Our resident bean left us a comment which reminded me that we wrote haikus to celebrate a rather obvious holiday two months ago. This, of course, made me feel guilty for being tardy with the 55Friday flash fiction free-for-all, so to distract myself from the shame, thoughts of a third writing exercise which employs “resource constraints” came to mind. Behold, a “Fib”:
Blogs spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry? [linky-poo]
What is a “Fib”? It’s a six-line poem inpired by the Fibonacci (Cough! Hemachandra Cough!) sequence, which controls how many syllables can be in each line.
The allure of the form is that it is simple, yet restricted. The number of syllables in each line must equal the sum of the syllables in the two previous lines. So, start with 0 and 1, add them together to get your next number, which is also 1, 2 comes next, then add 2 and 1 to get 3, and so on…Fibs…top out at line six, with eight syllables.[linky-poo]
According to the afore-linked NYT article, April just happens to be National Poetry Month AND Mathematics Awareness Month, so the sudden craze for “fibs” seems especially appropriate. Know what else is apposite?
The earliest known reference to Fibonacci numbers is contained in a book on meters called Chhandah-shāstra (500 BC) by an Indian mathematician named Pingala. As documented by Donald Knuth in The Art of Computer Programming, this sequence was described by the Indian mathematicians Gopala and Hemachandra in 1150, who were investigating the possible ways of exactly bin packing items of length 1 and 2. [wiki]
Paging “Everything-is-Yindian”-Uncle!
I know I usually name our nanofiction-orgies after some much-adored song in my catalog of tunes which I cried to in high school and or watched on “120 Minutes”, but I’m so fascinated by this “new haiku” that I’ll refrain from capping this post with an angst-ridden hat. Everything else is the same as it ever was, so leave your bit o’ brilliance (or a link to where we can find it) in the comments below. 55-word gems which tell a story, haikus which reference mezze and poetry which reminds me of that mindless Da Vinci code…come fifty-five, come all.
