otoh

April is National Poetry Month and I have been remiss not to have acknowledged it sooner. But the site that explains Writing Fibs I just ran across last week anyway. These Fibs are not the regular lies fiction that I usually fill these pages with. These Fibs are poems based on the Fibonacci Sequence. Simply stated, to get the next number in such a sequence you add together the two previous numbers as in 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, etc. These sequences appear in nature in the arrangement of leaves or seeds, the spiral shape of shells like the nautilus, and many others.

In their most basic form, these poems are six lines long and a total of 20 syllables — the first six numbers in the sequence above. I jotted down a few quick attempts below. Feel free to try some yourself and make sure you look at Gregory K.’s site where I got the idea for lots of links to news and hundreds of examples.

Math?
Cool!
English?
That’s cool too!
And here I can add
The two together in one form!

Two
Four
Six, Eight!
Who do we –
No, just wait, wait, wait!
Whose idea was this anyway?

I
Don’t
Want to
Learn about
Math in English class
Fibonacci was no poet

Spring
and
now the
sap rises.
Young girls run away.
Boys (and dirty old men) chase them.

I
tried
my hand.
These poems
show how little time
(even less editing) I spent.

Technorati tags: Writing Fibs~blog~personal~otoh~poetry