I decided to write a poem about Ada Lovelace a) for Ada Lovelace Day on Wednesday and b) because it’d fit into that sciencey sort of poem that I need to write tons of for the grant this autumn. Without knowing much about her aside of the fibs we told about her involvement with tiny shanty, I didn’t know what I was getting into. Read a lot about her and her parents, got too caught up in all the heredity of poetry and mathematics, and wrote this over-dense poem. Maybe a new one tomorrow that is a little more approachable, a little less unnavigable. I like so much of this but it is too, too dense. Also, there was a sassy bit about Barbie that was just inappropriate in this poem. There are always the failed poems that are still close to our hearts.

She walks in beauty like a sequence of numbers
simplifying the fundamental theorem of calculus.
She formulates rebellion from her mother’s worries,
writes poems in elegant equations, mother’s heart
is egg yolk spilled wet in amniotic fluid.
Ada wipes her up with a damp cloth and goes dancing.

They say father was mad, bad, and dangerous to know,
but mother and Ada cannot help loving him.
So we’ll go no more a-roving in literary circles,
we’ve heard his name spoken, and shared in its shame.
Dainty Ada outgrows her abacus and writes sonnets
for machines, she is waltzing algorhythmic elegance.

She calculates beauty in possibility, took mother’s numbers
and Babbage’s unfinished engines into dreams of weaving art
from punched paper dance cards- this loom could produce
music, she knows. Its weft could pen nursery rhymes;
Ada speaks contraption like simile, mathematics is metaphor.

Unearthing a new language, Babbage’s dance card
could become terabyte and wintermute.
A woman speaks breath into bot, we will call her programmer,
and centuries later, let’s give her genius to girls
who will walk in intelligence like the night,
of ceilingless heavens, and unimaginable skies.

Finding Ada