[Matt Q]

I find Die interesting. Intriguing, in fact. It made me want to reread it. In part that was because I wanted to know what it was doing/saying, especially given that it was presenting itself as a poem. Is it saying something about anything other than itself – is it working figuratively? Does it resolve? Does it turn? Is the narrator reliable? And so on. So, I guess it was ridde-like in that respect.

One theme the poem takes up is pretence, appearance. The diagrams, we are told, are used, typically inaccurately, for dramatic effect. Curie's story is repackaged, slanted to serve the dramatics of the storyline. Though this is not explicitly developed in the latter half of the poem, it might well, as Joe says, lead us to ask to what to extent is Paterson doing the same thing in poem. Is Paterson playing with mathematics as a back-drop/scenery to his poem? Do these diagrams really appear as often, and in the contexts he says they do, or even at all. And if they do, they denote what Paterson says they do?

Another theme is the distinction between the potentially predictable and the truly random. The poem’s close does seem play off what's gone before with respect to this. The N asserts that the spokes diagram appears to reliably precede a dramatic turn in films' plots, and asks if this the result of pure coincidence (an aleatory factor) or not. The N’s uncertainty about this is epistemic: it's something that could in principle be established if he had more knowledge.

The reader’s uncertainty, above, is epistemic too. We could in principle, find Parsi’s notebooks and look. We may well try. (No spoilers, but I did, and maybe in this sense, solved the riddle). So, actually the question of whether this co-occurrence is predictable (epistemic) or not (aleatory), is itself epistemic in the sense that we could in principle ask the script writers, but also epistemic on another level, in that the poem's claims may be bogus anyway.

Is it poem? (Do we even have a universally agreed definition of a poem?) And does it really matter? Irrespective of how we’d classify it, this piece of writing is asking us to take it as a poem, not as the essay, or sociological or historical study that it resembles (its form), and we should read it in that light, I reckon. FWIW, my working definition of a poem is: the sort of thing one finds in poetry books and poetry journals, so I don’t have problem with this being called a poem. Others may have narrower definitions, of course. The border between prose poetry and related forms like short fiction, essays, reports etc., is often hard to pin down (and again, beyond the desire classify, there’s maybe no strong reason to try).

Is it a good/bad poem? I quite enjoy poems that are playfully puzzling or absurd and call themselves into question, and I don’t really really mind if there’s no deeper meaning. I enjoyed the ride. Different people want different things from a poem though. Some people want emotional heft, or an emphasis on sound or rhythm, or fresh/unexpected use of language, or some reflection on the human condition. I’m not sure the poem gives us anything like that. But still, it kept my interest and had me rereading, more so than many poems do.

If it were a bad poem (let’s say we all agreed on this), could I conclude from that Paterson was past his prime? I really don't see how. The sample size is way too small. Even in their prime, few poets only produce good poems. (By which I mean, of course, poems that I think are good!).