Fibs - Fibonacci-based Poetry

Gregory K. writes "April is National Poetry Month (and, it turns out, Math Awareness Month), and on my blog, I decided to get people writing poetry based on the Fibonacci sequence. The poems are six lines, 20 syllables long with the syllable pattern 1/1/2/3/5/8, though they can go longer, obviously. I've been calling 'em Fibs, and people have been writing them on pop culture, politics, math, and more."

Comments

Seen elsewhere...

[Skreems]

Not to take away from this poster's message, but this has been done elsewhere as well. The lyrics to Tool's song "Lateralus" are written in Fibonacci rhythm (I think up to 13).

Too Cool Even for Geeks!

[under_score]

Some of the Fibs in the comments are astounding. So what about Prime's

A short Poem with Prime syllables is Just as beautiful as the Fib. But don't hold your breath for more in this one!

... or pi's

I eat pie . Please... Blueberry Pie... It's my favorite.

Fibonacci pineapples. 9 liner.

[gihan_ripper]

01 It
01 is
02 really
03 not taxing
05 to create a Fib,
08 but still they are interesting
13 sequences of numbers. We are familiar with
21 the 'rabbit generation' origins of the sequence, but it can also describe
34 the number of petals on a flower, or the number of curves on a sunflower head, on a pineapple, or even on a pinecone.

For You Tool Fans

[ras_b]

I copied the following directly from this website which has an interesting analysis of tool's lateralus album.
There's a Fibonacci in Maynard's lyrics, specifically the syllables:

  black [1]
  then [1]
  white are [2]
  all I see [3]
  in my infancy [5]
  red and yellow then came to be [8]
  reaching out to me [5]
  lets me see [3]
  there is [2]
  so [1]
  much [1]
  more and [2]
  beckons me [3]
  to look through to these [5]
  infinite possibilities [8]
  as below so above and beyond I imagine [13]
  drawn outside the lines of reason [8]
  push the envelope [5]
  watch it bend [3]

  I suppose it's not actually a true Fibonacci, since it does reverse itself.

Re:For You Tool Fans

[bloodstains]

I was working on this as well untill I got to the following lyrics:

Over thinking, over analyzing separates the body from the mind.
Withering my intuition, missing opportunities and I must
Feed my will to feel my moment drawing way outside the lines.

I decided I may have been missing the point of the song.

Surprised no one came up with this:

[Chapter80]

Here's a Python program written in a fib...

try:
....foo
except:
....print "Display"
....print "Fibonacci"
....count = prevcount = 1
....while prevcount <= 7000:
........print prevcount ; count, prevcount = count + prevcount, count

The way *I* read the program (pronouncing each special character except for the quotes and colons), it's a fib. AND it does something useful. It displays the first twenty Fibonacci numbers!

Pronounced:
(1) try
(1) foo
(2) ex cept
(3) print dis play
(5) print fib on ac ci
(8) count e quals prev count e quals one
(13) while prev count less than or e qual to sev en thou sand
(21) print prev count sem i col on count com ma prev count e quals count plus prev count com ma count

Now that's *real* nerdy. Geeks should be proud.

Math is everywhere you look

[hey!]

For example, consider the famous poem "The Tiger" by William Blake:

TIGER, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

If you read this alound (or at least subvocalize), you'll see a patern, and patterns in my opinion are quintessentially mathematical:

TIGer/TIGer/BURNing/BRIGHT */
IN the / FORests /OF the /NIGHT */
WHAT im/MORtal / HAND or/ EYE */
could FRAME / thy FEAR/ful SYM/meTRY?

What makes this pattern interesting is not what it is, but what it is not. It's like you can hear a quantum entanglement with the poem it is not, but easily might have been. A lesser poet would have written: "TIGer, TIGer, BURNing BRIGHTly", which would be a metrical form called "trochaic quadrameter". A trochee is a two syllbale unit (or "foot") with stress on the first syllable (like this: dah DUM), as opposed to an iamb which stressed the second (va VOOM).
Hiwawatha is an example of trochaic quadrameter:

By the shores of Gitche Gumee,
By the shining Big-Sea-Water,
Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,
Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.

Four footed forms are very solid and predictable, but are seldom chosen by profesional poets because they quickly become monotonous and susceptible to parody, as in this excerpt of a Geroge Strong's lampoon of Hiawatha:

He killed the noble Mudjokivis.
Of the skin he made him mittens,
Made them with the fur side inside,
Made them with the skin side outside.
He, to get the warm side inside,
Put the inside skin side outside.
He, to get the cold side outside,
Put the warm side fur side inside.
That's why he put the fur side inside,
Why he put the skin side outside,
Why he turned them inside outside.

Tiger's unusual and broken meter gives it a haunting feeling (haunted by the missing syllables?) that fits its subject perfectly.

Getting to the subject of the article, efforts like this are often successful at getting people who are interested in poetry to try their hands at it. I think in part because it's so easy to be write bad poetry, it's helpful to have the safety net of a highy arbitrary form to fall back on: after all, what can you expect given the restrictions? The 5-7-5 structure of Haiku is also popular for the same purposes and reasons.

I wonder whether a similar effort could be made using patterns in scansion, like in "Tiger". Maybe you could create a set of rules encoding messages in stress and rhyme, and then set out a task to "encrypt" a message as verse.

Re:Math is everywhere you look

[Anonymous Coward]

It's trochaic / iambic _tetrameter_, not 'quadrameter.' Also, the meter in Blake's poem is not that unusual at all; verse missing the final unstressed trochaic syllable as in "The Tyger" is known as "catalectic" (you could also see it as iambic tetrameter with the first syllable elided).

You're right about the safety net, though. Robert Frost (who himself often employed iambic tetrameter) said writing free verse is like playing tennis without a net: you either have to be bad, or really, really good (there is a good software engineer metaphor here, but it eludes me).

Those interested is more mathematical, rather than metrical, verse, should check out the line from Zukofsky and the Objectivists through Cage and the Black Mountain School up to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets. They composed around mathematical sequences / constructs, among other things.