Poem fractal
0.026 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.
0.2761 − 0.3913i
Drawing the boundary…
by Mina Loy
0.2566 − 0.3746i
Drawing the boundary…
Each poem scrolls on its own, so the two texts stay beside each other.
Mine is a body that should die at sea!
And have for a grave, instead of a grave
Six feet deep and the length of me,
All the water that is under the wave!
And terrible fishes to seize my flesh,
Such as a living man might fear,
And eat me while I am firm and fresh,—
Not wait till I’ve been dead for a year!
by Mina Loy
Man of absolute physical equilibrium
You stand so straight on your legs
Every plank or clod you plant your feet on
Becomes roots for those limbs
Among the men you accrete to yourself
You are more heavy
And more light
Force being most equitably disposed
Is easiest to lift from the ground
So at the same time
Your movements
Unassailable
Savor of the airy-fairy of the ballet
The essence of a Mademoiselle Genée
Winks in the to-and-fro of your cuff-links
Your projectile nose
Has meddled in the more serious business
Of the battle-field
With the same incautious aloofness
Of intense occupation
That it snuffles the trail of the female
And the comfortable
Passing odors of love
Your genius
So much less in your brain
Than in your body
Reinforcing the hitherto negligible
Qualities
Of life
Deals so exclusively with
The vital
That it is equally happy expressing itself
Through the activity of pushing
THINGS
In the opposite direction
To that which they are lethargically willing to go
As in the amative language
Of the eyes
Fundamentally unreliable
You leave others their initial strength
Concentrating
On stretching the theoretic elastic of your conceptions
Till the extent is adequate
To the hooking on
Of any— or all
Forms of creative idiosyncracy
While the occasional snap
Of actual production
Stings the face of the public.
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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