Perseus and Andromeda

Nude

in chains

on the rocks

she’s picture-perfect.

Titian’s Andromeda displayed

for us mortals, for hungry beasts, and for Perseus

who dives seaward dressed-to-kill in pink and gold robes to slaughter the slavering monster.

He’s a boy-hero, pointing his scimitar, playing the man-of-action awed by the glamour of a damsel’s distress – he needs to impress.

Her life depends on this handsome man so she exhibits herself in a table-dance

wearing fettish limb-fetters and a dangling earring

she guarantees love at first sight.

In moments of stress

decorum

learns how

to

flirt.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

I was inspired by the much-praised Titian exhibition, Love Death and Desire, at London’s National Gallery this summer, during the infamous Covid-19 pandemic – so much so that I decided to write a set of Fibonacci poems about them. Poetry based on specific works of art are known as Ekphrastic – my four new poems, Four Ekphrastic Fibs are the result and they have just been published in The Fib Review, that impressive Fibonacci specialist journal. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/

I thought I would reproduce them here along with the original paintings by Titian, maybe the greatest painter of the nude, known appropriately enough as the Poesie – or Poems. If you want to know more about these paintings read about them on my previous blog Titian Reunited: https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19989

My four new Titian poems join a fifth, Diana and Actaeon, that was already published in a previous issue of the Fib Review in a set of poems inspired, like all of these paintings, by stories from the Roman poet Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I have printed it again here below.

I write these poems using the Fibonacci mathematical number sequence for each line’s syllable count….and now having had 104 of them published by The Fib Review, I guess you could say that I’m hooked as you will probably see if you look back on some of my previous blogs on the subject of Fibonacci and the Fib. https://wolfiewolfgang.com/?p=19

My thanks, yet again, to The Fib Review for continuing to publish my work.

Venus and Adonis

Stay

moans

Venus

love’s goddess

Titian’s writhing nude.

Adonis springs hot from her bed

his blushes define the child out-grown by his body.

He is dressed for hunting, she’s undressed for him, helpless love personified by its queen

who is now tasting the pain she inflicts on us all.

His dogs salivate sensing blood,

the boy is confused:

why this fuss?

Venus sees

the death

of

youth.

Colin Bell 29/9/2020

Diana and Callisto

Chaste

queens

turn mean

at bath time

in Titian’s paintings –

he likes women out of their clothes.

Virgin goddess Diana is nasty when she’s nude

she’s addicted to alfresco ablutions in the woods with her handmaidens naked.

Useful for Titian but bad for the nymph Callisto

pregnant by the king of the gods

strip-searched found guilty

shaming us

who stand

and

stare.

Colin Bell 30/9/2020

Actaeon

Don’t

look,

he thought,

but he did,

fearing what he saw,

alert to the change in himself.

Until now he’d been just a lad hunting with hound dogs.

Eyes know your desires before you do, he discovered in that surprised unblinking glance.

Arousal felt bestial to this embarrassed young man.

The transformation was instant

and the first horn grew.

Love’s not blind,

he thought,

for

stags.

Colin Bell 05/10/2017

The post Titian’s Nudes are the subject of my new Fibonacci poems. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

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 first novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, is published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

The post Second Life: a writer’s life in a virtual world. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I have four new Fibonacci poems published today in the fifteen issue of The Fib Review so I’m celebrating being in eleven consecutive issues of this excellent publication. Writing in this style  has been important to me since I first began to write poetry. I love trying to find variety within a tightly rigid structure especially one that has the satisfying symmetry of the Fibonacci mathematical code.  If you’d like to read them here’s the link: http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

There is also a good definition of Fibonacci poetry on the editorial page.

Many thanks, yet again, to the Fib Review’s editor, Mary-Jane Grandinetti who first turned me on to writing Fibs and who has encouraged me to carry on ever since.

The post I never get tired of writing Fibonacci poems. Maybe I’m a geek. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

It was a nice Christmas present hearing that another two of my Fibonacci poems are being published by the Fib review today. I use the word “nice”, of course, in its purer mathematical sense meaning fine or subtle – its original meaning.

I have been writing more of these poems that owe their form to the medieval mathematician, Leonardo Fibonacci (c.1170 – c. 1250), whose so-called Fibonacci Sequence has been adopted as a syllabic pattern by poetry giving the medium its own equivalent of fine art’s Golden Section and which I explained in more detail in an earlier blog (8th september 2010 0 find it in the SEARCH window above).

Professor du Sautoy began with Leonardo’s Vetruvian Man  with its own ingenious sequences defining the proportions of the human body.

The last programme concentrated on the diagram sent into space in the 1970’s on Pioneer 10 on a journey to Jupiter  and then onwards beyond our own galaxy to explain mankind to any, if there is any, intelligent life in other galaxies. In an apparently simple diagram, the designers sought to show other worlds not only what homo sapiens looks like but also where we live and what date we posted this metal plaque into space. the optimistic thought behind that project was that mathematics is not just inter-galactic but possibly even universal.

Certainly, even an ignoramus like me can see that there is beauty in numbers and, dull though it might sound, the more I play with Fibonacci’s formula, the more I feel its, er, niceness. I am beginning to see the pattern all over the place, not just in the diagrams below, whose beauty I am newly awakened to, but in Nature itself. I find order there for my poetry when I am trying to explain the chaos of thoughts rattling around in my brain.

It would be nice indeed if, one day, in millions of years time, long after the great art galleries of the World have crumbled to dust, if The Fib Review could be found and understood by creatures from unknown galaxies. who knows, somewhere out there, might be planets where poetry is seen as an essential part of civilisation.

If you want to read my new fibonacci poems, Quitting and Snapshots,  click on Musepie Press on SOME LINKS in the right hand column on this page and then click on to the Fib Review icon on Musepie Press’s website.

Of course, aliens from other galaxies are welcome to read them too.

STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

The post Fibonacci and The Beauty of Diagrams appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My new poem is in the seventh issue of the journal which can be accessed on-line at http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/wolfiewolfgang1.html – if you want to read more of my Fib poems, and many of the others by other Fib poets, I am also in the fifth and sixth issues. 

Some of you may wonder what this has this to do with my laughable lack of arithmetic skill but these poems are all based on what is known as the Fibonacci Sequence which is, yes you guessed, a number sequence where one number fits into a pattern by being the sum of the previous two. In one of those dusty classrooms of my childhood, I would now be gazing out of the window watching crows mating on a chimney or a spider sucking the life out of a fly but stick with me because there is something in this number sequence thing.

First the numbers:

0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610, 987, 1597, 2584 …..

Am I boring you already? Sorry I’ll stop here but they go on like this forever in that mildly frightening way that numbers do in their own version of eternity.

If a poet uses the sequence to count out the syllables in each line of his poem then the end product is a sequence, a Fibonacci sequence and I just love writing them. Maybe, one day, I will do one for Sparky. Here’s a quick example, forgive me,  that I just rushed off as I was writing this blog:

Writing Fibonacci poetry is a wonderful mix of art and fun and I am a long way from getting tired of the seemingly endless possibilities of running these sequences. If you are interested in the variations possible within such a strict system just look at the work of the different writers represented in The Fib Review.

Fibonacci was, of course, much cleverer than me – even Sparky would have been in awe of him. He was born, Leonardo that is, in around 1170 as an Italian boy in Algiers where he first saw how much easier Arabic numerals were to use than those silly Roman ones where everything is a mix of different letters of the alphabet. He wrote it all down in a book called the Liber Abaci (The Book of Abacus) and, single-handedly, changed the way Europe wrote down its numbers. 

It was whilst he was studying Arabic numerals that he also read about the wierdly almost preordained relationship between those numbers which would forever take his name, the Fibonacci Sequence.

Now know how boring maths classes can be, believe me, but there is something about these numbers that even I can enjoy.

Someone clever like Sparky worked out that if you divided any of these numbers by the one next in line in the sequence, something truly strange happens once you get to around the thirteenth number. 144 divided by 233 equals 0.618. Wow!!!!!

Now you think I have gone mad but stick with this. all the numbers after that, when divided by the next one add up to the same result – 0.618 and that number, my friends is highly significant.

The spider had dessicated that fly and had moved on to a wasp when we got round to ratios in my maths class so forgive my rudimentary knowledge here but a shape that has two measurements of the ratio 1 to 1.618 or 1 to 0.618 is known as The Golden Mean and, so we are told, we all love things to look like that – as with the Fibonacci Sequence there is something about its symetry that appeals to us all,  be it human bodies… 

……Leonardo Da Vinci paintings…… 

………or great public buildings……  

…..Greek sculpture…….

…or Nature herself………

…and even in George Clooney…….

No wonder they erected a statue to Leonardo Fibonacci.

So I offer my thanks to Leonardo Fibonacci, the editor of The Fib Review and, of course, to Sparky for all their help and guidance on this unpredictable route from horror at maths to joy in its poetry.

The possibilities of the Fibonacci sequence has opened my eyes to all sorts of things maybe, even, the other school subject where I more than failed at – woodwork. Now that I have discovered Leonardo Fibonacci, who knows, I might even get to make my own writing desk using the truly wonderful Fibonacci Gauge but I might have to master sawing wood first because I could never cut it straight:

Maybe that is enough Fibonacci for one day but if not, take a look at this…..and don’t try it on the bus:

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