The math-art graffiti wall at The Bowery Poetry Club is taking shape.  (If you are reading this, you are invited to get down to the BPC and write some math-graffiti of your own!)

John Sims.



“Here is a poem I did with my NYU students in response to the Sol LeWitt / Adrian Piper show. Each student including myself wrote and recorded a small poem that was stitched together into a hyper poem. Visually each poem was mapped into a binary visualization of pi (see my pi quilt work — same idea). These crossword-looking forms were then mapped back into the original binary form (this gives a sense of self-similiarity as seen in fractals). Now, we created a model of this in animation space. The default flight path is associated with the sequence of pi in base two. As you travel over each section you will hear the voice of the student associated with that sub-poem. However the program allows for any path.” — John Sims

This Saturday, June 5, 2010, will be “Jack Foley Day” in Berkeley, California. On this day Jack Foley will receive a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Berkeley Poetry Festival .

Congratulations, Jack Foley.

Walking Across Brooklyn Bridge

by Jack Foley

As we walked across the Bridge,
  I thought of Hart Crane
    (poor suicidal poet)
      & of Joseph Stella
whose paintings are like chords struck
  on the harp strings
    of this amazing edifice
Crane saw The Waste Land
  as a condemnation
    of modern industrial society
      (“so negative”)
    His answer was
      this marvel
    of spidery, delicate cables
      which swoop us into skies
of unspeakable beauty
“sleepless as the river under thee”
(Eliot: “Fear death by water”)
  Our guide, Gregory,
quietly told us stories,
      raged against the sometimes reckless bikers,
        & watched our wonder
            as we walked
        across this passageway
        from busy life to busy life—
            this “between”
          suspended over water—
            that took us
            into the sky
          & home to Brooklyn

With Jack Foley in NYC, 2005.

My short novel, Stephen’s Lake, has been reviewed by Matt Margo for Goodreads.   Stephen’s Lake is published by xPress(ed) at Lulu.   Cover by Jukka-Pekka Kervinen.

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If you’re there or if you can make it to Seattle, The Seattle Group, featuring Joseph F. Keppler, is having a show at The Ouch My Eye Gallery. Joseph F. Keppler and I have collaborated on an e-chap, it is entitled, 3 Poems Introduced by Joseph F. Keppler.

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Tonight I made it over to Granary Books (on Mercer, in Soho) for a talk by one of our living masters, the remarkable Jerome Rothenberg. The occasion was an installment in an ongoing series of talks and presentations all to do with the phenomenon of the book and, on this particular occasion, of the book as it has appeared in the poetry and in the art of Professor Rothenberg and his collaborators, which have been co-publishers, co-editors, co-scholars, translators, artists and other poets. The setting was intimate and perfect, being close enough to hear every word and close enough to discern every facial expression. In addition to recounting his adventures, and sometimes larks and capers, as a poet self-publishing and publishing the works of others, and of the various types and productions of books ranging from the most economical to the most sophisticated and sumptuous, professor also spoke on ethnopoetics and on the dichotomy of the spoken word and the written word, of the presence in speech and of the absence in the printed. Several of his books were passed around for us to peruse. The one that made the deepest impression on me was entitled The Burning Babe & Other Poems, a collaboration with the artist Susan Bee.
















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Colin Wilson, author of The Outsider, The Occult, and Poetry and Mysticism, in 1956.  I had the pleasure of interviewing the magus back in 2006. Read the interview: Colin Wilson on poetry and the peak experience.

And here is the trailer for a new documentary on Colin Wilson.


More info here with Dennis Price at Eternal Idol.

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I'm beginning to brush up on all things "mathematical poetry." The Kaz Maslanka installation was a smashing success. (And it's so nice to be able to say "smashing success" and really mean it.) I'm excited to see what Kaz brings to the Rhythm of Structure event. And I'm excited at the prospect that Bob Grumman might be coming up from his home in FL. I've only met Bob once before and only briefly. Here is a link to an essay I wrote on Bob's "Mathemaku" poetry, it's entitled:

Notes on Bob Grumman's Mathemaku and on Mathematical Poetry Generally.

That essay will give you an idea of what I think of and of how I construe "mathematical poetry" (as basically a "making permanent of the transitory," which is what I maintain poetry does generally). Soon I'll post some samples of my own "mathematical poetry," along with a brief essay explaining it, and that'll be a sort of preview of the perspective or angle I'll be bringing to my responses to the "Mathematical Graffiti" at the Rhythm of Structure show. And I'll be posting about John Sims, the curator, mastermind and impresario behind this whole thing! So if you're reading this and you're at all interested, stay tuned. . . .



















Follow Rhythm of Structure on Facebook and at the Bowery Poetry Club.

Click here, please, for an article on the Rhythm of Structure series in Art in America and for a photo of John Sims with the former Poet Laureate Mark Strand.   And here, from an article in Nature, is John Sims on math and the arts:

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Last night I made it over to The LAB Gallery for the opening of Morgan O’Hara’s SPRING LAB, her latest site-specific drawing which is part of her ongoing “Live Transmissions” series.

“Live Transmissions” are made by a process in which O’Hara, with a pencil in each hand, records the left and right hand movements of an observed subject performing a task. Drawing methodically with multiple razor-sharp pencils and both hands, as time-based performance, O’Hara condenses movement into accumulations of graphite line. Such tasks have included knitting a sweater, a farmer’s wife digging up asparagus, a musician performing on piano and street pavers setting paving stones. The result is an abstracted map of the subject’s gestures.

“Movement of the hands of
 Conductor Riccardo Chailly” 
while conducting the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No 4. 
first movement, 
Carnegie Hall, New York City, 10 February 2000.

Here’s a video of the installation.

Morgan O’Hara

O’Hara’s works impress me as being neat and articulate.


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E·ratio Poetry Journal celebrates poetry with The Alan Halsey Interview.

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Visionary poet and mathematician Kaz Maslanka is bringing a special installation to NYC for The LAB Gallery at the Roger Smith (at 47th and Lex.). The installation will run from March 5th to March 26th, 2010, only.

Click here to see a “computer aided design mockup” showing the main structure of the installation.

Click here to read my interview with Kaz Maslanka.

Click here for Kaz Maslanka’s blog, Mathematical Poetry, and for updates and videos about the installation.





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a noun sing e·ratio 13 · 2010 · featuring the Alan Halsey interview

with poetry by Laynie Browne, Jill Jones, Jane Adam, Jeff Encke, Joseph F. Keppler, Mark Cunningham, Jadon Rempel, Keith Higginbotham, Anne Fitzgerald, and Halvard Johnson

e·ratio editions e-chaps by Travis Macdonald and Carey Scott Wilkerson

and featuring The Alan Halsey Interview

edited by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino



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In Poets and Artists January 2010 v3.1.

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Cover art by Eddy Burger for Cordite Poetry Review #31, EPIC. To see Eddy Burger's complete set of illustrations, click here.

Cordite 31: EPIC is edited by Ali Alizadeh. Read Ali Alizadeh's excellent editorial, here.

Read my poem, "The Archaeology of Palestine," here.

Cordite Poetry Review is directed by David Prater.


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from In White Writing by Alan Halsey


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This afternoon I had the pleasure of visiting at Granary Books (on Mercer, in Soho). What a thrill to be among such fine poetry, such fine books (art objects and artists’ books, “small edition books”), and such fine people. Thank you, Steve Clay, for welcoming me.

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