Bob of All Bobs

Bob Grumman not only has a blog, a worthwhile read in itself -- his open-hearted, personable readings of poems, poets, and poetries has been a delight for twenty years now -- he's posting absolutely stunning samples of mathemaku he's finished since February. Check out where two unlikely cast members -- mathematics and haiku (and maybe hay(na)ku) -- come together. He also has a link to "Doing Long Division on Poetry," a gorgeous series of poems using long division as a frame, an armature, through/from which to explore the nature/s of poetry. Bravo Bob!

(Question for the Bob: are the paintings, glyphs, drawings, collages in the poems your work, too? Done separately and then joined with the long division or created in the process of the division? Many of those works stand by themselves)

Comments

[Bob Grumman]

29 March. My blog is only two months old but already I'm forgetting a lot about what's there. For instance, yesterday I toured the mathemaku I have in my gallery there and realized that the graphics in them that Crag was asking me about are often simply backgrounds to the mostly verbal long division examples that are the important parts of the mathemaku. I then remembered that in making the designs, I was just trying for interesting colors and shapes, then not so much trying to deliver a mathemaku out of each one as trying to make a mathemaku having something emotionally in common with it. To "clarify." --Bob G.

[Bob Grumman]

Hey, thanks for the plug, Crag! I visit and enjoy your blog quite a bit but needed Geof Huth to tell me about this entry of yours on me. I had asked him why I got 39 whole hits on 25 March. I average about 6 a day. He suggested you sent 'em. Here's the funny thing: the 39 were for my homepage, but less than ten visitors went to my gallery to look at my mathemaku. But maybe they all looked at some of my entries which also have mathemaku. As for your question, the way I've mostly been working recently, I make a glyph, collage, or some kind of graphic, usually, then try to work a mathemaku out of it. I usually try to think of two verbal quantities that might equal it if multiplied together. For a while, I was just playing with Paint Shop, then throwing almost any old words in to make some kind of mathemaku. Sometimes, though, the words came first. I almost always want to have colored images in my mathemaku now, so add them. The graphics in the work at my blog are all mine, as far as I remember. One I put up just yesterday (27 March) was originally a stand-alone, but I wanted to "improve it." I find myself no longer satisfied with works that don't combine the verbal, mathematical and visual. Yet I know that that is foolish--a work that does just one thing can be just as good. All art comes down to add, subtract, distort, or some combination thereof, with no best procedure. Bob