Tag Archives: Poetic form

From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry

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A few years ago I was contacted out of the blue by Michelle Moloney King, the founder of Beir Bua Press. She had read some of my blog posts on mathematical forms in poetry, and offered to publish them as a book. The result was From Fibs to Fractals: exploring mathematical forms in poetry, which was released in autumn 2021, with stunning cover art by Moloney King herself.

Following the closure of Beir Bua Press in 2023 the book is no longer available in print, so I am now making it freely available in downloadable form. I’ve posted the Introduction below, followed by pdf versions of each of the chapters (including an additional chapter on geometrical forms). Enjoy!

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A Little Light Relief

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Poetry can be bleak. Grief, despair, loss, heartbreak and pain are timeless and universal themes that continue to be explored by contemporary writers, in poems that resonate with unflinching emotional intensity. To write, or to read, such poetry can be cathartic and healing.

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The Seasons: Four Pascal’s Triangle Poems

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I have always been drawn to the visual poetry of mathematics: the crisp clean curves of conic sections; the graceful graphs associated with trigonometric functions; the meditative intricacies of the Mandelbrot Set; even the simple, elongated elegance of the integral sign. I still recall the thrill I experienced as a teenager when I was first introduced to the triangular array of numbers known as Pascal’s Triangle. Mathematically, the array has applications in algebra, combinatorics and probability theory, but it is also intriguing as an object in itself, on account of the many patterns embedded in its structure. 

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‘Everyone is invited’ – An Interview with Anthony Etherin of Penteract Press

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Readers of formal and constrained poetry will, like me, have been saddened by Penteract Press’s recent announcement that it will cease publishing new titles after 2024. As part of my on-going series of interviews with editors of small independent presses, I spoke to Penteract’s editor Anthony Etherin about the press, its ethos, and the reasons behind the decision to close. Anthony also shares two poems from his new collection The Robots of Babylon, which will be published on the 21st of October and is now available for pre-order. 

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Rock, Paper, Scissors: Shape and Surface as Constraint

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Messages from the past take many forms: ancient structures, buildings, and artefacts; burial sites; rituals and symbolism; stories, poems and songs shared through generations; sculptures, paintings, works of art. 

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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.

Which comes first – the chicken or the egg?

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How does the formulation of a poem begin? With an idea, an image, a phrase, a subject, a feeling, a memory, a structure? 

I’ve been thinking about this question in relation to my own writing. Unsurprisingly, there is no single answer. On rare occasions a poem plops almost fully formed into my head (inconveniently, this tends to happen in the middle of the night). The trick then is to capture it, to write it down before it flits off and disappears like a migrating bird.

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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.