Category Archives: Experiments in form

Four Clerihews

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The four clerihews below are all inspired by famous mathematicians. 

Pythagoras
alas
had no clue what to do
with the square root of two.



Fibonacci
was feeling scratchy
because rabbits in his field
continued to breed… and breed… and breed and breed… and breed and breed and breed….  



John Napier
made a tiny error
calculating logarithms. Thankfully, the advent
of computing renders log tables redundant.



Wacław Sierpiński
was convinced he
could make holes in the carpet
but his wife blew a gasket.

The clerihews featuring Pythagoras and Wacław Sierpiński were originally published in: 

“Mathematical Graffiti: Bridges 2023 Clerihew Collection,” Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, Volume 14 Issue 2 (July 2024), pages 602-611. Available at: https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol14/iss2/22

A ScrabbleFib

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I continue to find Scrabblegrams challenging to write, but fun. Here’s an attempt to write a Scrabblegram that is also a Fib poem. It was inspired by a delightful cross-disciplinary lesson plan linking sunflowers, origami and the Fibonacci sequence, which I chanced upon while browsing the internet.

 My thanks as ever to Dave Cohen for his generous encouragement of my Scrabblegram experiments. For more on Scrabblegrams, and to read some exceptionally fine examples of the form, visit Dave’s site: https://davesscrabblegrams.com

Sunflower origami image credit: https://www.pinterest.co.uk/pin/508203139176751737/

Seasons and Landscapes: A fortune teller origami poem

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When I was a child, my friends and I enjoyed crafting and playing with paper fortune-tellers, a form of origami made with square paper folded in a sequence of triangles. 

The illustration below is of my fortune teller poem Seasons and Landscapes in two dimensions. You can download a PDF version to print out and fold into shape here. Folding instructions are given here (or here if you prefer a video version).

A Penrose Stairs Poem

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This poem was inspired by M. C. Escher’s lithograph Ascending and Descending (1960), which depicts figures on a staircase that appears to rise – or descend – in a continuous loop. This impossible construction is named the Penrose stairs, after Lionel and Roger Penrose.

The poem can in principle be read from almost any starting point, and in any direction. 

The Gym

‘We imagine we are climbing: every step is about 20 cm high, terribly exhausting and where does it get us? Nowhere; we don’t get one step further or higher.’ 

                                                 M. C. Escher, On Ascending and Descending, 1960.

Double Mesostic

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During a recent constraint-based creativity workshop, we tried our hand at writing a mesostic. If you don’t know what mesostics are, join the club; I hadn’t heard of them before either! A mesostic, I discovered, is similar to an acrostic in that it is a poem or piece of text containing a word or phrase that is read vertically through the horizontal lines. The difference is that in the case of a mesostic the vertical column of letters intersects somewhere within each line rather than at the beginning or end.

Just for fun, here’s a double mesostic that I wrote, inspired not only by the workshop but also a common occurrence in our household. Fill in the blank letters and then read downwards to reveal what’s missing.

February’s Garden

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The days are lengthening. Harbingers of spring
pierce through resistant soil; spikes of daffodils

and early tulips mingle, tight buds sprinkle
thin syringa stems. A few oak leaves linger,

crisp-curled and dead, rasping in the flowerbed – 
but death is a stranger now. Pale hellebore

blushes shyly, fern fronds prepare to unfurl.
Clouds lift. The air is clear and bright. All winter

I have dug hard cold ground, hoed, mulched, dreamed of growth.
Now, accompanied by bird song, I plant words.

This poem was first published on The Wombwell Rainbow in February 2023. It is a variation of a masnavi (or mathnawi), a poetic form that has its origins in Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Kurdish and Urdu writing.

Cascade

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Listen to the riversong – 
meltwater from mountain flanks
tumbling its own path
between resistant rocks.

Meltwater from mountain flanks
trickles down through peat and moss,
conjoins to become a burn

tumbling its own path;
tugs at roots by shaded banks,
crashes, eddies, foams.

Between resistant rocks
salmon leap against the flow,
glinting in the sun.

This poem was first published on The Wombwell Rainbow in January 2023. It is a trimeric, a recent poetic form devised by Dr Charles A. Stone.