And now my Fibonacci Poem Brief Encounter gets the movie treatment.

In a collaboration with the multi talented American film-maker Joseph Nussbaum, another of my Fibonacci poems has been turned into a miniature movie using the virtual world of Second Life as its starting point. The result, I think, is really original. The poem, Brief Encounter (published in The Fib Review - Musepie Press) makes a romantic and powerful film . The poem was written in strict syllabic count according to the Fibonacci Sequence (1,1,2,3,5,8,13 etc.) and is one of many of my 'Fibs' to be published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review. Here's a link to the poem as it appeared there in 2011: http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/…/wolfiewolfgang4.html


The very concise form of the poetic style translates well into the equally concise filming style of Joseph Nussbaum - it was a happy coming together of different art forms making, I think, what looks like a Contemporary Dance piece. Poetry and Dance as Film - a great combination. Take a look:

My miniature Fibonacci poem The Music Of The Spheres becomes a movie - Wow!

I wrote a miniature Fibonacci poem five years ago on the gigantic subject of humanity's ideas of the Universe and religion - well, there's no need for humility if you're writing a very short poem. It was called The Music Of The Spheres and was published in that excellent poetry journal The Fib Review:  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/issue10/wolfiewolfgang2.html - I hadn't thought about it much since then until recently when the highly imaginative Joseph Nussbaum approached me asking to make a short animated film of the poem.

I was thrilled earlier on today to see the result. Wow! I think it's magnificent. See what you think:

"Music of the Spheres", a video by Joseph Nussbaum. FIlmed in Second Life. Poem by Colin Bell. Music by Moby. Sculpture by François Arteo. With Marly Moon, Joseph Nussbaum, Boris Twist, Bryan Trefoill, and Novs Morlim.

No pretence - hand on heart: I'm thrilled to have my Fibonacci poem nominated for The Pushcart Prize.

I'm thrilled this week to be told that I've been nominated for the prestigious Pushcart Prize by American publisher Musepie Press who have been publishing my poetry in two of their journals, Shot Glass Journal and The Fib Review since 2009.

The nominated poem, Visitation, is published with three of my other new Fibonacci poems in the new issue of The Fib Review which has now published 57 of my Fibs, short poems written to a syllable count according to the Hindu-Arabic numerical system introduced to the West by the Medieval mathematician Leonardo Bonacci (c.1170 - c.1250), known as Fibonacci.

Fibonacci's statue in Pisa.

The Fibonacci Sequence finds a pattern in numbers - one that is repeated in nature but which can also be an exacting but satisfying master for short form poetry. It has been my personal passion for some years now discovering how varied the possibilities are in writing within such a tight set of criteria.

My Pushcart nominated poem, Visitation can be found by following this link:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell1.html

So thank you Musepie Press, on behalf of all Fibonacci poets,  for nominating my poem.

Here is some information about the Pushcart Prize:
'The Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses series, published every year since 1976, is the most honored literary project in America.

Since 1976, hundreds of presses and thousands of writers of short stories, poetry and essays have been represented in our annual collections. Each year most of the writers and many of the presses are new to the series. Every volume contains an index of past selections, plus lists of outstanding presses with addresses.

The Pushcart Prize has been a labor of love and independent spirits since its founding. It is one of the last surviving literary co-ops from the 60's and 70's. Our legacy is assured by donations to our Fellowships endowment.'

Here's the link to the Pushcart Prize website:

http://pushcartprize.com/index.html

One man and his pencil - a special relationship.

I own a number of pens, ball point, felt-tip and fountain, and they all have their function in my life. Also, a lot of my time is spent at the computer and I'm perfectly happy typing away all day. There is, however, a special relationship in my working life and that is the bond between me and my pencil. There is something especially intimate and natural about writing poetry with a pencil and I have a number of little note books which I keep with me and where I do exactly that. Over the last few years I've written over seventy Fibonacci poems, many of them published in the specialist Fibonacci poetry journal, The Fib Review,  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/ and most of them begin life in this rain-spattered book. It's interesting sometimes to look back and see how these little syllable-count poems began.

I have a number of pencils but the one in the photograph has been companion for some time now and, silly though it might sound, I've grown attached to it. I feel that we know each other very well and I respect the way it puts up with my terrible hand-writing and the often intense pressure I put on it when I write.  It is also tolerant about being chewed during those thoughtful moments when, in olden times, I might well have simply lit a cigarette. So this little pencil and I are friends.

I have my rather superior pencil sharpener too - it's a souvenir from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice and, over time, it has sharpened but also whittled down my pencil many times a day until now I'm brought to a sad moment of parting.

My old friend is now getting so small that I fear it's reaching the end of its working life. Just how much smaller can I make it before it ceases to function as a writing implement? What do you think? Is it time to chuck it? Should I retire it to the back of my stationery drawer or just throw it into the bin? I have plenty more pencils so I should stop being sentimental perhaps.

Recently I was given a posh Edwardian propelling pencil as a birthday present. It's made of silver and is elegantly ornamented so it's the type of pencil that should be used on special occasions like noting down a telephone number, scribbling an aide-memoire, making a light-handed and desultory doodle or, best of all, it's perfect when I'm in the mood to write a gentle and thoughtful poem conceived in tranquillity. If I'm in my usual writing gusto though, the leads just break on first contact with the paper.

No, my little pencil does that job best but I know that I am going to have to make a decision. Which of these lovely new pencils, another present, should I choose next? It's an important moment because whichever it is, it might be with me for a long time and through many writing adventures - both good and bad. Farewell little pencil.

My three Fibonacci poems about the composer Tchaikovsky published in The Fib Review.

Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893)

My three new Fibonacci poems about the Russian composer Piotr Ilych Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893) were published yesterday in that pioneering and Fibonacci-dedicated online journal, The Fib Review. I hope you'll take a moment to follow the link and read them and the other poems there. My poems were written as I came to the end of  Tchaikovsky's life in my seventeen year chronological journey through the history of classical music from the year 1100 until my planned ending date 1897 (Brahms' death) - this project has been often discussed in these blogs. I have now moved on to 1894 - only three years to go - and with the closing of 1893 came the end of Tchaikovsky after I have listened to almost all of his works in time order.  I used to sneer at Tchaikovsky when I was a teenager, thinking him a tunesmith but little more. I've changed my mind and now, while still recognising that his worst works are extremely dull, his greatest pieces are truly original and very great indeed. I'm listing some of the very best here and they stand up as powerful works of genius. So, if for nothing else and if you still don't believe me, listen (or listen again) to the 6th symphony (Pathetique), the ballet score for The Sleeping Beauty,  the opera Eugene Onegin and, for all its organisational flaws, the always brashly brilliant, First Piano Concerto.  I shall return to them often. It was a tough project to try and say anything worthwhile about the man in the challenging miniature form of Fibonacci poetry.

Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (1831 - 1894)

I've also written a Fibonacci poem about Tchaikovsky's patroness, the enigmatic Baroness Nadezhda von Meck (1831 - 1894) who supported Tchaikovsky for years after hearing an early performance of the First Piano Concerto in a concert only weeks after the death of her husband. It was a passionate relationship conducted by letter because the Baroness insisted that they should never meet. 

Pierre Moskaleff

The third Fibonacci poem deals with the dedication of one of the composer's last piano pieces, the melancholy Berceuse, Op. 72 No. 2 written in the last year of Tchaikovsky's life. This lullaby is dedicated to a man called Pierre Moskaleff from Odessa. No one has managed to trace this man so all we have is his name, the town he came from and this lovely piece. We can only guess at the nature of their relationship but the piece has a feverish passion which certainly supplies a few clues.

So, please take a look at my three Tchaikovsky poems and enjoy The Fib Review. This is its 21st issue and my sixteenth consecutive appearance in it. Thanks are due, yet again, to its editor, the always energetic Mary-Jane Grandinetti.


http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

If you'd like to hear that piano piece, Tchaikovsky's Berceuse Op. 72 No. 2, here it is played by the young Russian pianist Konstantin Shamray:

And, go on, I know you want to hear at least the opening of the First Piano Concerto and here it is performed by the legendary American pianist Van Cliburn in Moscow, 1962. He was accompanied by Kirill Kondrashin:

George Best, Miss World and Me: What better subject for my latest Fibonacci Poem?

George Best and Mary Stävin.

As a youngish man in the early days of my career in television, I had the intriguing and unlikely job of having a breakfast meeting with one of the most talked-about of all British footballers, the legendary George Best. We were scheduled to meet in London at the decidedly posh restaurant in up-market department store, Fortnum and Mason in Piccadilly. I arrived as myself, a media type, an unglamorous journo on day-release. He arrived with his current girlfriend, the then Miss World, the very beautiful Swedish actress, Mary Stävin, best known, perhaps, as one of the 'Bond Girls' in the James Bond movie, Octopussy.

Mary Stävin and Roger Moore in the James bond movie,Octopussy.

 The photograph above of George and Mary was taken that year and shows that they were, no exaggeration, a very handsome couple. Not only was I the odd-one out in the glamour stakes but I had no interest either in the Miss World contest or football.

George Best in action.

Strangely, we all got on really well - well enough for me to tell George that I was hoping to get fit and had recently started going to a once-a-week fitness class at the Stretford Leisure Centre in Greater Manchester. OK, I know, not very cool. The rest of the breakfast, when the work had been done, was devoted to this famous and now ( for a time) sober athlete giving me one-to-one advice on my fitness regime. He told me I was wasting my time only taking exercise once a week and, it was thanks to him, that I started the regular fitness regime that I have followed ever since that day. I owe it all to George.

I've been writing a lot of what is known as Fibonacci poetry in the last seven years and, recently, I've been fitting some of my television career memories into this toughly disciplined short form style where each line has to  conform to a strict syllabic count using the arithmetic code popularised in Europe by the medieval Italian mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci. This weekend six of my new poems were published in the specialist Fibonacci journal,  Musepie Press' The Fib Review, and one of them was my poem about George. My thanks, as always to Mary-Jane Grandimetti, the editor of The Fib Review, who has encouraged me since my early days as a poet and who has now published 49 of my Fibs in 16 consecutive issues of her great journal.

Here is the page featuring my George Best poem but, for the rest of my Fibs and for many more by other poets, click on the link below:

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

If you're a real glutton for punishment, click on the writer archive section and you'll find links to all 49 of my Fibonacci poems.

 Meanwhile, I have to start thinking about #21 of The Fib Review hoping to come up with something to send in  next time.

Second Life: a writer's life in a virtual world.

Believe it or not, blog-readers, there is still a lot of prejudice around concerning on-line networks and so-called virtual worlds. We are not far enough away from the 20th Century yet for some people to see that there is no great difference between communication media - for good or for ill. The tabloid print press, every now and then, run a story about how this marriage broke up because of a relationship formed in the virtual world of Second Life or that a child became hooked on war games or someone else found some other on-line addiction. Well, we humans fail, fall and get addicted to almost anything and, if the sensational world revolution that is the web has to get the blame then, blame too, newspapers, films, television, the telephone, letter-writing, conversations at the supermarket check-out, anything where human speaks to human. I am thinking in particular about Second Life today because I have some experience of this international network of strangely animated avatars who can speak freely to fellow humans in any country in the world because it is free in all senses of that word. These people, because behind each avatar is an individual human being, can explore wherever their imaginations lead them. I am a fan of communication, freedom and the imagination and I discovered that in Second Life, all of these things are in abundance.

For me, it's a very creative place with a lively literary world where, like last night, you can put on an exhibition of poetry and people come to it from all over the World. I run a gallery in a place called Book Island and often hold other poetry events at a village known as Written Word and have done since my brain haemorrhage of nearly five years ago when going out at all would have been impossible. In both places, it is quite difficult to find a philistine or a modern art cynic and last night, at the opening of my exhibition, the conversation was about poetic form and writing styles with people coming to explore the world of Fibonacci Poetry without any prejudices or preconceptions.

In this virtual world, we have to make everything ourselves, or get help from clever friends - that is how my gallery, Wolfanatolia was born. I then had a space to fill with 40 of my Fibonacci poems along with some of my photographs which, I hoped, were complimentary to the poetic themes. These little arithmetically conceived poems take concentration from reader and writer alike so I was thrilled to find such an intent and appreciative audience for these little Minimalist pieces that I have put together into a sequence when previously they have had to stand alone - mostly individually published in succeeding issues of that pioneering journal, the Fib Review. Here is a link if you'd like to read some of my work and also Fibonacci poems by many other poets from a round the world:

www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/

I had never read them as a sequence out-loud before and didn't know if they were going to work as performance pieces. Second Life, not for the first time, gave me the chance to find out.

In the audience there were people from Hawaii, India, Singapore, California, South Carolina, Tennessee,  New York City,  London, Manchester, Wales, Lisbon and Paris. I was there too without having to leave my hometown of Lewes in the UK.

We were all linked up visually and aurally by the amazingly clear telecommunication that is Second Life. An international conference call with a difference perhaps and absolutely free. It is in moments like this that I feel hopeful about our planet Earth. Moments when we don't have to worry about presidents, dictators and generals or even the sneers from that great army, the silent majority of reactionaries.





I think my Fibonacci Sequence, Brief Encounters, worked as spoken word - I hope it did, the audience thought so anyway. They stayed for the excellent live music provided by my friend Brendan Shoreland,  singer-songwriter, a Yorkshireman from Plymouth,  who also finds inspiration in virtual worlds. People even stayed  afterwards to walk round the exhibition.

I am not alone in finding inspiration in the technology that allows like-minded people anywhere in the world to share ideas and creative endeavours,  I met Adele Ward, the future publisher of my novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love, at just such an event as last night. She is one of the pioneers of bringing  and developing literature in virtual worlds. I have grown as a writer since visiting this place and see it now as yet another inspiring part of my always interesting life.

So don't laugh when you hear people talk about virtual worlds because you might just be missing something. You might even be wrong. OK, then, laugh if you want to, sometimes it's safer that way.

My fiftieth published poem celebrates the life of Yehudi Menuhin

Yehudi and Me

I heard over the weekend that my Fibonacci elegy poem, Yehudi Menuhin, is to be published by Every Day Poets - it will probably come out next March on the fifteenth anniversary of the great violinist's death. More of that later. In my television days I worked a number of times with Yehudi Menuhin (1916-1999) and we struck up a kind of friendship so I'm very happy that my elegy for the great man takes me to the magic number of fifty published poems. I'm pleased too that this news arrives on the fourth anniversary of my first published poetry and just before the fifth anniversary of the first poem I wrote (since I was a schoolboy). It is still a new medium for me and it's great to have discovered a new challenge. Even if no one publishes the stuff, even if no one likes it,  it has given me tremendous pleasure learning how to write it

It is an exciting time right now as I'm getting ready for the publication of my first novel, Stephen Dearsley's Summer Of Love - it is published on 31 October and I can now say, hand on heart, that I am genuinely very excited about it. I'm half way through the second draft of a new novel too and hope to finish it by Christmas.

I hope that I will still find enough time for poetry writing as I'm still learning how to do it. Maybe you never quite get there with poetry (or any other writing for that matter) - that's what makes it so absorbing.