Pedro Poitevin

Originally from Guatemala, Pedro Poitevin is an experimental bilingual poet based in Marblehead, Massachusetts. His poem Sueño de la Cercanía earned the 2021 Juana Goergen Poetry Prize for the best Spanish-language poem written in the U.S. that year. Trained and employed as a mathematician, Poitevin brings an experimental edge to his poetry, playing with forms and constraints. He is recognized, in Spanish literary circles, as a leading practitioner of the palindrome. He has also published poetry in English, in venues like Rattle and River Styx.

Ten Million Palindromic Sonnets

In English, these are ten million palindromic sonnets that Pedro Poitevin published on 01/23/2024.

In Spanish, these are “diez millones de sonetos palindrómicos” that Pedro Poitevin published on 02/02/2020, in celebration of that palindromic date. They are also an homage to Raymond Queneau.

The Longest Sonnet in the World

Crafted from a sequence of airport codes, A Doomsday Prayer for the Polluting Ape is an enciphered but lyrical environmental sonnet whose 988,714 mile-long itinerary touches ground at 132 airports worldwide and has an estimated carbon footprint of approximately 12.5 million kilograms of carbon dioxide. The linked-to webpage contains an applet that allows the reader to interact with the poem and explore its composition.

Chaos and Order

As my Three Children Tidy Up their Rooms consists of a pair of poems: a prose poem that sets the scene, and a self-describing, self-enumerating, truthful, rectangular monospace sonnet that caps the scene. These two poems are anagrams of each other, and the anagrammatic transformation of the one into the other, which is animated in the provided link, hints at what went on during their conception. This is, naturally, a family favorite.

Palindromic Rhyme

Under the Bedroom Skylight is an insomniac sonnet with palindromic rhymes: keep/peek, emit/time, wolf/flow, loops/spool, part/trap, doom/mood, and peels/sleep. The first line of the poem gestures at this constraint.

Found Sonnet

CAT G[enome] is a bilingual sonnet, found in the genome of a cat. The only letters in this sonnet are, naturally, A, C, G, and T, the minimal dictionary necessary to spell CAT and GATA. In order to find this sonnet, Pedro Poitevin coded a Python script and ran it on the Open Science Grid.

3 1/3 - ina

A tritina is a poem consisting of three stanzas with three lines each, where three end words are permuted according to the spiral permutation that also governs the sestina. A 3 1/3-ina is a generalization of the tritina in which there is an additional short line, which is 1/3 as long as the other lines, and the end-word of this short line consists of the initial third of the end-word that precedes it. Autumn’s End may very well be the first 3 1/3-ina in the English language.

Bilingual Palindrome

Bilingual Sonnet is, letter-by-letter, a palindrome. It is also a sonnet whose octet is in Spanish and whose sestet is in English. It is certainly the first such poem in existence.

Pedro Poitevin: Mathematical Poet