Prompt #263 – Fibonacci Poems by Gail Gerwin

My dear friend and fellow poet, Gail Fishman Gerwin, 
prepared this prompt on the Fibonacci for us,

 and I'm pleased to share it with you this week—with many thanks to Gail.

Write a Narrative Fibonacci

Several years ago, I was fortunate to receive an invitation to read at the Barron Arts Center’s PoetsWednesday in Woodbridge, NJ. The series offers workshops prior to the features and open readings. Luckily, that evening renowned poet Joe Weil facilitated a lesson on how to write a Fibonacci, a poetic form named for 13^th century mathematician Leonardo Pisano, later known as Fibonacci. That night’s workshop dealt with one form of Fibonacci. The formula:

First line – one syllable or word

Second line – one syllable or word (0 +1, sum of previous two lines)

Third line – two syllables or words (1+1, same pattern)

Fourth line – three syllables or words (1+2)

Fifth line – five syllables or words (2+3)

Sixth line – eight syllables or words (3+5)

Seventh line – thirteen syllables or words (5+8)

Then reverse:

Eighth line – eight syllables or words

Ninth line – five syllables or words

Tenth line – three syllables or words

Eleventh line – two syllables or words

Twelfth line – one syllable or word

Thirteenth line – one syllable or word

The finished product: an interesting-looking narrative.

I preferred the word count to the syllable count. I chose a television show of my youth, starring Milton Berle, a comedian; it was live television in black and white. Families would gather in some lucky person’s living room at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights (not everyone owned even a single TV) to watch.

Many early television sets were made by a company named Dumont. The screens were small but the laughs were large. Some skits were extremely silly, like when Milton called “make-up,” someone would come out and smack him in the face with a big powder puff and he always acted surprised. You can see an example of this on an old Donny and Marie YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dT4m2D_Aan8) at about minute 3:07 (+/-).

When I received Joe’s prompt to compose a Fibonacci with the above formula about something in my past, I thought of Uncle Miltie, as he was called with affection. One feature of the show involved an ad for the Texaco gas company, where service-station attendants sang a jingle that began “We are the men of Texaco, we work from Maine to Mexico . . . Everyone watching knew this song and could sing along. Hence the mention of Texaco men in the poem below. I like to put dialogue in italics, not quotation marks.

Slapstick Fibonacci

Uncle

Miltie,

Tuesday nights.

Whack! Maaaaaaaakeup. Hilarity.

Dust flies on the set.

Oh no, who turned the sound way down?

Fix it Daddy. I can't. Just go to bed, there's always next week.

There it goes, Ben, it's on again. Whew.

Can I stay up, Mommy,

‘til Texaco men?

Why not?

Dumont

Works.

After that summer evening, when Joe introduced me to the form, everyone in my family received Fibs as birthday poems. Muse-Pie Press’s The Fib Review, an online literary journal edited by Mary-Jane Grandinetti, published that one and another I wrote about my obsession with the style.

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue10/gail_fishman_gerwin1.html

Check out The Fib Review’s current issue and archives. 

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

• Explore the variety of Fibonacci styles.
• They don’t always follow the 1-1-2-3-5-8-13-8-5-3-2-1-1 format (my personal comfort zone). 
• They’re not all narrative. Some may take on the image of what the words describe.
•  See if you can figure out which formulas the poets used. 
• Was there more than a single stanza? If so, did they take the same shape? 
• Then write a Fibonacci of your own and think about posting it in a comment on this blog.

Happy Fibbing.

__________________________________________________________ 

 Many thanks, Gail!

Visit Gail Online by Clicking Here

To Order a Copy of Gail's Latest Poetry Collection, Click Here