Sherry Chandler

The Fib

A few days ago, my friend Donna , who points me to many quirky aspects of the web, sent me a link for GottaBook, where Gregory K. was talking about his new form, a way to combine National Poetry Month and Math Awareness Month: The Fib, a poem based on the Fibonacci sequence. So I put together a post on the subject, thinking I’d roll it out as a balance against 19th century solemnity. But it kept getting bumped by really important stuff like photos of my dogwood tree. And then, this morning, I discover that the Fib has not just hit the NYTimes, the article is number 10 on the most-e-mailed items list. So by now, you all probably know more about the Fib than I do. Nevertheless, here’s what I found on the GottaBook website:

One
Small,
Precise,
Poetic,
Spiraling mixture:
Math plus poetry yields the Fib.

What’s that, you ask? That’s the very first Fib I wrote. What’s a Fib? Well, first a little backstory….

At the 2005 SCBWI-LA Writer’s Day, poet-novelist Ron Koertge mentioned the idea of “warming up” each day by writing haiku. …
I was intrigued, but my geeky mind immediately began to churn. Why just haiku? I wanted something that required more precision. That led me to a six line, 20 syllable poem with a syllable count by line of 1/1/2/3/5/8 – the classic Fibonacci sequence. In short, start with 0 and 1, add them together to get your next number, then keep adding the last two numbers together for your next one.

Here’s kind of a nice one from the GottaBook comments on April 3:

RHYMING

Ants
Can’t
Wear pants
When they dance.
Plus I’ve heard the news
They never put on dancing shoes.

For more about this phenom, including a photo of Gregory K. [Pincus, it turns out] and a quote from Annie Finch, read the Times article, and, of course, you can go to the source.

Possibly related posts:

Point of Rock

Trillium

from dbqp:

Baudelaire, Second Preface

Chicken Little and the Ostriches

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