The Fibonacci Sequence Poem

This is where poetry and mathematics collide or cooperate, as you may see it. The Fibonacci Sequence is a concept in mathematics in which each number (after the first two) is the sum of the two preceding ones. The series starts as 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, then goes on. It’s how we get a spiral. With that much math talk I’m teetering on the edge of my math knowledge, but here is how it relates to poetry. In a Fibonacci sequence poem the number of syllables per line is the sum of the number of syllables in the two preceding lines. The first line has one syllable as does the second line, the third line has two syllables and the sequence goes on just as above. There is some talk that the first line is zero, the second line is zero plus one (1), and the third is two (1 +1). To convey that in a reading, you could pause to connote zero. To do it on the page, you could have a blank line as someone suggested to me in a workshop, but I think that looks as though I pressed enter one time too many, by mistake. Another option is to have the first one syllable line as the title.  Here are a few examples of the Fibonacci. I don’t have any unpublished Fibonacci poems, also called Fibs, so I am not posting them here.

Fibonacci poems tend to be short usually stopping at about six or seven lines because beyond that the syllable count gets unruly for a line of poetry.

Here is a link to the writing of the inventor of the “Fib”, Greg Pincus. GottaBook: The Fib

Bonus link: here are examples of the Fibonacci sequence in plants.  5 Examples of the Fibonacci Sequence in Plants - SunnyScope (sunnysports.com)

Here is one example using the title as the first one syllable line.

Kiss

me
again
tongue and lips
like Fibonacci’s
sequence, each movement a spiral,
enfold, unfold, a working through and against, again.

—from “Fibonacci Poems” by Athena Kildegaard, published in Rare Momentum

This example by Jonathan Moskaluk comes from the Fib Review and is a “double fib”.  fibonacci poems - the fib review - the home of fibonacci poetry (musepiepress.com)

 

rare air

I
know
that you
lost yourself
when you found him there—
removed from our most bitter air.
He grew sick from the gases that give life to the group,
so he bagged up his own hissing mixture to breathe, but it swirled in his head on a loop
and we all learned that even the sun can snuff itself
for burning too brilliant and bright,
as he reeled towards
his last hour—
breathing
rare
air.