Adrienne Rich: Mathematician

Here’s a post by Ben Orlin at Math With Bad Drawings:

In 2017, when I was writing my book on calculus, I fell deep into Rich’s poetry. Calculus sets geometry and algebra in motion; it is a leap from the static to dynamic. That’s precisely the sort of leap that Rich’s poems bring to life. …

This math-to-feminist-poetry connection might not seem obvious, or, for that matter, entirely respectful of Rich’s depth. But I’m hopeful that Rich herself would have embraced it. Though she devoted her life to poetry and politics, she saw a crucial role for the quantitative, too. “We might hope to find the three activities—poetry, science, politics—triangulated,” she wrote, “with extraordinary electrical exchanges moving from each to each.” …

… But I want to leap ahead to the final section of the poem, which begins:

Interior monologue of the poet:
the notes for the poem are the only poem

What Rich is saying–or what I hear her saying–is that the final draft of the poem itself is never as true or as beautiful as the initial notes you make for it. The printed thing lacks the spontaneity, the freshness, of those first notes.

But then, just a few lines later, she modifies this thought, refining the initial meaning, nudging us deeper:

the mind of the poet is the only poem

Ah, so it’s not the notes themselves. It’s the frame of mind in which the poet wrote those notes. It’s the inner experience.

But then, Rich revisits this thought a third time, ending the poem with one of the most famous lines she ever wrote, one that I clumsily borrowed as an epigraph for my calculus book:

the moment of change is the only poem

***

There you go! Change — that’s why Ben thought about this with regard to Calculus. I appreciate the way Ben shows, in many of his posts, that he appreciates and loves both language and math. Neat post if you would like to see the “bad drawings.”

This is part of the description from his calculus book:

Change is the Only Constant is an engaging and eloquent exploration of the intersection between calculus and daily life, complete with Orlin’s sly humor and memorably bad drawings. By spinning 28 engaging mathematical tales, Orlin shows us that calculus is simply another language to express the very things we humans grapple with every day — love, risk, time, and most importantly, change. Divided into two parts, “Moments” and “Eternities,” and drawing on everyone from Sherlock Holmes to Mark Twain to David Foster Wallace, Change is the Only Constant unearths connections between calculus, art, literature, and a beloved dog named Elvis. This is not just math for math’s sake; it’s math for the sake of becoming a wiser and more thoughtful human.

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