There is something terribly troubling in the media and political discourse about education in our time. We so urgently need critical thinking to gauge what measures we can engage so we might inspire our children to study and invent their own paths to the gateways to what we call knowledge and wisdom -- and so that they become caring parts of a society we call our own. All too often we, instead of hearing about creative reaches to enhance the passions of our kids, we tend to hear about schools and communities being punished for lack of performance.

There have always been stories of teachers who turned kids on and got them to care, teachers who cared enough, and tuned in enough and got on a footing with kids that reverberated in their art, poetry, and much more.

One such teacher is Dennis Bernstein, whose volume of poetry entitled Special Ed: Poetry from a Hidden Classroom, comes out on February 8, 2012 courtesy of New York Quarterly Foundation. Dennis Bernstein is better known to some readers as journalist and radio host for Pacifica, the West Coast sibling of WBAI. And some of these poems hail from 30 years ago, with Bernstein having revisited them at points to leave his current mark.

However be warned: this is not the pretty poetry that makes you smile knowingly at the talent of even the most impoverished lives made quaint. It's rather the gift to the reader of sad, tragic, even brutal information. It's the jolt to the body as some of the words land viscerally in the gut. And at other moments, it's the dreamy reverie of a child, a teacher, or the reader that cradles a torn to bits but still beating human life -- a possibility in rhythms that will no doubt want to be reread and become remembered.

For those who insist on remaining insular or self-congratulating on their/our progressive endeavors, these poems will be off putting. Their humanity brings us to the door of the harshest and saddest emotions, and the awareness that there was then as there is now, poverty and crime and lack of caring in the too often divisive United States of America.

The poems are small, and they are small but packed stories. They give form to tales which hint at the ways in which these kids -- these people -- needed to be seen and too often were not. One, called "tamisha's alphabet" goes like this: Tamisha makes up her own words. Her alphabet is full of sounds/that come before A and after Z--/The 26 letters in between/only get in her way.

The poem reminds me of how much we know or suppose we know or forget about diversity in terms of our children's learning styles and needs. The poem called "Pea-Brain" tells of this with short precision that leaves us wandering into knowing how smart some kids -- and grownups -- are who don't fit into the boxes of our decisions as to how things are supposed to go. It's like this in "This one's a real pea-brain": That's what Dean Riley tells me/as he shoves Jason into my classroom/and shuts the door in our faces./Next morning, Jason is spinning jacks/on the hard-tile floor. He calls me over/?and insists I hunker down for a front-row seat. "Look," says Jason,/?"look at the ballerinas dancing on their tiptoes."

And then the sadness of the teacher about his limitations, and the wish and wanting and possibility in the face of violence, death, and trauma, is shown in "the way it is": Some days, I can hold back their hunger/with a recipe for sweet potato pie,/or divert it with a story about the biggest lie ever told./Sometimes, I can snip the fuse from the dynamite and close the charge before/it explodes./I can rescue them from the murder scene/with songs or poetry or an urgent session/on the trampoline./Other days, death combs its hair with the bones of my children. . .

The children are not all "innocent" or only sweet. There is crime lurking, done by them or to them and their families. And there is fear and desperation and so much hunger, physical hunger. And there is toughness, the toughness they have learned: "from where?" we might want to ponder. Here is "strange tears": Paulie finds tears/in the oddest places./He finds them/in the mirror's eyes./He knows they can't be his. He's too tough.

This is the stuff that could haunt those of us ready to hear. Apropos of at least remembering, this is "present tense": Can anyone give me a sentence/?using the present tense for "remember"?/Jojo?/I remember the look on Fat-Jake's face after my sister shot him.

Dennis Bernstein has had his own history of undiagnosed dyslexia, with the good fortune in meeting up with a willing, caring and creative teacher who helped find him and his needs and style in translation. His poignant sensitivity and availability to pain and connection pose a question for me which is: Does it have to be those of us so out of the box ourselves, so much feeling like strangers in a strange land or outsides longer than is comfortable, to give a shit about making education a source of constant hope?

And with it, with the above question comes another: how to broaden the caring and get us to "get" we are all connected to the sorrows as well as to the grandness of being human?

The last question is one I'm into working on. In the meantime, enjoy this read and whatever chords it might strike in you.

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On Spectacle Pond a laggard loon yelped, next
I saw it, next I didn't. Hardly mannerly
of me to paddle out chasing the loons, but I did.

High fall color, but leaves upon leaves,
spotty this year, begrudge themselves. They remind
me of me, trying on grade school dresses in ill will.

Undone! Obstinate spirit undoing! —reiterates
whatchamacallit, territorial chirp of the backwater nondescript.
Every so often my heart sinks without a trace.

Shaggy pond, in finite patience, means to shrink itself
soon to a meadow: tree-by-toppling-over-
tree it raddles its rough edges gradually inwards.

Despised exotic once myself, I did my stint of fish-&-wildlife
mischief & thrived. (Among profuse apologies a few
fresh aspersions cast, with luck nobody gets them.)

Most maple leaves alight face-down. Buoyant on tips
on the facile surface, they round their silvery
wrongsides up & erect red stems; swanlike, disperse.

Brief breather, then parties to refractory
local hostilities resume: in a twinkling I snap up a modest
rocky lakefront property, post my dissuasion.

The pond mistakes itself for the time being.
Inevitably most pond creatures fall prey.
The pond quibbles and turns to itself a deaf ear.

Solicitudes, regrets: community civilities
too proliferate upon so little to recommend them that I do
relish a tongue-lashing followed by laughter.

Subject to lunatic humors, myopic of eye & woozy,
I poured myself some glasses of water. Binocular
blink: those two look to me like the same pair, year after year.

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Welcome back for the sixth year of Maths Masters. We're very grateful for the continued interest that our columns have received.

Again this year, we hope to write about some beautiful and little-known mathematics, and to explain more familiar maths that tends to confuse. And yes, we'll probably wind up whacking a windmill or two.  However, we've chosen to begin the year by honoring a very special mathematician. In the 1980s, one of your maths masters was lucky enough to be invited to study at Stanford University. Soon after arriving, he met a mathematician who looked remarkably like Groucho Marx, complete with stooped walk, and a nasal, jokey manner.

Robert Osserman turned out to be almost nothing like Groucho. Bob definitely had a great sense of humour, but he was also gentle and generous. As it happened, your maths master began researching what are known as minimal surfaces (which are a mathematical idealisation of soap films), a field in which Bob was an expert. Your maths master found himself asking Bob question after question. He read Osserman's excellent (technical) introduction to minimal surfaces, many times over. None of this is exceptional, merely indicative of an accomplished scholar and dedicated teacher. But then an opportunity arose.

As do most American universities, Stanford encourages undergrads to at least have some breadth in their studies. So, science students must read and write upon at least a few great books, and arts students are required to study a little maths and science.

University subjects are typically ill-suited to outsider students, so it is common for American universities to offer specialised "breadth subjects". Bob Osserman, together with Sandy Fetter (physics) and Jim Adams (sociology) introduced such a year-long subject at Stanford: The Nature of Mathematics, Science and Technology. Your maths master was lucky enough to be one of the two tutors.

It was a terrific subject, with the three lecturers perfectly complementing each other: Bob introduced the abstract mathematical ideas; Sandy demonstrated how these ideas could be used to model the physical world; and Jim described the often circuitous path from the physics to technological breakthrough. This was gently and engagingly presented to a hundred nervous arts students, most of whom were ready to flee at the first appearance of an equation.

Your maths master is undoubtedly biased, but he found Bob Osserman's presentations particularly enjoyable and insightful. Bob presented mathematics as a collection of ideas, and as the history of the mathematicians who struggled, not always successfully, to untangle those ideas.

Bob used the arts, and music in particular, to motivate the mathematics. He began with the Pythagorean theory of harmony, based upon simple ratios of string lengths: 2/1 and 3/2, and so on. Bob then demonstrated how that simple idea leads to more complicated ratios, and finally, almost in contradiction, to irrational numbers. This fascinating history also included a guest appearance by Vincenzo Galilei, the father of his much more famous son.

Bob, Sandy and Jim had planned to write a textbook for the subject but unfortunately it never eventuated. However, Bob did write Poetry of the Universe, a wonderful book intended for the general public.
Poetry of the Universe tells the history of the mathematical exploration of the universe. Osserman begins the story in 240 BC, with the Alexandrian mathematician Eratosthenes and his stunningly simple calculation of the size of the Earth.

Eratosthenes knew that almost due South of Alexandria was the city of Syene, with a notable feature: at noon on the summer solstice, the Sun is directly overhead. Eratosthenes then measured that in Alexandria at that same time, the Sun makes an angle with the vertical of a little over 7 degrees, about 1/50 the way around a circle. From this, Eratosthenes deduced that the circumference of the Earth must be about 50 times the distance from Syene to Alexandria. That distance (in modern units) is about 800 kilometers, leading to a remarkably accurate estimate of the Earth's circumference of about 40,000 kilometers.

Poetry of the Universe takes the story right up to the present day exploration of the shape of the Universe. Along the way there is wonderful history and fascinating digressions, perhaps the most fascinating of which is the story of Dante's universe.

In Paradiso, the 14th Century poet Dante described the universe as consisting of two spheres. The first sphere is our physical world, with the Earth at its centre, and the outer layer of this sphere is the primum mobile. The second, heavenly sphere is the Empyrean, inhabited by the angels and with a godly point of light at its centre.

What is fascinating is that the primum mobile, the outer layer of the physical world, is simultaneously the outer layer of the Empyrean. This may be very difficult to imagine, but modern mathematicians know Dante's universe very well.

As Osserman explains, Dante has perfectly described his universe as a hypersphere. Analogous to the borderless 2-dimensional surface of the Earth, a hypersphere is a borderless 3-dimensional world. It is possible that our Universe is a hypersphere, and the hypersphere is the central character of the famous Poincaré Conjecture.

In later years, Osserman was Special Projects Director of MSRI, one of the World's most prestigious and successful mathematical institutes. In this role, Bob became much more involved in presenting mathematics to the wider community. He engaged in public conversation with such disparate artists as actor Alan Alda and pianist Christopher Taylor (both events being viewable online), comedian Steve Martin, composer Philip Glass and playwright Tom Stoppard. Bob Osserman recognised mathematics as an art, and he helped many others to see it that way. Robert Osserman died at his home last November, at the age of 84. Your maths masters will spend the year trying to live up to the brilliant, beautiful example set by this wonderful man.

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 Unleash the excess!
     Bring me cleavage and rumpage,
one heftable breast, then another,
     a buttock untrussed
and rhapsodic for humpage.
     Begin the maneuvers,

  purge girdles and covers; undress
    each strumpet of frumpage
  that revolts a fat lover. Release the noblesse,
the cankles and haunch, trot out the lumpage—
            Deliver the flesh!

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1
I was going to praise the transpersonality of print over the individuality of
     handwriting
I was going to praise the viewer constructed by monochromy
I was going to describe the remarkable comeback intention is making in new music
     and praise that
Desire for accessibility flaring up inside me as I praise the fantasy of corporate
     personhood
In the brief window between takeoff and the use of approved electronic devices I
     believe great change is possible
I believe it while banking hard to the east to find smoother air
When I can't tell if a person is joking I believe in the power of poetic modality, to
     hear this as music,
to see this as an experiment in the collectivization of feeling, no matter if failed

Red glow of the clock tower visible from our window and red glow of the alarm
     clock beside the window
collaborate on a claim about color and synchrony until the former loses minutes in
     high wind
Then the claim devolves into a sigh acknowledging the futility of administration, a
     fallacy
I praise for its mutability and enlist

2
I cannot express in the language of logical entailment my love for you, the second
     person plural
on the perennial verge of existence, like color almost becoming surface
I reach for a verb that isn't there but experience its shape, then back-form a
     phantom subject
with whom I identify, walking through the park at night
There is nothing more beautiful than a vulnerable grid
glowing in late empire, which is how I think of you, street lights flickering
I think of you as a friend who continues to speak to me, not realizing the call was
     dropped, or as
my denied freedom returning in the form of atonality

not when breaking glass wakes me, but when it enters the dream as orchestral
     innovation
I guess I'm waiting for you to read this back to me in a voice I can entrain into the
     actual, tiny wings
brushing the lips, beginning to make sense, oceanic
tone suspended undecidably between exuberance and flatness

3
I have almost none of the characteristics of the well-made man Walt Whitman
     enumerates
All I have is a kind of supersensitivity to harbor lights and skylines, which come at
     me hard
It's like smoking with the patch on for me to be in time, like waving to someone
who was waving to someone behind me for us to correspond
But we do correspond, like a crisis in easel painting and a dirty war
Soft glow of the Kindle when the train enters a tunnel, I would probably reach more
     readers
if I went on tour, but I'm dead and busy with teaching
I'm standing before a kind of allover abstraction the placard says I'm part of,

unprimed ground returning as figure, figure coming at me hard
I carry its afterimage into the park and lay it down like a lily where a falling branch
     struck a child
While I wait to be reanimated briefly by an as yet only hypothesized force,
I keep my practice virtual

4
And there are real forces at work in the popular, I acknowledge that now, I am
     seeking out forms
of acknowledgment, this is one, let me know if it counts for you, brother
That's a great word, like "bread" or "death," let's add it to the list of things to recover
     for the noncommercial
floating city I'm building out of trash and hair, the car alarms that follow thunder,
out of rain and thunder and bread and sex, this is a model, not sure if it scales
Like the princess in Sans Soleil, I am making a list of things that quicken the heart,
     and you can be on it
I am having a frank conversation regarding the permissibility of violence during the
     long transition
to re-enchantment, and you can leave comments

Out of the bright, perpetual midnight of the truck stop, I saw a man emerge barefoot
Out of the empirical fact of contingency I saw a relation of great delicacy grow,
     trellis and vine
and thunder and work, I acknowledge that now
I acknowledge that dark and light as modeling tools must cede to warm and cool

5
I just learned their screens don't glow, they depend, like moons, on an external light
     source
I had known, but forgotten, that the moon is slowing the Earth's rotation, minutely
     lengthening the day
Learning some facts feels like remembering, as they fit into a place other facts have
     prepared for them
We can carry the shape of a fact we don't know around like a photograph
of a missing loved one, though any isolated fact is useless
The steady stream of isolated facts we call information distracts us from a basic fact
     whose shape we carry
This shape has a volume and we try to fill it with colloids, smoke and foam
When we encounter this missing fact, we will for the first time experience integrity,
     which will feel

like remembering, reemerging from a tunnel into rain, I know
I read somewhere in the dark that a transpersonal subject capable of ending the
     permanent war
is the still unconstituted whole, the poem
its figure in slow rotation, and each of us carries a volume

6
This is the short transitional phase between organic imagery and a mature
     vocabulary
of great rectilinear severity, the sun gone cadmium among ambient particulates
This is the brief window in which the beautiful etymologies return, when you can
     intuit a future usage
in a slur, vinho verde on the roof, skeletonized foliage where we saw those
     iridescent beetles mate
A kind of mock vampirism is spreading fast among America's teens and we must
     support it,
their desire to be marked and live forever, their refusal to reflect, salt on the neck
     maybe the best salt there is
I am willing to stand with any experimental form of sociality grounded in twilight,
     and it is a ground
You can sift a handful, see flakes of mica sparkle

in the moment before the acrylic dries, before it's recuperated into the white walls
     of medium specificity
Because of expanding underwater plumes, a desperate pluralism has obtained, and
     you can say anything
in loose hexameters, help me gather these
quickly, before the night work on the bridge begins

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April, late enough there’s forsythia everywhere—how could I forget it, it’s so shocking, toothy and gold. I have to remind myself it’s beautiful. The tulip trees, like I said, blossoms big as teacups. What strange names we come into the world with, and for. Nameless—to be named on the earth, as one of the earth’s things, a thing alongside all else—. For instance the narcissus, now closing primly, drawn purse strings. And the birds, oh the birds are everywhere these days. Strange, the notion of migration, the question always a matter of return, dashed lines of the aerial view. Does sky clatter; is it silent? And dying? That must happen every so often. How many travel together, do they sleep in trees, no time to construct an overnight nest? Do our birds prefer particulars, a blue height, length of limb, do they know? I can’t help but ask them: Send news.

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Poet LLC, the largest U.S. corn- based ethanol producer by installed capacity, established a joint venture with Royal DSM NV to produce cellulosic ethanol and license the technology to other plants in the U.S. and globally.

The companies will each own 50 percent of the joint venture, named Poet-DSM Advanced Biofuels LLC, Poet said today in a statement. Its headquarters will be in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where closely held Poet is based.

The venture will let Poet build one of the first cellulosic ethanol plants in the U.S. and decline a $105 million U.S. loan guarantee. Wider adoption of the technology is needed for oil companies to meet federal requirements to blend 16 billion gallons (61 billion liters) of the fuel with gasoline by 2022, said Chief Executive Officer Jeff Broin.

“We have the raw material to make it happen,” Broin said today on a conference call with reporters. “There’s more than one billion tons of biomass available every year in the U.S. that could be used to produce enough cellulosic ethanol to replace a third of America’s gasoline.”

Initial capital expenditure by the venture will be $250 million, which will be invested in Poet’s Project Liberty facility in Emmetsburg, Iowa. The funding makes it unnecessary for Poet to take advantage of the $105 million loan guarantee the U.S. Energy Department offered in September, and it will be declined before any funds are drawn, Broin said.

Project Liberty
The Emmetsburg plant is expected to begin production in the second half of 2013 and will convert corn cobs and other crop residue into 25 million gallons of ethanol a year. The venture intends to deploy the technology at Poet’s 26 other U.S. corn ethanol plants and license the technology to other producers globally.

DSM is contributing its enzyme and yeast technologies, which complement Poet’s processes and make the company “an excellent strategic partner,” Broin said. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimates that as many as 400 new biorefineries must be built by 2022 in order to produce the 16 billion gallons of cellulosic biofuel required under the agency’s regulations, Poet said.

As much as 1 billion gallons of cellulosic ethanol could be produced annually at Poet’s 27 plants if the technology is deployed at all of them, according to the statement.

‘Quick Build-Out’
“I think you’ll see a pretty quick build-out of the cellulosic industry once it’s proven,” Broin said. “I think the dollars will be available, and I think this product will be very important to our country becoming more independent from foreign sources of oil.”

DSM and POET expect the venture to be profitable in 2014 and to deliver “substantial revenues” and an “above-average” contribution to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in the medium to longer term.

Based on Project Liberty’s expected initial capacity of 20 million gallons, and current average prices, annual sales may reach $100 million, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Feike Sijbesma of Heerlen, Netherlands-based DSM told reporters on the call. Sales may grow by another $100 million or more depending on licensing deals, he said.

Prices for ethanol have dropped 30 percent from the 2011 high of $3.068 a gallon on the Chicago Board of Trade. Poet’s cost to make its cellulosic fuel is “just under $3” now, Broin said. --With assistance from Mario Parker in Chicago and Maud van Gaal in Amsterdam. Editors: Will Wade, Charles Siler.

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Chinese writer and activist Zhu Yufu was charged with publishing a provocative poem this past week (the official charge was "inciting subversion of state power"). Zhu's poem is entitled "It's Time," and here it is in translation:

It's time
It's time, Chinese people!
It's time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It's time to use our feet to go to
the square and make a choice.

The charge comes a year after Zhu was arrested as part of a crackdown against the so-called Jasmine Revolution, a protest movement inspired by the Arab Spring (Zhu's lawyer asserts that Zhu's poem was not connected to the movement). The movement called on people to take "strolls" at certain points in the major Chinese cities, in the hopes that avoiding obvious signs of protest would protect them from arrest.

This is the third time Zhu, who is 58 years old, has faced jail time. He was previously locked up for seven years after a 1999 conviction for helping to start the "Opposition Party" magazine, and for two years in 2007 after pushing a police officer during an arrest.

Zhu's advocates doubt that authorities will go any easier on him this time. Sarah Schafer, an expert on China for Amnesty International, told the AFP, "We are not optimistic that Zhu Yufu will get off easily. We hope that the court realizes this man has not committed a crime and therefore should be released." Zhu's lawyer is similarly pessimistic. He told the press that while he will defend Zhu's freedom of expression, his chances of success are "very slim." He added, "You can't be optimistic about anything in China. In this country, he'll be punished harshly."

Zhu is a member of the Independent Chinese PEN Center (ICPC), part of the PEN American Center, a group that fights for freedom of expression worldwide. The group, which has closely followed the plight of Chinese writers in recent years, notes that Zhu is just the latest in a series of high-profile Chinese dissident writers to be targeted. The most notable, of course, is Liu Xiaobo, the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize winner sentenced to eleven years in prison in 2009 (I've previously written about Liu and his poetry here).

And just last week, Yu Jie, the former vice president of the ICPC, fled with his family to the United States. In a press conference on Wednesday, he talked about the years of harassment he endured in China, and detailed how he was tortured the day before Liu's Nobel Prize ceremony. During the press conference, Yu quoted a passage from Macbeth,

I think our country sinks beneath the yoke;
It weeps, it bleeds, and each new day a gash
Is added to her wounds.

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[In constructing an assemblage of “outsider” poetry there is a point finally at which the work of contemporaries has also to be considered. I have felt constrained here by a determination not to confuse “outsider” with some sense of the “marginal” or “alternative” as defined in contrast, say, to another assumption of “mainstream” or “normative” or even (god help us) “canonical.”

Here, it seems to me, one principal characteristic (but only one) of outsiderness, as I’ve come to understand it, is a difference of mind or body that results in a range of differences in language & poetic forms that might otherwise be hard or impossible to come by. It is in this sense too that “outsider art” and by extension “outsider poetry” has had as one of its anchors what Dubuffet & others defined as art brut & brought into prominence the work of artist/poets such as Adolf Wölfli & Aloise Corbaz. In line with that I can imagine the place among outsiders of “canonical” or near-“canonical” figures such as Blake & Smart, Hölderlin & Artaud, whose skewered view of language & poetic form was both a cause & consequence of their historical isolation.

Coming closer to the present, however, I have hesitated to bring the work of my contemporaries & acquaintances into play. With Hannah Weiner (1928-1997), as a key instance, the turning in her work followed an extreme perceptual shift in which words & letters appeared to her in air & on the surfaces of objects & people, to be incorporated into the written works she was then composing. In her own well known accounting: “I SEE words on my forehead    IN THE AIR    on other people    on the typewriter   on the page   These appear in the text as CAPITALS or in italics”  The results of that, through her own efforts, were nothing short of extraordinary.

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She is a writer, educator and a dreamer. Aditi Rao who won the last Srinivas Rayaprol Poetry Prize says she started writing even before she knew that she wanted to write. “I don't have a real answer for why. It started out because I saw it as play and fun; in some ways it still is. But it's not towards a goal of publishing as such. It keeps me sane and rooted,” she says. However she cannot judge commercial writing, she clarifies, “I don't write commercially, but that doesn't mean that other writers shouldn't. The filtering process happens at the readership level and it's best left to them to choose what kind of writing they want to read.” She feels that there is a lot of reading material out there. Usually people don't read all the books written by one author. She says that reading is a “mood-based thing”, you might not always want to read a serious book that will take up a lot of your time. Commercial and fun-reads come in handy then.

Writing happened to her because she loves the language. “It's the story you're telling and the way you're telling. Like Kiran Desai, the music of the language, the way it flows, the play of the words matters. Writing should be enchanting,” feels the Delhi-based poet. What really inspired her poetry was a summer spent in Latin America. “All the writing I did then was inspired by the place; the people I saw and met there started showing up in my poems, becoming characters. My poetry took a giant leap.”

Aditi says that she is new to the world of publishing. In a world that's dominated by bestsellers and reader domination, how difficult is it to not fall into the rut of writing for an audience? “I love the process of writing and there was a disconnect between that and publishing which is after all a business. I saw that writers often shaped their work according to what sells, I saw that in my creative writing programme as well and it didn't sit well with me. Until I was sure of finding my own voice, I felt vulnerable and didn't want to publish. I feel ready now.

I can tell when I am being honest and when I am writing to please somebody,” she says. A personal connect with the readers is more important to Aditi than prizes and awards. Poetry she says is a more concentrated art form, “You're packing in emotions and imagery in a small space,” she says.

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