About T. G. Vanini

By day, Laurie Kirby is a professor of mathematics at Baruch College in New York City. By night, though, thanks to some mysterious detour on the royal road to geometry, he performs his poetry and music under the nom de perf of T. G. Vanini. But the arts of Euclid and the arts of Yeats are all of a piece to Kirby, who says he's been feeling "more and more" the unity between his disciplines. "I've never been satisfied with rational explanations of the connection between math and poetry," says the violinist, whose band, the Princes of Serendip -- featur[es] Don Yacullo on keyboard and Julie Parisi on frame drum and ethereal vocals . . . The work he's doing now, he adds, is "not an explanation, but maybe an embodiment" of that connection. Take, for example, a recent sequence of song-poems about trees. "Math is about looking at the world and abstracting out certain structures, and so is poetry," Kirby explains. "So for instance, if you take a tree and cut through it at any point, it falls into two pieces, and that's a mathematical property of a tree. Yet at the same time, a tree resonates poetically, and biologically, and any other way you can relate to a tree . . . [that's] what I'm ruminating on in the tree songs." Having caught Kirby's band at the Outloud Festival in Grahamsville on July 4, I can add that whatever math does manifest itself in his music and poetry has more in common with the playfulness of Lewis Carroll than the austerity of Albert Einstein (this, despite Kirby's unruly, Einsteinian shock of white hair). His song-poems limn the richness of both the mortal world and the deathless realm of enchantment, and that magical point at which they intersect: in the visitation of a chickadee, in a lover's "Chinese eyes," in the jewelry surrounding the skull of an ancient Sumerian concubine. Some of the songs have a tipsy Celtic lilt; others, the staccato edginess of Brechtian street songs. The melodies and harmonies are haunting; so, too, the prevailing sense of wistful, tender sadness at the fleeting nature of life and love. "The structures with which mathematics deals are more like lace, the leaves of trees, and the play of light and shadow on a meadow or a human face, than they are like buildings and machines, the least of their representatives," wrote Scott Buchanan in his book-length essay, Poetry and Mathematics. He might have been describing the song-poems of T. G. Vanini, aka Laurie Kirby.

The Music of T. G. Vanini Poetry by T. G. Vanini T.G.Vanini's showcase main page T.G. Vanini's home page Princes of Serendip website contact T. G. Vanini	Order the CD growth & gravity	The Impossible Puzzler by T. G. Vanini, aka Laurie Kirby Try to Solve It Yourself (click the image to go to the puzzler) Art by T.G.Vanini, aka Laurie Kirby, copyrighted material, all rights reserved. Tree *a mathematical puzzle-poem.* Only 3 people have ever solved it. Be the fourth person to send T. G. Vanini the solution!