Poem fractal
0.015 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.
by Arthur Macy
−0.2546 − 0.5668i
Drawing the boundary…
−0.2421 − 0.5583i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
by Arthur Macy
My hatband goes around my hat,
And while there's nothing strange in that,
It seems just like a lazy man
Who leaves off where he first began.
But then this fact is always true,
The band does what it ought to do,
And is more useful than the man,
Because it does the best it can.
How innocent we lie among
The righteous!—Lord, how sweet we smell,
Doing this wicked thing, this love,
Bought up by bishops!—doing well,
With all our leisure, all our pride,
What’s illy done and done in haste
By licensed folk on every side,
Spitting out fruit before they taste.
(That stalk must thrust a clubby hud;
Push an abortive flower to birth.)
Under the moon and the lit scud
Of the clouds, the cool conniving earth
Pillows my head, where your head lies;
Weep, if you must, into my hair
Tomorrow’s trouble: the cold eyes
That know you gone and wonder where.
But tell the bishops with their sons,
Shout to the City Hall how we
Under a thick barrage of guns
Filched their divine commodity.
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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