I am very fond of Baroque music, and-

Watches in dismay as people stop reading

Okay, I’ll start with something more amusing! I guess that everyone’s heard of fibs, or Fibonacci poems? It’s a brilliant form of poetry: following the Fibonacci sequence, each line in the poem must have 1/1/2/3/5/8 syllables respectively. Here’s an example:

Blood
Flows
The pain
Comforts me
How I long for death
Teenage angst is so pathetic

Hey, I’m no poet - I’m just a grumpy bastard. Anyway, note how the last line forms a counterpoint against the rest of the poem; I’ll get to that later.

The fib has become a minor Internet phenomenon, and people have written fibs all over the place. As an amusing bit of info, you can scroll down to the comments in the last link, and note that Gregory K - the first person to post about Fibonacci poems - has left a comment where he mentions that 12th century Sanskrit poetry had a meter based on the Fibonacci sequence. He’s not the inventor in other words; it’s rather silly that it took 900 years for the idea to become widely known again, though. And while I’m on the topic of amusing info, you can note that he mentions Tetractys as well in his post. Anal as I am I had too look it up: it’s a 20 syllable poem consisting of verses where the lines have 1/2/3/4/10 syllables respectively.

Fibs have become very popular, as I mentioned. Guess who’s writing a book on fibs, for example? It probably came to this after the NY Times article that mentioned Fibonacci poetry and showed a pic of the aforementioned Gregory K as well. If you look at the NY Times article you’ll note that they offer an example of an alternative Fibonacci poem; one that adds two lines to the structure:

I
like
to blog.
Frequently.
Theory matters.
Computer science (theory)
is my home and geometric algorithms are
sublime. Let P be a set of points in general position in the plane. Amen.

Now, this is where the fun begins. I would like to claim that the fib above is clever, but absolutely atrocious as poetry. This is what happens when mathematicians start writing poetry! I quote from the article: “For many people, writing one of the poems is a little like solving a puzzle.” What they probably fail to see is that it has potential for beauty as well; mathematical elegance and aestetical qualities can merge, and this is a perfect example of a meter for it.

And with this I have brought us back to my initial statement: I am very fond of Baroque music, and I believe that restrictions is what gives the style its appeal. There is a mathematical beauty in Baroque music, just as there is emotion and aestetic beauty. The restrictions force repetitions, but in turn they bring out flowing variations; the limited cage transmogrifies into the entire world, making the outside irrelevant.

So, what exactly is it that I’m trying to say? I believe that fibs could become so much more if additional restraints were added - stylistic guidelines and restrictions. Take the haiku for instance: the hokku where it originated from had demands for a season word, a combination of elements, a grammatical break and so on. I am pretty convinced that I would appreciate a strict hokku style more than the common free-form haiku found everywhere. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the sonnet was much appreciated with its strict meter, for instance.

Speaking of the sonnet (and Shakespearian sonnets in particular) they often featured a turn of events – a volta – toward the end, where the build-up of the poem changed into the resolution, and the mood of the sonnet changed. Did you note that my silly Fibonacci poem in the beginning had just that, as well? I tried to add an ironic twist in the last line, and I suspect that fibs in general would benefit from a stylistic change like that.

But then again…

He just won’t shut up
Thinking he knows poetry
Don’t listen to him

This entry was posted on Monday, June 26th, 2006 at 2:01 pm and is filed under Awesome Stuff, Literature. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.