Editor's Note

Welcome to Issue # 5. This past year has been an exciting one with two issues of The Fib Review posted in 2009 and plans for three issues a year to be posted April, August and December. The recent re-design of Muse-Pie Press inspired changes to the look of the Fib Review pages as well. As an artist and poet, our new webmaster, Lonnard Dean Watkins, understands what makes an online poetry journal work well. We hope you enjoy the new look.

Looking back at Issue # 1, former editor R.G. Rader wrote,

". . .for now this journal is just another way to publish some of the work that is being done with this wonderful new way of focusing our creative talents in a fixed, focused pattern. Is it poetry? This might be a topic for another issue."

I think each issue of The Fib Review has addressed this topic and answered it. The Fibonacci poetry form may have started as a numeric form where one could drop in a poem. But the talents of the poets like those you will read in these pages, with true poetic voice and heart, have broken free from the limitations of syllable count, line length, and word order. They write poetry that happens to be in the form of a Fibonacci numeric sequence. It is the difference between a Fibonacci poem and a poem in Fibonacci form. The Fib must be poetry first, and form second, although it must be true to its form, as all other form poetry styles require whether it is the use of rhyme, line, syllable count or meter. Every form, such as the Sonnet or Villanelle was at one time a new form, unfamiliar to poets and their readers. Over time, talented poets chose to write in those forms, whether they were popular for the times or just a convenient means of expression. Where some find the Fibonacci poetry form challenging, limiting, or unnatural, others pour their souls into its structured form and make poetry.

Mary-Jane Grandinetti

What is a Fib?

The Fibonacci poem is a 6-line short poetry form that is based on the structure of the Fibonacci sequence. For those unfamiliar with the Fibonacci Sequence, it is a mathematical sequence in which every figure is the sum of the two preceding it. Thus, you begin with 1 and the sequence follows as such: 1+1=2; then in turn 1+2=3; then 2+3=5; then 3+5=8 and so on. The poetry sequence therefore consists of six lines of 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8, with each number representing the number of syllables that a writer places in each line of the poem. Initially poems were written with 6 lines, but now many poets experiment with poems that go well into higher digits, or with poems that are in reversed sequence. As a literary device, it is used as a formatted pattern in which one can offer meaning in any organized way, providing the number sequence remains the constancy of the form.

The subject of the Fibonacci poem has no restriction, but the difference between a good fib and a great fib is the poetic element that speaks to the reader. No longer just a fun form to write as a math student, the poets who write good Fibonacci poems have replaced the 'geek' with the poet.

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