Saturday, April 15, 2006

Fibs for Poetry Month

I learned about this from Marilyn, the Knitting Curmudgeon.

Writer and blogger Gregory K. Pincus got his geek on and decided to combine poetry with the Fibonacci sequence. He calls the result the Fib and blogged about it. Slashdot reported on it. The New York Times reported on it. Two weeks later, he has had hundreds of poems sent to him, and his blog has many links to Fib fans.

So anyway, here’s what you do. Remember how to write haiku? Five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second, five syllables in the third. Fibs are done the same way, except the syllable counts are taken from the Fibonacci sequence, the series of numbers where each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. So instead of 5-7-5, it is 1-1-2-3-5-8 (and 13-21-34 if you are so inclined, but that gets unwieldy.)

For example,

Bad
cat
Katie
wants a bird,
but is frustrated.
She cannot open the window.

They are addictive. I actually got out of bed to write down a couple that I thought of before I fell asleep.

I did my little part to keep the bandwagon rolling by starting a Fibs thread at the Piker Press forums. As soon as everyone wakes up, it should see a little action.

1 comment:

Greg Pincus said...

I just wish to point out that friends of mine would say that I never simply get my geek on...it's ALWAYS on. What can you do?

Thanks for the link and the Fib.