Yeah, it was the Fibonacci sequence. Apologies, this was supposed to be out a few days ago but between a therapist mandated grieving day and a date; well, explaining my poetry rules sort of fell by the wayside.
I mentioned in the ramble for Anxiety that it was the first of the poems I wrote for the collection. I’d like to tell you there was more to it, but it really did just sort of happened. Somewhere around line 13 I realized all the previous line’s syllable counts were numbers from the fibonacci sequence, so I committed to the bit.
I’m not really a math gay. I have the animal autism spec. And yet or maybe for those reasons, the fibonacci sequence has always had a weird place in my heart and mind. It’s one of the number sequences found most often in nature. It’s connected with the Golden Ratio, it can be found in the growth spirals of shellfish, the patterns of seed and petal placement in flowers, and it starts from a fairly simple base line; each number in the sequence is the sum of the previous two.
So, yes, if you go back and count the syllables in every poem you’ll find the sequence worked through out. See, I love poetry, but rhyming has never been my forte. Instead, I prefer to write free verse and create rules to limit my word choice, or more accurately, to forcibly drive my creativity and poetic license.
Most of these poems used two simple rules
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Each line’s syllable count must be a number from the sequence
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The title must be the same number of syllables as that day’s number from the sequence.
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Day 1: 1 Joy
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Day 2: 1 Bugs
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Day 3: 2 Numbers, Mathematics*
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Day 4: 3 To Be… What?, Anxiety, Just a Fib
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Day 5: 5 Of Sweetest Succor, Un-done Un-ity, Breaking or Broken?, Borne of Root or Rot?, Forged Utility
*Mathematics in both it’s title, and last line intentionally broke the rules (4 syllable title, line syllable counts are 1, 1, 2, 2), both to play off of the theme of Numbers, and as an intentional clue to the theming. Also because I suck at math.
From there some were a bit more extreme than others. Joy, which was inspired by among many other things, a particular bit from Freiren: Beyond Journey’s End that’s been sitting with me for fucking ages, was a bit more aggressive. I wanted to start the theme strong so it’s lines run the sequence fully up to 8, then run it back down. Numbers also followed this sequence so the discrepancy in Mathematics would stand out that much more.
With some like Bugs I’d use extra rules. Each coupled line use numbers that are adjacent in the sequence. At the same time, no paired set of lines uses a number that appears in the pair that follows or proceeds it.
And then there are poems like Anxiety. That was a work of recalcitrant stubbornness. The first and last line are dissociated from the rest of the poem, though this wasn’t as clear in the image I made for it, as the first line is so close with the second, I’ll be correcting that soon. They obviously intentionally mirror each other, but thats not were my obstinance really starts.
First, each triad of lines are set up as
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Number from the sequence
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Next Number from the sequence
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The number that proceeds line 1 and sums with it for equal line 2
That part was actually surprisingly easy to do, the real challenge came in the my next extra rule. Each line’s word count is one of the two sequence numbers that sums into it’s syllable count. It’s probably easier if I just show you an example.
perchance, a canker? 5 syllables, 3 words
survival, debited hoyden 8 syllables, 3 words
verity? 3 syllables, 1 word
(“Fun” Fact, the canker I mentioned here was a cancer scare I was dealing with last month which I didn’t feel I could share with that partner)
I doubt knowing the sequence is worked into the collection terribly effects it’s reading, but it was a fairly significant undertaking so maybe I just want folks to know the effort I put in.
Heck, I even threw in a tiny bit of extra effort no one but me can even see. Each poem was posted here, Patreon, Ko-fi, and when the scheduler worked, BlueSky, at a time corresponding to the sequence too, well in Mountain Time. The most common was 11:23 am, but there was also 5:23, 8:53, and 9:13 pm aka 21:13.
Again, does that add anything? I honestly can’t say. It felt important to me as the poet, but I think it’s up to the reader to decide how much it matters to them.
I think I’m going to keep working on the collection. Twelve poems doesn’t feel like enough to really ‘release’ in any sort of unified form, despite the work they took to craft, and I don’t really think I’m done with the project. I merely expect I’ll post further inclusion in a less… systemic way, saving the regimented elements for however I choose to collect them.
Thank you as always to my supporters for making all of this possible, as a reminder I really only make about $80 a month between Patreon, Ko-fi, and Twitch, so please consider throwing me and other creatives you enjoy a few bucks. I can honestly say every time I get a new $5 supporter I have to fight back tears, and I know plenty of folks are in the same boat as me.
Oh, and as for my next project, it was going to be a single essay discussing the confluence of Alchemical themes and willfully ignored misogyny in Elden Ring, but… well you know the XKCD comic, Average Familiarity? Yeah.
I think this is going to also end up as an essay collection as I first need to explain what Alchemy actually was/is as opposed to the cultural understanding of it as something between porto-chemists and transmutation-based magicians. And that’s even before we start interrogating the ways in which the From Soft Souls-borne games have used focal themes of patriarchy’s corrosive effect on women, which go ignored by it’s masculine dominated vocal player base (as opposed to it’s actually quiet gender balanced player base)
So look forward to that! No seriously, I think y’all will actually really like this series, it’s just, well, going to be a series.
Oh! One last thing before I’m done, I mentioned that one poem was inspired by Freiren, but I’d also like to say the whole collection was inspired by Kaela Prall’s Rupture and Repair and Chimera. If you enjoy free verse, especially that reminiscent of Amanda Lovelace but are looking for something more organic, more biological, I highly recommend them.
