Ambi-poetry: A mathematician reinterprets ambigrams

by | Saturday, January 10, 2009

My friend Gaurav Bhatnagar (I had blogged about his new book, Get Smart: Math Concepts here), for some reason, known only to him, has decided to create a poetry-blog based around my ambigrams. Each posting consists of one ambigram (taken from my large collection of ambigrams on Flickr), followed by a short poem inspired by it. Suffice to say, I am quite flattered by all this attention and am highlighting his work on my website (in fact it gets its own sidebar entry on the right). One might argue whether or not these writings can truly be called poems (all I can say is that Gaurav takes full advantage of poetic license), but that is not the point. What is important is the manner in which he often, in true Hofstadterian fashion, understands what inspired me to create these designs in the first place. Thus these poems serve as another layer of interpretation of these designed objects.

As I said before, I am flattered.

Consider for instance two of his poems. The first is around an ambigram of my own name: Punya


Followed by this poem by Gaurav

A Pun-
A bad one,
or a good 1,
is just a Pun.
You’ll never know,
whether
I say what I mean,
or I mean what I say.
A good pun, ya?

The second is around a schitzophrenic ambigram, which could be read as Teach or as Learn!


to which Gaurav adds the following piece of inspired doggerel.

Some say that
one teaches best,
what one needs to learn
the most.

Teach-Learn
Two sides
of the same coin?
Or are they,
one and the same?

Read the rest by going here, or by following the links on the right!

Topics related to this post: Ambigrams | Art | Blogging | Creativity | Design | Fun | India | Personal | Poetry | Representation | Worth Reading

A few randomly selected blog posts…

21st Century Skills? What do they mean?

A decade into the 21st century, how are we doing with the movement to "position 21st century skills at the center of US K-12 education." The National Journal Online has been conducting an discussion on this topic... some very interesting views represented there, from...

TPACK in EDTECHNICA

TPACK in EDTECHNICA

I have been a huge fan of EdTechBooks for a long time. Their philosophy of making quality textbooks freely accessible for all resonates with me deeply. It is no surprise that I was excited to hear of their latest initiative: that of creating a living encyclopedia of...

Constructing knowledge on the web: New dissertation

I am pleased and proud to announce that Mike DeSchryver recently defended his dissertation, titled: Toward a Theory of Web-Mediated Knowledge Synthesis:  How Advanced Learners Used the Web to Construct Knowledge about Climate Change Behavior This is an excellent piece...

Creativity & Flow: New article

Creativity & Flow: New article

180-degree rotational ambigram for "Flow" by Punya Mishra The next article in our series Rethinking Technology & Creativity in the 21st Century just got published by the journal TechTrends. This article features Susan Perry, social psychologist,...

All you can cheat, part II (a response)

Patrick Diemer commented on my previous posting, All you can cheat, the web & learning by saying: Do you have any words of wisdom or resources on how to create appropriate questions? This sounds great, but easier said than done in my humble opinion. I started...

Books on visualization & info-graphics

There was a recent query on the PhD-Design-List regarding sources for designers on how to make good info-graphics and data-visualizations. I am collating the options being put forward by people here, just for the record. Manuel Lima's work  The book: Visual...

The gift that keeps on giving, or Why I love the web

I recently received this email: Dear Mr. Mishra, I am currently working on a poetry research project for school, and one of the requirements is researching five different poets. While looking for people who wrote palindromic poetry, I found your website and decided to...

A pome a day

Greg Casperson is a graduate student in our Ed Psy & Ed Tech program. He has been engaged, over the past few months, in the most interesting experiment. He carefully selects and posts to his website one poem every day! Greg's RSS feed has become one of the first...

Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story

Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...

5 Comments

  1. Ajit Yadav

    Thanks Punya

    Reply
  2. fewo

    It´s fascinating what Gaurav Bhatnagar did by creating a poetry-blog where his latest works are based around Punya Mishra´s ambigrams.

    Reply
  3. Anand

    Through the ages,
    teach and learn
    symbi-otic
    now we learn (or are we being taught ?)
    they could be
    ambiotic
    sleight of hand
    or a moment of “Blink”?
    I guess we can – read what we want to
    even fool our I’s to reach some elegant con-clusion

    Reply
  4. Cherice

    A shame that such dishes aren’t on the standard menu of “food for thought” served in school. They are as attractive as appetizers, satisfying enough to serve as the main entree, and their flavor is sufficiently complex to stimulate a patron’s appetite for more.

    Reply

Leave a Reply to Gaurav Bhatnagar Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *