Rahul Santhanam is a mathematician and experimental poet, with work published in The Rialto, Otoliths, Propel and Blackbox Manifold, among other venues. He occasionally tweets about mathematics, art and poetry at @rahulsanthanam.
Artist Statement:
The following series of poems are part of a sequence that looks outside literature for its models: in particular, the Lyrical Abstraction movement in painting, as manifested in the work of Joan Mitchell, Nicolas de Stael, Gerhard Richter and Maki na Kamura, among others. Each poem is in a fixed ten-line format, just as each canvas is the same size. It might seem that the preoccupation here, after the initial irreducible impulse, is purely with the holding together in balance of various formal aspects: tone, colour, line, meaning, sound. And yet nostalgia for poetry, for lyric and pastoral, is never far away.
Flux P
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If in five tots weeping
Traduced by corn
In the blight of torpid
Budgerigar song nipple
Bizarre the reign of truth’s
Lovely vicar heaped with avid
Tentacles afloat in yarn
Capped by close stranger quell
A boat in morning’s suck and
Toothsome elusive lawn
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Flux U
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If, as in a shorn like rose,
Torn badger lovingly elides
Tardy demon happenstance, akin
To taped paper fodder, where woof
Of closed lawn marbles
Ledger, warped and glued to shy
Cropped glass, a fat foggy
Demon with mazy eyes and laughing
Putrid hands… Cloud blue?
Lune’s arabesque, if true.
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Flux J
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Apocrypha of snub-nosed enjambment
Wallowing in vats of whey dram torque
Culled and pricked with hart’s bloopy visor
Gingham peddled as a blown sangfroid
In gurney’s brown predicament songstress
A hundred garish goddesses of thought
Chipped and scoured ebullient lacuna
With vaunt and whim in tenebrous respite
Hobble O gaunt receptacle so campy
Come and quip your habitues in tripe
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