Could mortal lip divine
Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.
Poem fractal
0.031 apart. A smaller distance means the lines are built more alike.
This number is read from the build of the lines. The bright edge is that number, carried outward until the pattern repeats.
−0.4273 − 1.0450i
Drawing the boundary…
by Mina Loy
−0.4562 − 1.0340i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Could mortal lip divine
The undeveloped freight
Of a delivered syllable
'Twould crumble with the weight.
by Mina Loy
The white flesh quakes to the negro soul
Chicago! Chicago!
An uninterpretable wail
stirs in a tangle of pale snakes
to the lethargic ecstasy of steps
backing into primeval goal
White man quit his actin' wise
colored folk hab de moon in dere eyes
Haunted by wind instruments
in groves of grace
the maiden saplings
slant to the oboes
and shampooed gigolos
prowl to the sobbing taboos.
An electric crown
crashes the furtive cargoes of the floor.
the pruned contours
dissolve
in the brazen shallows of dissonance
revolving mimes
of the encroaching Eros
in adolescence
The black brute-angels
in their human gloves
bellow through a monstrous growth of metal trunks
and impish musics
crumble the ecstatic loaf
before a swooning flock of doves.
Cravan
colossal absentee
the substitute dark
rolls to the incandescent memory
of love's survivor
on this rich suttee
seared by the flames of sound
the widowed urn
holds impotently
your murdered laughter
Husband
how secretly you cuckold me with death
while this cajoling jazz
blows with its tropic breath
among the echoes of the flesh
a synthesis
of racial caress
The seraph and the ass
in this unerring esperanto
of the earth
converse
of everlit delight
as my desire
receded
to the distance of the dead
searches
the opaque silence
of unpeopled space.
A fractal is a shape that keeps its pattern when you look closer. Coastlines, trees, shells, and weather do this. The large form and the small form are the same kind of thing. A poem can be drawn that way. The shape of the whole comes from the shape of the lines.
Primunia is the name for the source of that order: the pattern under the pattern, already there in a tree, a shell, and a verse.
The number under the picture is the poem constant. It is read from the build of the lines: their length, how uneven they are, the size of the stanzas, the share of vowels, and the way the lines end. A new word moves the number when it changes that build. The same poem always gives the same number.
Drawn on its own, that number sits in a quiet part of the plane, and most poems would look like the same soft disk. So the number is carried outward along its own direction until it meets the edge of the Mandelbrot set, where the shape turns sharp. The picture is the Julia set of that meeting place.
Each point on the canvas is folded again and again by one small rule. Points that stay near the rule form the dark interior. Points that rush away become the coloured bands. The hue comes from the poem constant, and the brightest bands turn toward gold. Change the length of a line, the stanza, or the vowel share, and both the number and the picture move.
Branching draws the poem as a tree. Each turn follows a line, and every smaller branch repeats that pattern. A longer line reaches farther. The letters at the start of a line bend the next turn. A higher share of vowels opens the branches wider.
The trunk takes its colour from the poem constant and warms toward gold at the tips. When the poem has more than one stanza, gold forks leave the trunk. Each fork is a stanza beyond the first, up to three. The tree divides where the poem divides. One stanza remains a single trunk.
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