A poem by another poet new to me – Peter Howard
It was first published on the Snakeskin webzine and I saw it in Oxford Poets 2001
It makes me laugh
It is the latest addition to my haphazard collection of the poetry of mathematics
And it may be the only poem I have ever read which uses the word statistics
I used to twist men round my little finger.
They wanted me to be simple
to fit their idea of aesthetics
but I was a coquette. I trailed
an infinite series of decimal places
behind me, like a wedding dress
and wouldn’t lie down & be a proper fraction:
no square pegs for me. I got around:
diversified into magnetism, flirted with statistics,
insinuated myself everywhere.
I’m embarrassed to let you see me come to this:
raised to that upstart’s power, multiplied
by a clown I seriously doubt the existence of,
the result of a cheap trick, worth less than nothing
Two of his other poems in this collection which I particularly liked were This is a No Smoking Zone and Yromem (backwards memory), which could be read as a special poem for all those rocket scientists who failed to foresee the credit crunch
