I love strict poetic forms. I think creativity comes not from total freedom — but from arbitrary structural limitations that compel artists to be concise, or to take the history of their media into account. That’s why, for example, I love a tightly-structured pop song more than freeform jazz. In poetry, I think the single-coolest form is the nonrhyming petrarchan sonnet executed in a loose iambic pentameter: A perfect amalgam of structure and freedom. (This is also why I think e. e. cummings is the finest modern poet in English, because he perfectly balanced a love of structure with the liberating dictates of free verse. His sonnets are just off-the-hook fantastic, and despite the apparent chaos of his more open-ended writing, there is virtually always a meticulously architected subskeleton of meter or rhyme.)

I was thus delighted to discover “The Fib”, a new poetic form based on … the Fibonacci sequence!

It’s the invention of Gregory K, a blogger and L.A. screenwriter, and it’s a simple conceit: Each line of the poem has as many syllables as its corresponding place in the Fibonacci sequence. The sequence, for those who aren’t familiar with it, is a neatly recursive thing: Each number is the product of the last two in line, with 0 and 1 being the first two digits to start the sequence running. So it goes 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 33, etc. As a poetic device, this produces poems that slowly cascade from terse, haiku-like concision into a waterfall of prose. Several people showed up at Gregory’s blog to try their hand at writing some; an example:

I

want

to be

all the things

my mother said I

couldn’t be in my own life time.

The thing about the Fib, though, is that after the ninth line, you’re dealing with 50-plus syllables, which means you’re essentially writing prose paragraphs. By the 21st line, you’re dealing with a hefty 10,946 syllables — which translates to about 6,700 words of English prose. That’s an entire short story on its own, or a chapter from a book.

Thus, the Fib is an incredibly unique form, in that it spans the entire spectrum of literature: It begins with uses of language so concise that meaning and beauty hang on a single word, then transforms into a Proustian torrent of storytelling. Imagine the cool ways those two polar opposites could work together!

Even more lovely is the fact that the Fibonacci sequence officially begins with a zero. That means that the true first line of every Fib is always the same: Silence.

(Thanks to Slashdot for this one!)