and & and
By banalasanything
an equation’s unusual beauty
borderline tropes and borders
and lines and the curvature and
hooks of glyphs, xs and ys and
the pivots of ‘of’ and ‘and’ or
the equals and equivalences:
a deep feeling for the way we
measure, or don’t measure, and
measure.
This entry was posted on August 25, 2008 at 8:24 am and is filed under algebra, geometry, language, poetics, translation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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September 18, 2008 at 5:19 am |
Hi Astrid,
Thanks for this. I am doing some writing and thinking on George Oppen and there is something in this that plays into it. An idea of the pivot in his lines (I think Bernstein uses the word hinge). And, of course, thinking of ‘Of Being Numerous’. Of ‘ofs’ and ‘ands’. It goes a way towards what I stumblingly noted about the paratactic and prepositions (and connectives) in my talk at the Trace conference.
Hope all is well and Newcastle is fun. I may be back in Sydney at least once in October and certainly late November.
Cheers,
J
September 18, 2008 at 5:33 am |
thanks jill! i’m really glad you’ve found something useful here. it’s very interesting that you come to it via oppen, a poet who for some reason i am shamefully unfamiliar with and yet feel a deep, prophetic affection for. i have, as you may tell, been reading a lot about geometry and algebra and have been inspired by the material aspects of mathematical language.
& yes, i can see what you were talking about in terms of your paper at the trace. from memory, there was the discussion of poetical movement — parataxis as its own form of non-euclidean or multi-dimensional geometry, perhaps.
i am very excited to see you in syd in oct, i hear whispers about a reading, looking forward to it. i hope things are going well in adelaide.
cheers
a