Victor Coleman

Ivh: an Alphamath Serial Victor Coleman

Poetry. IVH: AN ALPHAMATH SERIAL is a book-length poem composed in the tradition of such precursors as Pythagoras, who taught that Number was the essence of all things; Plato, who argued that geometry was the foundation of all knowledge; Leonardo, whose work clearly follows the Renaissance aesthetics of mathematics and the mathematics of aesthetics; Descartes, Pascal, and d'Alembert, all of whom were both writers and mathematicians; Schopenhauer and Lewis Carroll, and then moderns such as Valéry and Ezra Pound, who, in his The Spirit of Romance, declared that "poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics." And now, in 2012, as the present moment in this literary trajectory, IVH: AN ALPHAMATH SERIAL has arrived in the form of a faux transtranslation of Raymond Queneau's 1939 novel Un rude hiver!