For National Poetry Month I’ve been noticing where poetry showed up in every day life. Recently in the New Yorker, Calvin Trillin wrote about pi day and mentioned
There is a form of poetry known as a piem, in which pi’s digits are represented by the number of letters in each word. The best-known piem renders the first fifteen digits of pi as “How I want a drink, alcoholic of course, after the heavy chapters involving quantum mechanics.”
Googling “piem” didn’t get me much, although eventually I found the letterpress poster to the left, by Toronto printer Amanda White.
Maybe people use poetry to remember other things? There are mnemonics to remember lots of facts, for instance “Every Good Boy Deserves Favor” to remember the musical notes in the scale. Googling “mnemonic” I got more poetry to remember the digits of pi and then another term for piem: piphilology.