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.

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 Many thanks, Gail!

Visit Gail Online by Clicking Here

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

Prompt # 230 – Picture This by Guest Prompter Gail Fishman Gerwin

 

When we visited Florida’s Sanibel Island a few years ago, the chilled morning air didn’t stop early risers from waiting for the first glimpse of sun. Lucky me: I caught a pelican mid-air against the orange sky, yet the memory the photo took me back to my youth, to a special person, to an affirmation of his life, to an inspiration for the way to live mine. As I stood in the cool sand, awed by the sight, the narrative was nowhere in my mind, yet weeks later the poem came to me along with a flood of emotion.

Pelicans at Sunrise

Just before sunrise at Sanibel,

pelicans gather, soar high above

the Gulf, then dive and soar again.

My high school friend swam in waters

like these as a young man. Awed by an

avian fisherman that could gulp whole

fish into a waiting gullet, he squinted

toward the sun, unaware that this circling

hunter would swoop down, pluck out

his eye.

He married much later than the rest of us,

chatted at class reunions about his progeny

as the youngest: ours were wed and parents,

his just starting their college days.

We never could tell which eye was taken,

they seemed alike, it would have been rude

to stare, but the incident was the icon

that defined him throughout his life.

You remember, we’d say when he was

out of range, a pelican took out his eye.

When I read about his passing a few years

ago, I recalled a sweet man, bespectacled,

who didn’t seem his age, whose generous

smiles belied his trials, who gave his eye

to a pelican and never looked back.

                                        —First Published in Exit 13

Take some time to look through your memories. Is there a photo that sparks a special event or a meaningful time or season in your life? Is there a box of sepia-tinted family photos with people you don’t recognize? Did you stop the car to photograph wild turkeys along a Greek roadside? Or drive (on the wrong side of the road) to Stonehenge? Wait! Look at these: you with a favorite childhood toy, you with arms around your best friend, you as a four-year-old with your first dog (what was his name?), you at your wedding, you at your youngest child’s wedding. Take some time to relish the feelings your chosen photo brings. Can you smell salt air in the background? Can you taste that birthday cake? Does the photo spark a memory outside the image?

Use the photo you choose to create your piece—as a narrative with stanzas, a prose poem, something formal . . . Tell the truth or make up a new truth. Inspire yourself as you bring your image to life. Use whatever implements you keep in your poetry toolbox and publish your poem with “the music in it” on this blog’s comment section—or continue to revise it. Click here for editing tips. Perhaps you will submit your poem to a journal.           

Here’s a link to another poem inspired by a 2010 photo of my granddaughter trying on my wedding dress. Note the allusions to an era of protests, to life’s challenges, to times lost, to times gained. Go to www.chayacairnpress.com, click on Excerpts from Dear Kinfolk, and scroll down to “Wedding Dress, 1968.” Or check out the kid with the braids and her Dy-Dee doll by clicking here.

Time to dig out those photos now. Happy writing!

Suggestions:

1. Write from a distance. Tap your memory to see if the photo evokes an emotion long gone. Tell your story.

2. Write from the photo subject’s point of view.

3. Write in the third person from the point of view of someone (not you or you as someone else) who finds the photo.

4. Pose questions to the photo’s subject(s).

5. Address the subject(s) by name(s).

6. Exaggerate. It’s your poem. If you don’t know who the subjects are, make up a story.

7. Is someone missing from the photo? Let that be your prompt.

8. Incorporate elements from another photo into the poem.

9. Allude to the photo’s era through images. The adage applies: show, don’t tell.

10. Use poetic devices, rhythm, repetition, stanza structure, etc. while simply describing the photo.

11. See how your poem looks on the page. Tighten it. Read it aloud.

12. Have fun!

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Many thanks, Gail!

Prompt #178 – Capture Your Kinfolk by Guest Prompter Gail Gerwin

This week’s prompt comes from guest blogger, Gail Fishman Gerwin—

get ready to call up your kinfolk!

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From Gail:

My late aunt Helen Stern Mann, who met challenges with courage, humor, and high dives, began all her letters to us with Dear Kinfolk,. This greeting provided the title for my poetry collection, which deals with kin by blood, kin by marriage, kin by experience. So many of our memories call on these kin: perhaps feuding aunts, spouses (current, former, or fantasy), loving parents and grandparents, siblings, children, grandchildren, cousins, and even the animal kinfolk we love(d). This week, in a spirit of honoring our family members, I invite you to think about your kinfolk and to write poems about them. Here’s one of mine from Dear Kinfolk,:

Smothered with Love

1

Foam or feather, says my daughter

when I forget

where I left my keys,

where my glasses hide,

what happened yesterday.

Foam or feather, she says, lets

me choose the pillow she’ll use

to smother me if I forget who she is.

2

The pillow engulfs my head,

I struggle, then give in to the white

void, my arms at rest, parentheses

against my sides, my legs slack,

toes point out second position.

3

I climb over the hedge that separates

the old real from the new real, see

my mother, father, aunts, uncles,

grandparents, friends.

They beckon, they know I didn’t

forget their lives, I recorded them.

Look—they are poems.

(Prologue, Dear Kinfolk, ChayaCairn Press, 2012)

Poetry calls on many of us to remember, to honor people who touch(ed) our lives, events that linger in our hearts, places we cannot erase. In the following poem from her collection “No Longer Mine” from This Sharpening (Tupelo Press, 2006), Ellen Doré Watson, who heads the Poetry Center at Smith College, honors her mother whose indelible mark she can’t relinquish:

How many years will my mother go on passing/the anniversary of her subtraction, the day the first/piece of her slipped off into wet grass or got left/in the parking lot like a scarf lost and the end of winter/and not missed until the next? Why mourn the day/my daughter takes possession of her body — mother,/daughter, no longer mine as if they ever were? Who/flipped the switch from wishing to remember to trying/to forget? It’s all recorded, each scintilla, memory dozing/until some rasp or whiff heralds its return and leads us/back without our knowing. Brain whorls are funny/that way, forever rearranging us — daughter opening/because she says so, mother a watercolor fading to plain/paper, not because of not remembering but because/her mouth no longer makes words; she lives beneath/her eyelids because she can no longer name the world.

In "My Grandmother's Bed," Edward Hirsch takes us on a trip that calls on our senses to share his beloved grandmother’s apartment and his childhood nights within. In "A Dog Has Died," Pablo Neruda’s matter-of-fact voice belies the tragedy of a pet’s loss. He takes us on a voyage that questions one’s own existence and place in the world.

This week, think about your kinfolk and write a poem that calls on your memories. Maybe there’s an old photo in your own archives that will prompt you. A wedding, a drive for a holiday visit, a conversation long overdue, people you cannot identify. Share your kinfolk.

Guidelines:

1. Give your kinfolk voice. Write a poem from a kin’s point of view.

2. Write from your childhood point of view or write as an adult looking back.

3. Take readers to your kin’s home: the furniture, the meals, chatter among visitors, dust under the sofa.

4. Adopt a relative you admired or disdained: your friend’s mother, father, sibling.

5. Write a poem that lets readers know how you feel about the subject without spelling out these feelings.

6. Write a poem that places your kinfolk in history; use images that define that period.

Tips:

1. Tap your memory for your kin’s qualities; note those you want to feature.

2. Use interesting enjambments (See Watson poem).

3. Take a look at your poem sideways. Is there an interesting line pattern?

4. Try a prose poem.

5. Don’t forget imagery.

6. Use stanza breaks to show time lapses.

7. Let your thoughts flow; let stanzas run into each other.

8. Try a poem with short lines, no more than four words each.

9. Try repetition at the end of each stanza.

10. Have fun as you bring kin to life in your words.

11. Reveal. Revise. Elaborate. Cut. Revise again.

Examples:

"Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night" by Mary Oliver (Video)

"The Daughter Goes to Camp" by Sharon Olds

"In the Waiting Room" by Elizabeth Bishop

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Sincerest thanks to Gail for sharing with us this week!

You Can Order a Copy of Gail’s Book by Visiting www.chayacairnpress.com.