Poetry by the Numbers

Our friend Thomas Aslin (A Moon Over Wings, Tebot Bach) told us about the Fibonacci Sonnet. It's a beast of a writing exercise in which you write a 1 word sentence, another 1 word sentence, followed by a 2 word sentence, a 3 word sentence, a 5 word sentence, an 8 word sentence, a 13 word sentence, a 21 word sentence, and so on. Add the number of words in the previous two sentences to get the number of words in the current sentence. The sentence after the 21 word sentence would have 34 words and the one after that would have 55. 

You can stop at whatever number you want, of course, and then start going the other direction, ending up with two 1 word sentences. The link to Austin Kleon's website (below) has a wonderful cartoon depiction of the creation of a Fibonacci Sonnet. Here is my very imperfect effort.

City.

Rain.

Dog shit.

Buenos Aires, November.

You forget that it’s spring.

You forget, home is ice on the

roads. Home is frozen pipes, bare black limbs

against a silver sky, constant threat. Here at the edge

of the sea, jacaranda cascades over peeling stucco walls, trumpet vine

rains pollen down on café umbrellas. Maricela says we must stay up all night,

just once, dinner at midnight, breakfast at 4 in the morning, sleep til noon,

it’s the culture, she says, so we dance all night, just once. When we

emerge, blinking and sore-footed, the sun is already steaming

the streets, the cartoneros have picked through the bins

and hauled the still useful away, the blood

of yesterday’s thief has been hosed

into the gutter—there is no forgetting

in Buenos Aires, the all-night

milonga is a fuck you

to the death squads.

 


 

Another game to play with numbers I stole from www.languageisavirus.com
It's called "doubling."  Starting with one sentence, write a series of paragraphs, each doubling the number of sentences in the previous paragraph and including all the words used previously. For example:

Woman with a Blue Jar

A woman holds a blue jar.

Jar blue as her eyes.

A woman holds a meteor.

Meteoric falling into blue.

The jar fills with ash.

The woman places her eyes on the mantle.

She pretends she holds the ashes of a lover in the jar.

At night the woman lies down in a field.

She watches dark blue holding back.

Blue letting black spread its ink across her eyes.

The jar is the blue of a meteor when it falls and fills with light.

The ashes are scooped from the remains of a burning house.

Her lover places himself on the mantle.

He is pretending to be her dream.

When she returns to the house in the morning.

When morning returns night lies down in a dark blue field.

Meteors fall, filling the burning house with light.

The woman scoops ashes and pretends to spread them across her eyes.

She holds her lover's dreams in the jar on the mantle.

 

Link of the week: http://austinkleon.com/