Blogs
spread
gossip
and rumor
But how about a
Rare, geeky form of poetry?
That's what happened after Gregory K. Pincus, a screenwriter and aspiring children's book author in Los Angeles, wrote a post on his GottaBook blog several weeks ago inviting readers to write "Fibs," six-line poems that used a mathematical progression known as the Fibonacci sequence to dictate the number of syllables in each line. The sequence goes like this: 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,..., where each successive number is the sum of the previous 2.
Within a few days, Pincus, 41, had received about 30 responses, a large portion of them Fibonacci poems. Most of them were from friends or relatives or people who regularly read his blog, which focuses on children's literature.
Then, on April 7, a subscriber to the popular Web site Slashdot.org--which runs over a tagline that reads "News for nerds. Stuff that matters"--linked to Pincus' original post, and suddenly, it seemed, Fibs were sprouting all over the Internet.
Pincus, who wrote in his original post that he conceived of the Fibonacci poems in part as a writing exercise, said in an interview that he figures more than 100 other Web sites have linked to his post and more than 1,000 Fibs have been written since the beginning of April, which just happens to be both National Poetry Month and Mathematics Awareness Month.
"It tickles me that it can spread like that," said Pincus. "It's such a wonderful thing."
By and large, most of the people who have written Fibonacci poems over the past several weeks are not professional poets, but actors, comedians, video role-play enthusiasts, musicians, computer scientists, lawyers and schoolchildren. Casey Kelly Barton, a stay-at-home mother and home-schooler in Austin, Texas, who started a blog called Redneck Mother to chronicle her "dissatisfaction after Bush got re-elected," used the Fib form to write a rant against the president.
Chat rooms linked to Web sites ranging from Actuarial Outpost, a forum for actuaries, to em411.com, a site for electronic musicians, have taken up Pincus' challenge and generated strings of the whimsical poems.
For many people, writing one of the poems is a little like solving a puzzle. Suresh Venkatasubramanian, a 32-year-old computer science researcher at AT&T Labs-Research in Florham Park, N.J., said he was attracted to the Fibonacci poetry because it reminded him of "what a computer scientist would call the 'resource constraints.'" Check out his blog, Geomblog for a taste of his version.
More professional poets may be attracted to the form, said Annie Finch, a poet who teaches at the University of Southern Maine. "Poets are very, very hungry for constraint right now," said Finch, who has written about formal poetry. "Poets are often poets because they love to play with words and love constraints that allow the self to step out of the picture a little bit. The form gives you something to dance with so it's not just you alone on the page."
Even those who were not compelled by the idea of Fibonacci poetry could not resist the challenge. When asked for her insights, Judith Roitman, a poet and math professor at the University of Kansas, wrote in an e-mail message that she "found the phenomenon pretty uninteresting." But she then went on to write:
So
you
no doubt
will not find
it interesting
to talk to me about this stuff.
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