Beyond Fibs

From the Annals of Arbitrarily Constrained Expression

Let's not stop with Fibs, or with prime numbers or pi digits for syllable counts. John Conway's Audioactive Sequence provides a simple syllable pattern for writing incredibly natural poetry that simply overflows with the idealistic purity of mathematical structure. It's simple. It's elegant. It's geeky. Therefore we must use it.

Here are the first six strings in the sequence:

1
11
21
1211
111221
312211

All you have to do is replace each "1" with a monosyllabic word, each "2" with a disyllabic word, and each "3" with a trisyllabic word. Instant poem. One example should suffice to demonstrate the power of the form:

Dude!
I'm a
techno-geek
who's never thought of
why one should bother learning how
poetry can convey feelings in words.