About
T. G. Vanini,
an alm@nac review, July 9, 1998 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.
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