Place Value Poems by Gregory Vincent St. Thomasino

Professor St. Thomasino has developed a new structure for Mathematical poetry that I will add to the taxonomy in the side bar of this blog. What he has done is mapped the decimal notation system “onto” a sentence or set of phrases to “Place value” on the phrases. Focusing attention to the syntax of the poem. Here is an example of one of his poems called “Molotov’s Sister”:

a blonde bomber,she.smokes filterless,plays upright bass & writes haiku

Notice the decimal point and the commas. The commas delineate the digit/phrases in the poem and the decimal denotes where the decimal exists in this number. In essence we have the set of phrases that would equate to the following 100 x a blonde bomber, 10 x she . 1/10 x smokes filterless, 1/100 times plays upright bass & writes haiku

I have created a visual counter-part to the poem so that you can see the dynamic range of meaning mapped to each phrase. (images above)

The first image gives you the size differences in each decimal place and the second image groups the poem in detail so that it is readable.