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From: will.dockery@gmail.com (W.Dockery)
Newsgroups: alt.arts.poetry.comments,rec.arts.poems
Subject: Re: Dorothy Livesay -- Mathematics poem
Date: Thu, 27 Feb 2025 18:12:34 +0000
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On Wed, 6 Sep 2023 3:04:23 +0000, David Dalton wrote:

> On Sep 5, 2023, Faraway Star wrote
> (in article<5256550e-666f-4377-b352-6883b3734ce0n@googlegroups.com>):
>
>> On Friday, September 1, 2 023 at 12:44:01 AM UTC-4, David Dalton wrote:
>>>
>>> Here is a poem by Dorothy Livesay from her book
>>> of selected poems, The Self-Completing Tree.
>>>
>>> --------------
>>> Mathematics
>>>
>>> I want to play the great game, darling
>>> but only you can play it to perfection:
>>> Much talk..no bed. Some talk..some bed
>>> no talk..all bed; and talk tomorrow.
>>>
>>> I meant to play the great game, darling
>>> and hold your bones deep to the root of one
>>> I meant to play the great game, darling
>>> but the heart for it is gone.
>>> -----------------
>>>
>>> How do you interpret the poem? In my book I
>>> wrote down lemniscate root of one, perhaps
>>> related to my theory of lemniscate time, but I
>>> have crossed it out. I also wrote down eighth root
>>> of one, where one can be expressed as
>>> e^{2*n*pi*i}, and there are eight eighth roots of one
>>> (there are one two square roots, 1 and -1).
>>>
>>> Of course the heart could also be a cardioid.
>>>
>>> I’ll think about it some more but just wanted to
>>> put it forward for discussion for now.
>>>
>>> Is anyone else on here familiar with Dorothy Livesay?
>>>
>>> Followup-To set to alt.arts.poetry.comments .
>>
>> Second read, quite good...!
>
> In the printed poem there are some spaces (of more than
> one blank space) that aren’t reproduced in my post
> since my newsreader Hogwasher converts all instances
> of more than one blank space in a row to just one,
> and deletes any blank space at the start of a line.

Yes, the different newsreaers and portals throughout Usenet newsgroups
can definitely mess with the formatting.