Life &Poetry Entropy | 13 Aug 2009
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David Ignatow is remembered as a poet who wrote popular verse about the common man and the issues encountered in daily life. Direct statement and clarity were his primary objectives in crafting a poem.
In this prose poem, Ignatow spoofs—and celebrates—the scientific method, as his speaker counts all two million and seventy-five thousand leaves on a single tree, proving that one tree is finite. Is this as meaningful as counting stars, as astronomers do? Why or why not? And should we count the hairs on our heads as well? Bombarded as we are by information, how do we decide which facts are important and which are not?
As if in life everything is quantifiable .. ??
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This tree has two million and seventy-five thousand leaves. Perhaps I missed a leaf or two but I do feel triumphant at having persisted in counting by hand branch by branch and marked down on paper with pencil each total. Adding them up was a pleasure I could understand; I did something on my own that was not dependent on others, and to count leaves is not less meaningful than to count the stars, as astronomers are always doing.
They want the facts to be sure they have them all. It would help them to know whether the world is finite. I discovered one tree that is finite. I must try counting the hairs on my head, and you too.
We could swap information.
© Information- from Against the Evidence:
Selected Poems by David Ignatow. 1914 – 1997