Scroll down to review titles of a variety of poems with mathematical IMAGERY.And, beneath them, some samples of a collection of mathematical love poems. If YOU have suggestions of poems you recommend for listing here, please e-mail JoAnne.

JoAnne Growney edited NUMBERS AND FACES, a small anthology of mathematical poetry, for the Humanistic Mathematics Network in 2001. Below you will find a CONTENTS page for NUMBERS AND FACES. Printed copies are no longer available BUT to obtain a WORD file of poems via e-mail, please contact JoAnne.

Poet John Bricuth has a "mathematical" poem entitled "Talking Big" (in his collection Words Burnished by Music ©2004, Johns Hopkins University Press)  and the poem makes good humor of math terminology.   Here are lines 4-8.5:

We are talking big. Someone has just remarked
That energy equals the speed of light squared.
We nod, feeling that that is "pretty nearly correct."
I remark that the square on the hypotenuse can more
Than equal the squares on the two sides. The squares
On the two sides object.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge (famous for THE RHYME OF THE ANCIENT MARINER) has a poem entitled "A MATHEMATICAL PROBLEM" that describes the construction of an equilateral triangle.  This difficult-to-find poem is presentied in compressed paragraph format, but the rhymes help one to expand it into verse form.

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CONTENTS

 CONTENTS

for  NUMBERS AND  FACES

How I Won the Raffle by Dannie Abse                                         1

My Number by Sandra Alcosser                                                      3

Reservation Mathematics by Sherman Alexie                                  5

Numbers and Faces by W. H. Auden                                               7

Thirty-six Poets by Judith Baumel                                                 8

Fibonacci  by Judith Baumel                                                            9

The Inclined Plane by Nina Cassian                                               11

Numbers by Mary Cornish                                                            14

Geometry by Rita Dove                                                                16

The Parallel Syndrome by Miroslav Holub                                     17

The Fraction Line by Miroslav Holub                                            18

Brief Reflections on Logic by Miroslav Holub                               19

To Myself by Abba Kovner                                                           20

Suicide by Federico Garcia Lorca                                                   21

Figures of Thought by Howard Nemerov                                       22

Ode to the Numbers by Pablo Neruda                                           23

The One Girl at the Boys’ Party by Sharon Olds                           26

Algebra by Linda Pastan                                                               27

Arithmetic by Carl Sandburg                                                         28

Six Significant Landscapes (III, VI) by Wallace Stevens                 29

A Large Number by Wislawa Szymborska                                     30

Pi by Wislawa Szymborska                                                            32

A Word on Statistics by Wislawa Szymborska                               34

The Calculation by David Wagoner                                              36