Colin Bell - a writer's life: November 2014

Monday, 3 November 2014

The Beatle, the Cardinal, the Poet and the Prime Minister - my meetings with famous people memorialised in my newly published Fibonacci poems.

A page from the latest issue of The Fib Review

This isn't the first time that I've written about my Fibonacci poetry on these pages but today, I'm particularly thrilled that I have ten new poems published in The Fib Review #19 which came out over the weekend. These poems, written to a syllable count taking self-imposed rules from the medieval Italian arithmetician, Leonardo Fibonacci, the so-called Fibonacci Sequence when a pattern is seen in the relationship between numbers written to the pattern 1: 1 : 2 : 3 : 5 : 8 :13 : 21 : 34 etc. etc. At it's simplest the pattern means that each number is the sum of the previous two but you can, of course, reverse the order and do a whole number of variations. I've loved imposing this discipline on my poetry and now, thanks to the continuing support of The Fib Review's editor Mary-Jane Grandinetti, I have been writing 'Fibs' for over five years, forty-five of them published in fifteen consecutive issues of The Fib Review, the World's leading Fibonacci publisher. Heres' the link where you will find my ten poems plus a whole lot more. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

Leonardo Fibonacci (1170 - 1240)

This summer I've been sorting all my Fibonacci poetry into some kind of order, there are now 62 of them, and found that they sat together happily enough and, without being a literal narrative, they tell the story of my many brief encounters with people in my personal life but also in the years when I worked in television. Sorting them out and writing some to fill the gaps, it was a bit like putting together a photograph album so, it was not much of a struggle to call the collection, Brief Encounters. Some of the latest poems have been about meetings with famous people, some admired, some feared and some disliked. It's possibly a form of poetic name-dropping but I hope it adds up to more than that. Not all the encounters were with the famous - some are friends, some strangers and, a few, are imaginary encounters with some of my fears and obsessions.

In Issue 19 of The Fib Review, four of the ten poems deal with my meetings with the famous - vivid memories all. As all four are now deceased, it seemed like a good idea to memorialise those brief encounters among my latest Fibonacci experiments with minimalism. I hope you'll enjoy them.