Musings From a Math Woman [1]
September 21, 2020Poetry by JoAnne Growney
Musings From a Math Woman
Topological equivalence is the bond we share
in this neighborhood where nothing's square
and zero know serenity with our group's identity.
Sequences of digits lose place-value in emails
where no one cares that the gross national product
can be factored into primes. Although imaginary
numbers are vital, I long for the intersection
of your path with mine to have real coordinates,
for us to form a set with an equivalence relation.
Art Information
- “Verso [5]” © Jean Wolff; used by permission.
JoAnne Growney has loved poetry since girlhood. While a mathematics professor at Pennsylvania’s Bloomsburg University, she brought the arts, particularly poetry, into her classroom—and that sort of integrative activity continues in her blog “Intersections—Poetry with Mathematics.” [6] For several summers she was a teacher in Romania and assisted in translating work by several Romanian poets into English. Her poems have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies and in her widely circulated collection, Red Has No Reason (Plain View Press, 2010). [7]
For more information, see JoAnne Growney’s website [8] and "Author Talk: JoAnne Growney," [9] a 2018 TW video interview with the poet.