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Unread 01-21-2012, 05:03 AM
Ann Drysdale's Avatar
Ann Drysdale Ann Drysdale is offline
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Location: Old South Wales (UK)
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I think it's a Canadian wheeze. Actually a prose device, which works thus:

On the page, it looks like two paragraphs. Each sentence is made of the number of words in the Fibonnaci series. One of the paragraphs is longer than the other by one sentence. The Fibonnaci count in either parangaph can go in either direction. So it could have a first paragraph of nine sentences and a second paragraph of eight sentences, with the word count for each sentence in order being 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34; 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. Or the first paragraph could be ten sentences long and the second paragraph eleven, with the word-counts for each sentence being 55, 34, 21, 13, 8, 5, 3, 2, 1, 1; then 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89. (Courtesy of Bruce Holland Rogers and Ron McFarland)

All it is really is a way of making prose writers think about what they're doing in the way that we formal poets do by instinct. And you can adapt it so it looks like a poem, but I think that's cheating.
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