Pi Pie Contest Results

Last month I posted about a Pi Day Pie Contest. Well the results are in, you can see the finalists here. I made an unadorned (although yummy) apple pie in my Pi pie plate. See the winners here and all the entries here. Below are some of my favorite entries:

Pies Are Round? No, Pi(es) Are Squared!
Pies Are Round? No, Pi(es) Are Squared! 		Pi and math
This pie is pi by mass along with pi by count. 		Pi-rat pie
Pi-Rat pie
Compass Pi on Looseleaf
Compass Pi on Looseleaf 		Riemann Zeta Key Lime Pie
Riemann Zeta Key Lime Pie: I asked my nerd friend what pi-related thing I should make into a pie form. The answer I got: “You should use the Riemann zeta function with power 2. i.e. 1/1 + 1/4 + 1/9 + 1/16 + … + 1/n^2 + … = (pi^2)/6.” I was totally lost at this, but made a polar plot of the function for him. 		18 Digit Blueberry Cheesecake Pi Pie18 Digit Blueberry Cheesecake Pi Pie: The ingredients list puts the first 18 digits of pi in pie form.

Lyrics as Poetry

Book of RhymesToday is the first day of National Poetry Month. I’ve been thinking about how to celebrate, as well as where I encounter poetry in my every day life. I remembered a recent book review I read about Book of Rhymes: The Poetics of Hip Hop that starts

Are you a hip-hop fan who can’t tell assonance from alliteration? An English major who doesn’t know Biggie from Tupac? Adam Bradley’s “Book of Rhymes” is the crash course for you. The book — essentially English 101 meets Hip-Hop Studies 101 — is an analysis of what Bradley calls “the most widely disseminated poetry in the history of the world”: rap, which he rightly says “is poetry, but its popularity relies in part on people not recognizing it as such.”

Song lyrics as poetry isn’t a new idea — probably originated before Shakespeare. That review reminded me how I first got interested in poetry — in high school I wrote a paper on lyrics as poetry. I don’t remember the songs, or how, in the pre-web era, I found the words. But I do remember that my Mom was curious about the songs I was considering, and we talked at some length about many of them. One in particular piqued her interest, Eleanor Rigby by the Beatles:

Eleanor Rigby picks up the rice in the church where a wedding has been
Lives in a dream
Waits at the window, wearing the face that she keeps in a jar by the door
Who is it for?

A Chair Is Still A Chair

A Chair Is Still A Chair…” by Mark GleberzonFrom my press name, you might guess I’m slightly enamored with chairs, at least my own. Another person taking inspiration from a chair is Mark Gleberzon, who explains “I have been painting this same chair for almost 15 years as a tribute to my parents after taking it with me when I moved out. I love its form and architecture and always find some new detail I didn’t see before.”
The particular painting to the left was at the Architectural Digest Home Show and is a bit different than Gleberzon’s other chair paintings in that it has words. The words are from the song A House Is Not A Home (lyrics by Hal David). (Seen on Design Milk.)

Pi Leaf

My Pi Day post was a bust — the youtube video was taken down because of copyright issues. Pi Day fell on a Monday this year. Tuesday morning I found the leaf pictured below on the front stairs of my house. Looks like several Russian Olive tree leaves got stuck to an old Aspen leaf — we have many of these trees on our property, several of them right next to each other. I thought it was a lucky coincidence, don’t you?

Pi Leaf

How to Celebrate Poetry Month

Photo: Ruven AfandorApril is National Poetry Month. How are you going to celebrate? O: The Oprah Magazine suggests you update your wardrobe, in a article subtitled “Modeling the latest looks, eight rising poets express their dynamic personal styles—and show you how to cultivate your own.” I found out about this unusual way to celebrate from this article by David Orr. (I always enjoy Orr’s columns on poetry for the NY Times, you can read past ones here.) Orr starts out his column about the O Magazine article

The signs of the coming apocalypse are many, but none are starker than this Web headline in the April issue of O: The Oprah Magazine: “Spring Fashion Modeled by Rising Young Poets.” Yes. Spring fashion. Modeled. By rising young poets. There follows a photomontage of attractive younger women — some of whom are rising poets mostly in the “I get up in the morning” sense, but all of whom certainly look poetic — in outfits costing from $472 to $5,003. This is all part of O’s special issue celebrating National Poetry Month, edited by the noted verse aficionado Maria Shriver and including interviews with “all-star readers” like Bono, Ashton Kutcher, the gossip columnist Liz Smith and someone named James Franco, who is apparently an actor.

Read the entire column here. The photo to the left is of poet Tara Bracco, taken by Ruven Afandor.