|
About The Poem
I was in my first year at UConn when I wrote this in the dorm one afternoon. I can't explain its genesis, as I can't explain almost any of my poetry. I was sitting in my room or down in the common study room on our floor, I forget which. I was staring at this white dorm wall, with three switches near the door. Underlying all this, of course, is a sense that there is engineering at work, which springs from science, which explains and harnesses the forces of the universe. So this orderly arrangement of switches is more than aesthetic. It represents a logical statement embodying the combinatorial probabilities for how many positions those switches can assume. I studied statistics in a first year intro to math course at the time, so maybe some of that orderly thinking rubbed off on my normally fuzzy, emo kind of mental processing. I believe the number of possible combinations is eight. Anyway, I was not doing math. I was conscious of order in a more vague way. That orderliness is what I tried to capture here or what impressed me about looking at that orderly composition of shapes on a blank wall. Theoretically, there could have been six compositions, and I could have done this differently, but that is what I did and it pleases me as such.
|
Composition I
on a white wall:
switches, three:
OFF, ON, ON
|
