Poetry and Arithmetic
My brother just sent me a link to, and I just read: “Chaos in Fourteen Lines”: Reformations and Deformations of the Sonnet by Annie Finch
For the most part I like the article. I knew about the Italian and Shakespearian sonnet forms, and about the volta and the quatrains and the couplet and so on. I didn’t know too much about sonnet forms apart from those two.
Mostly the example sonnets are enjoyable, but I do think Ms. Finch goes a bit far. I definitely believe that sonnets have a certain something and that that something is big. Just that she’s a bit overzealous in finding connections to other even bigger things….
One example: Ms. Finch is not good at arithmetic. That is to say, she starts talking about the Golden Mean (I think she means the Golden Ratio, see Wikipedia’s entry on the Golden Ratio), the ratio seen in nature, implying that there is something numerological and vast and universal and almost spiritual about the form of the sonnet with its 6 and 8 division, but wait, the last couplet is sometimes separated out so the numbers are … 6:8:12. (Okay, so the Shakespearian form of 4,4,4,2 version doesn’t fit this cosmological connection she’s discovered, but hey). But okay, we’ll overlook all that. The only real problem is that the numbers she uses 6:8:12 to show the ratio, to prove her argument don’t hold true in any way. If you use 12, the ratio is wrong and even if she had used 14, perhaps the number she should have used (6+8), it still isn’t right.
The proportion is:
(a+b)/a = a/b
(8+6)/8 does not equal 8/6
On a different note, at one point she says, “Paul Oppenheimer makes a convincing argument that because the sonnet allowed room to struggle with oneself, it marks not only the beginning of modern poetry, but the beginning of the modern idea of our ’self’ as having a complex internal life.” Whoa. I guess I should do some research and read Oppenheimer, because I gotta figure that people way before sonnets were written in English, way before there was English, there were people thinking that we had a “complex internal life.” Didn’t people like Plato and Lao Tzu imagine a “complex internal life”? They were probably too busy doing math.
So, I may be way off on that last bit, that it’s only in the modern era that we are special enough to think ourselves to be internally complex, but I’m pretty sure about the arithmetic part.
I need to first read some Paul Oppenheimer and see if he can support his view of ancient thought and fuzzy math. And then perhaps I need to write a sonnet that does some fancy math that proves an impossibility, something like the lyrics to “I’m my own grandpa”, and have it published in the Contemporary Poetry Review.
