Math and Poetry

Hosted by Shakti

Math and poetry are two ways of making a truthful compression.

Both begin with an infinity—quantity, experience, time, grief, desire—and then make a deliberate set of choices: a constraint (axioms or form), a notation (symbols or lines), and a method of proof (logic or revision). Out of those commitments, something strange happens: a small structure starts to carry disproportionate truth. The work begins to feel inevitable—less “invented” than revealed—once you travel through it.

In mathematics, wildly different phenomena become expressible in the same way: patterns recur; invariants hold; single structure lights up many worlds. In poetry, wildly different lives become legible in the same way: a lyric can behave like a human theorem, precise enough to hold what we cannot fully say, what language can never touch but for which it must reach.

This exstitutional workshop is a studio-lab for that symmetry. We’ll work with accessible constraints (no advanced math required) and use them as generators for poems, drawings, and short “proofs of feeling.” Participants will experiment with simple rule-systems—syllabic sequences, permutations, and instruction-based scores—to experience how constraint doesn’t reduce expression; it concentrates it.

We’ll also treat axioms in their shared sense as inevitable commitments—chosen premises that shape what becomes thinkable, writable, and true. The goal is to leave with a handful of new forms, a sharper sense of structure as meaning, and a felt understanding that math and poetry are not opposites, but twin disciplines of attention.

Timing: 2 hours a day in workshop, and an hour or more outside workshop

• 3-4pm ,and  6-7pm everyday, - with the intention to go create and work on stuff and read for the intervening hours

Monthly theme:

January | Feÿ Faber - We build, we make - things that we want to see in the world