Calculate Your Name

I decided to lead a mini-workshop with my roommates to test run an assignment that would in some way play with ideas about translations between mathematical and poetic expressions. This idea emerged from conversations with Luke Albrecht, amazing mathematics teacher @ Crown Academy in Chicago, and Cynthia Weiss, brilliant arts educator. Here's what we came up with and the results that followed after an hour long workshop with artists Jamie Topper and Chris Salaveter. Inspired by Oulipo.

Assignment:

First, figure out where your letters of your name appear in the alphabet. Then, write a poem using the number of words per line that correlate with the number attached to the letters in your name. Then, add up all the numbers. Add the number in your total together. Repeat a word or phrase the number of times of that final total.

A M A N D A
1 13 1 14 4 1

1+13+1+14+4+1 = 34

3+4=7



1 Snow,
13 Where did we sled when the sky turned cold and we slept slow?
1 Worry
14 settled in when our fingers went numb --- how did we know when to leave?
4 Return home now. Hurry.
1 How?

7
Slow. Slow.
Slow. Slow.
Slow. Slow.
SLOW.


C H R I S
3 8 18 9 19

Canoe through lilies
Do you chew your food thoroughly while breathing?
Sleeping boy in headlights beyond hill house mess of clothes inflatable giraffe won at carnival by throwing darts.
What is the quickest way to the boiler room?
Staring contest with the owl still thinking of atrophied bengal tiger and cluster of policemen on the wall.

Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover
Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover Cover


J A M I E
10 1 13 9 5

He spotted the stags.
Gentlemen deer
Then separately, the does.
Where to?

My walk to school
East Prairie Road --
One giant fissure in the
sidewalk

If you stay with your kind,
will we survive?

Yours: Half of the back seat

Half ! Half !