Leaping While Sleeping

When I was a graduate student, I would sometimes be assigned a difficult mathematical proof to present to the class. There was one that I had worked on for days, but the night before the presentation I was still stuck at a crucial step. I had a copy of the finished proof (I'd been given the paper expositing it, and was to explain it to the class in lieu of their having to slog through it), and if I skipped over that one step, I could explain everything after it, as well as before it. But that one step eluded me, and the paper offered no explanation for a highly convoluted line of mathematical symbols which seemed unrelated to anything that came previously.

At 3 am, I gave up and went to bed, slightly horrified, because as the only woman in the entire graduate program, I particularly hated to fail in front of my peers. When I awoke in the morning, I knew the answer. I just woke up with it in my head. It was a brilliant piece of symbolic manipulation necessary to force the proof to its end. Later, when presenting the proof to the class, I impressed even the professor who admitted that he also had not been able to figure out that particular leap between lines.

This has happened to me several times with regards to proofs or math problems, and a few more times when I was working as a financial analyst. My subconscious mind (or perhaps my unconscious mind--I asked a psychiatrist friend once what the difference was and he replied, Well, that's the million-dollar question) can solve things that my conscious mind cannot.

Do poets have this ability to access the not-conscious mind too? Apparently they do. In an interview with the UK Guardian in December of 2006, the poet Anne Carson (my hero) said, "I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time. But the jumps between them are entirely at that moment."

I suspect that many poets can access those jumps, have those moments, when they are awake. I, however, cannot, at least not yet. I suffer from the overly rational mind as described by Sir Rabindranath "Tagore" Thakur: "A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it."

So I have learned to access my not-conscious mind, which is so much more resourceful than my conscious mind, in sleep. However, I cannot force it. It doesn't work unless I have exhausted every possible avenue my conscious mind can attempt in my waking hours. And even then, it doesn't always work. When insight like that comes, it's a gift.

Dreams are a well-known source of creativity. Many scientific discoveries were first seen in dreams: the helical structure of DNA was first seen by James Watson in a dream, for example. I know poets also commonly use the imagery of their dreams in their work. But what I want to know is this: all you poets out there, can you access your not-conscious mind in the waking state? Can you make those genuinely astounding intuitive leaps without resorting to sleep? And if so, how? And by how, I mean not only how does it happen, but also how do you stimulate that kind of access organically? What rituals do you have, if any, that lead to these kinds of soaring leaps in your thinking? Seriously, I'd like answers to this, if you've got them.

Calling All Bards of the Binary Code

Are you equally comfortable with Linux and linebreaks? If so, this post is for you.

Poetic use of mathematics and science as both topic and literary device has been around for quite some time. For a classic compendium, see Verse and Universe: Poems About Science and Mathematics, compiled by Kurt Brown (Milkweed Editions). In the past few years, Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, edited by Sarah Glaz and JoAnne Growney (AK Peters), has also come on the scene. The latter editor also has one of the better blogs on the subject, compiling poems and briefly introducing the thinking or history behind them, at Intersections--Poetry With Mathematics.

I have to admit, however, that I am not as familiar with the blending of computers/computer science and poetry. Recently I was directed to the following site, Thinking Machines, run by Neil Aitken, editor of Boxcar Poetry Review. Here Aitken is soliciting poems for an anthology about computers, programming, and poetry. Neil Aitken is presently working on his PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at USC, but in a previous incantation he was a programmer, so he's the go-to guy for all things on this subject. He even has suggestions to stimulate your thinking about this mix of topics on the website cited above.

If you have a poem relating to programming and poetry, OR if you are a programmer and a poet who's written poems on any subject, you are invited to submit. So check it out.

And if you have a favorite book of/about poetry and math/science/computing, let me know! I'd love to hear about it.