a FOURTH poem. I know. I am insane.

K51  This beautiful poem was written by Joseph B. Strauss,

engineer, artist, musician, poet and builder of the Golden Gate Bridge.

PUBLISHED BY “ZAN” STARKS, MILL VALLEY, CALIFORNIA●

LITHOGRAVURE BY H. S. CROCKER CO., INC.,

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA.

Mother to Son

I will take you

            to the Redwoods

                        before you’re grown and gone.

We’ll stand beneath

            their canopy, the trunks

                        ancient and strong.

How straight they reach

            from earth to sky,

                        in perpendicular groves.

My love is like

            the Redwoods, and

once planted, never moves.

Poetry Postcard #50 (View the postcard project wrap-up here.)

My daughter came home from school. She liked both new poems. I consulted with several sources. Their advice: go with math humor over heartfelt.

I thought I was ready to submit until  my husband got involved. He is a math brain, an engineer by training, and he hated the title. "Worm-Ometry" did not make sense to him. Our mathy son concurred.

I tore my hair out. Then, I said, "Aha! I will look up the scientific name of the inchworm." Which is GEOMETER.

Yes. My geometry-teaching inchworm would some day grow up to be a Geometer Moth. How is that for serendipity?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geometer_moth

Our Poetry Friday host is Jone at Check it Out. The March Madness Poetry entries are so fabulous, I hope you have some time to check out the perspicacious poets at work.