Pedro Poitevin

Dubitative mathematician. Experimental poet.

Methodologies

Constraint as Liberation: In a world suffocating under its own complexity, I find palindromes oddly reassuring. Creating meaning within rigid structures? That’s not just poetry; it’s a survival skill.

Structural Semiotics: Anagrams and palindromes aren’t just wordplay. They’re metaphors. If you can’t see that, you’re not looking hard enough.

Found Poetry in the Anthropocene: Airport codes become global lamentations. Genetic sequences hide verses. The world is a text; read between the lines.

Mathematical Poetics: Precision isn’t the enemy of beauty.

Ten Million Palindromic Sonnets

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

In Spanish, these are “diez millones de sonetos palindrómicos,” 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.

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. You can think of it as the linguistic straitjacket of a bilingual immigrant poet who still thinks, even as this world feels ever more constrained and constraining, that it is possible to create meaning within it.

Pedro Poitevin: Mathematical Poet