Friday, April 4, 2014

*you* you know...a fibonacci poem for Oulipo


You you know
 
 
you you know;

your honeymoon-
                          trouble;

dance-alley on,
life disappears.

 

 

Source (a sentence, within)
Darling, Cary. "Honeymoon Goes Awry in Fast-Paced ‘In the Blood.’" Houston Chronicle 4 Apr. 2014: E4.
 

Note:
This was a surprising amount of work. Not producing this poem, as will be obvious, but selecting it. It’s the product of a Fibonacci sequence, in this case (1-1-2-3-5-8-13-21-34-55-89-144) of found words. This means a lot depends on the first sentence of the article. Eliminating a lot of obvious non-starters left a variety of options, none of which panned out as well (?) as this one did.


Here is the prompt I was responding to:


In a Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two terms immediately preceding it; typically with 1 as the first term: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on.
Select an article from your newspaper and create a poem using the words that correspond with the numbers in the sequence. Your poem will take the form of first word, first word, second word, third word, fifth word, eighth word, thirteenth word, etc. You can continue until you’ve run out of words in your article or until you’re happy with the poem’s conclusion.

 

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The poem dances. I spent some time enjoying myself reading it aloud to different possible rhythms.

Richard Thompson said...

Thanks! I enjoyed playing around with spacing and whatnot.