Anthony Etherin is a poet, publisher, podcaster, and musician. His books include Stray Arts (and Other Inventions) and Slate Petals (and Other Wordscapes). Find him on Twitter @Anthony_Etherin and via anthonyetherin.wordpress.com.

Pedro Poitevin is a mathematician and bilingual poet. His poems have appeared in Rattle, Letras Libres, y Periódico de Poesía. He won the 2021 Juana Goergen Poetry Prize for the best Spanish-language poem written that year in the United States. You can find him on Twitter @poitevin and via pedropoitevin.com.

Poetry ⨂ maths ?

Anthony & Pedro say: "The two sonnets are in conversation with each other and they are anagrams of each other. The process involved a sequence of pairs of sonnets (one in Spanish, one in English) that converged in distributions to these two final sonnets. However, convergence in distribution is not quite the seminal mathematical idea here. Since the point of the experiment was to preserve structure, the process of composition can be thought of as what mathematical logicians (model theorists, in particular) call a back-and-forth argument. Each décima was written using only the ten most frequent letters in its corresponding language. There exists a bijection between the two ten-letter sets in such a way that, up to that bijection, the two décimas have the same lettristic distribution. This is an example of what we call substitutive anagrams. "

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