Poem fractal
0.066 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.
0.0014 − 1.0925i
Drawing the boundary…
by Mina Loy
−0.0627 − 1.0757i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
What is gold worth, say,
Worth for work or play,
Worth to keep or pay,
Hide or throw away,
Hope about or fear?
What is love worth, pray?
Worth a tear?
Golden on the mould
Lie the dead leaves rolled
Of the wet woods old,
Yellow leaves and cold,
Woods without a dove;
Gold is worth but gold;
Love's worth love.
by Mina Loy
Pigeons doze,
or rouse
their striped crescendos
of grey rainbow
a living frieze on the shallow
sill of a factory window.
Pigeons arise
alight
on vertical bases
of civic brick
whitened with avalanches
of their innocent excrements
as if an angel had been sick;
all that is shown to us
of bird-economies,
financeless,
inobvious as the disposal
of their corpses.
Pigeons make irritant, alluring
music;
quilled solfeggios
of shrill wings winnowing
their rejoicing, cooing
fanaticism for wooing.
Their dolce voices
dotage.
Too and fro, frowardly they live
burnishing each other’s
gorgeous halters
in the feathery drive
of preliminaries
to their marriages.
Pigeons disappear,
their claws, a coral landing-gear,
dive for the altar-stair
to their privacies
a slice of concrete
fallen on a cornice
leading into darkness;
the slit adjacence of houses
where the careesive dusts,
the residue of furnaces
upholster the gossamer
festoons of intestate spiers
for nuptial furniture
Pigeons through some conjurous procedure
appear to reappear
upon the altar-stair
at startling instants
in the immature
torsos of their giant infants;
timid and unflown
stark of plume
naive in nativity
to peer into a vast transparency.
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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