Re: Dorothy Livesay -- Mathematics poem

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.
>
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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.
-----------------
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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.
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I’ll think about it some more but just wanted to
put it forward for discussion for now.
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Is anyone else on here familiar with Dorothy Livesay?
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Followup-To set to alt.arts.poetry.comments .

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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.