HEADSTUDIES

HEADSTUDIES
50 Years of Poetry

I suspect an elementary school teacher taught my class to write poetry, and I’ve been doing it ever since. My first poems were published when I was still in high school, and since then they’ve appeared in a number of publications including a cookbook! That was the Tomato poem (included in this volume).

Now the tomato poem has a strange story. I wrote it when I got back from a “salon” of sorts held by a journalist who had the idea of getting all the “interesting” people she’d interviewed together so we could meet and share our art with one another. It was a nice idea and a very interesting evening. One gentleman, however, was a poet who read a couple of his poems Well, I can’t begin to describe his method of delivery … it was a sort of cross between the sounds a cow would make if she was caught in a fence and someone giving birth to an extremely large baby sideways. I truly didn’t know if he was being funny and I should laugh, or he was serious and I should hide under a piece of furniture!

So I went home and wrote my own emotive piece of poetry. But it turned out to be pretty good. It’s actually been published four times, and it’s probably the sexiest piece of poetry about a tomato you’ll ever read.

Another poem, the sample below, was actually written as part of a college exam … it was an experimental class in mathematics taught by a genius of a teacher who took us exploring mathematical concepts in all kinds of unexpected places such as art, music, and the natural world. The school couldn’t stand it, BTW, and the class was discontinued, alas. (Libby, where are you?)

I don’t think many people actually read poetry, but if you want something interesting to leave in the bathroom for some intriguing short reading, try HEADSTUDIES

MATHEMATICS POETICALLY
I hope you can be suited
by a poem that’s computed
And writ not by pen, but machine.
Don’t depend on my meter,
sometimes stretching it’s neater,
Read on and you’ll see what I mean.

 When I write, it’s laborious
and often uproarious
when you read all the nonsense
I’ve said.
And don’t think I’m not willin’
to write like Bob Dylan,
I just can’t get inside of his head.

Still, it’s fun to relate
the contortions of fate
in arithmaticalistic design.
A mathematical beat
for numerical feet
with vibrations in parallel time.

 Now if I learn trigonometry
all those things astronomically
inter-related with everything real;
with calculus calculating,
logic logically relating,
Will it help me explain how I feel?

 Numbers are amazing!
Although sometimes they’re crazing,
their puzzles confusing
the muse in my mind,
who’s creating, conceiving
what now I believing …
oh, where are the answers I’m trying to find?

 Still light waves come swirling,
great galaxies curling
through purple, magenta, and blue in my head.
My eyeballs are tired, my muse has expired,
my circuits are scrambled,
I’m going to bed.