Fibonacci: forms in nature. forms in poetry?
Monday, December 10, 2007
In my “free time,” I do stuff like listen to podcasts from BBC radio (England changes you)…and I came across this bit on The Fibonacci Sequence, on the programme “In Our Time.” What is interesting to me about this chat, specifically, is that it began to intersect some of my ideas about creating an “invented form” for Seminar: Poetics by Praxis, and my thoughts about form, more generally, and naturally embedded roots for poetic form, specifically. Winter trees, in particular, make me think of strict forms existing in nature, which may be borrowed from, or mused upon for creating formal poetry…Levertov has this to say in her essay, “Some Notes on Organic Form:
For me, back of the idea of organic form is the concept that is a form in all things (and in our experience) which the poet discover and reveal. There are no doubt temperamental differences between poets who use prescribed forms and those who look for new ones—people who need a tight schedule to get anything done, and people who have to have a free hand—but the difference in their conception of “content” or “reality” is functionally more important. On the one hand is the idea that content, reality, experience, is essentially fluid and must be given form; on the other, this sense of seeking out inherent, though not immediately apparent, form. Gerard Manley Hopkins invented the word inscape to denote intrinsic form, the pattern of essential characteristics both in single objects and (what is more interesting) in objects in a state of relation to each other; and the word instress to denote the experiencing of the perception of inscape, the apperception of inscape. In thinking of the process of poetry as I know it, I extend the use of these words, which he seems to have used mainly in reference to sensory phenomena, to include intellectual and emotional experience as well; I would speak of the inscape of an experience (which might be composed of any and all of these elements, including the sensory) or of the inscape of a sequence or constellation of experiences. (more…)
Original post by Whitney
