With so much bad news  coming out of New Jersey this week, I was worried when I received a message from a publisher in New Jersey today which had the word “unfortunately” in the first paragraph. Now any writer who has ever submitted work to publishers will know to look for that word immediately as an instant sign of rejection.

I had submitted some Fibonacci poems to the excellent journal The Fib Review which specialises in this style of poetry, based on the Fibonacci Mathematical Sequence, one that particularly attracts me. The Fib Review is published by Muse-Pie Press in Passaic, New Jersey (see Links)  and they have been kind enough to publish a number of my poems over the last three years – in every issue in fact since Issue Three.

We all have to live with rejection so I skimmed the rest of the note with a bit more attention: “Unfortunately I’ve been affected by Hurricane Sandy and I’ve been without power for several days.”

Further on I read that The Fib Review wants to publish three of my new Fib poems in the next edition, Issue Thirteen. I am doubly delighted after that moment of disappointment.

I have been writing Fibonacci poetry now for about three and a half years after first learning about it from the pioneering editor of The Fib Review, Mary-Jane Grandinetti who is a specialist in short-form poetry. I am doubly grateful to her for the inspiration and for the encouragement.

The Fibonacci Sequence was brought to Europe by one Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c.1170 – c.1250) who is also known as Leonardo of Pisa or, more simply, as Fibonacci. He discovered what was originally a Hindu-Arab form of mathematics when travelling in North Africa and published his findings in a highly influencial book Liber Abaci (1202) or The Book Of Calculations which also introduced into Europe the now familiar Arabic numeral system that replaced the more complicated Roman numerals.

The Fibonacci Sequence is a mathematical formula that identifies the relationship between certain numerical combinations when added together in a specific sequence.

In his book, Fibonacci explains his system using the example of rabbits breeding in a field. He begins with one male and one female and makes the assumption that neither they or their offspring will die. After one year, he asks, how many rabbits will there be in that field. Don’t try this at home, believe me, it could get messy, but Fibonacci calculated that the number of rabbits could be predicted by his system: 1, 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 35, 55, 89, 144 etc. You will notice, pay attention at the back, that each number is the sum of the previous two. It was the use of these numbers as syllable counts that attracted me to writing Fibonacci poems. Here is an example of a Fibonacci poem by Jim Wilson:

This is its nature and
ever-expanding essential meaning and centrifugal motion of the exhilarating
Fibonacci!

Jim Wilson.

To borrow your patience a moment longer, you can also use these Fibonacci numbers to make something known as the Fibonacci Spiral where curved lines are fitted into a series of squares with Fibonacci numerical dimensions:

This is one of the basic patterns of Nature and it has its own beauty which we can recognise even if we don’t understand it.

It is used, either consciously or subliminally in the proportions in a work of art too. Like this photo of a rose…..

or this advert for Cognac:

It was also the shape of Hurricane Sandy when it arrived on the shores of New Jersey and took out the electricity of The Fib Review. Now that’s another neat, if inconvenient, Fibbonaci pattern.

For other examples of Fibonacci poetry go to The Fib Review at www.musepiepress.com – you can hear me read some of mine in the video column to the right of this blog. Issue 13 of the Fib Review will be out soon.

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I have had an inconvenient bout of ‘flu this week. No big deal compared to the terrible events brought about by Superstorm Sandy. My ‘flu has forced me to switch off and sit back in front of my television set during these dramatic days of unprecedented danger to the East Coast of the USA, especially New York City and the State of New Jersey where I have good friends.

For a time we worried about you, my American friends, but you seem to have weathered the storm. Sadly not everyone was so lucky and the death toll is still rising as the extent of the damage is revealed in its full horror.

I watched the moving and impressive speeches made by President Obama and New Jersey State Governor Chris Christie and thought it was great to see the Democrat President and the Republican Governor standing as one and getting just the right amount of sympathy and practicality across to a shaken region of the States. To my, maybe naive, eyes and ears, both men seemed genuinely moved and involved in the human dramas and tragedies confronting them. The President, only days before the Presidential elections, looked to me to be first of all as human, then as the President, and only with hindsight, as a presidential candidate.

I was watching American news reports or American reporters on Sky News but then I turned over to the BBC News for a report by the BBC North America Editor, a windswept, ruddy-faced, Mark Maddell standing on the Atlantic City coastline, telling me that Barrack Obama had played it just about right at this point in the election campaign and that he would benefit from his performance in New Jersey. As far as Mr Mardell was concerned this was all about political gesturing.

I also saw former (sacked) director General of the BBC, Greg Dyke, on the Sky News section on the newspaper headlines when he said, full of laughter, that Barrack Obama must have gone to bed last night thanking God for Hurricane Sandy.

I thought I was cynical but I hope never to get so tangled up in the power politics within the broadcasting media, to miss the human point so wildly as these two respected members of Britain’s television elite. I wondered if some of the current problems within the BBC over the previously much praised but now disgraced late paedophile  pop presenter, Jimmy Savile, also stemmed from the blinkered vision that comes with an obsession with power games at the top of organizations that haunt so many decent journalists on their way to the top of their profession. Hearing these comments, I wondered if I had misread those moving scenes from New Jersey but then I clocked that, for some political pundits, in the end, politics is just a game and political commentary an exercise in showing off.

Back to last night’s BBC News which led with another cynical exercise in political trickery, the British Parliament’s short-sighted debate on the European Union’s budget which was analyzed by the BBC’s  Political Editor with good-humoured scorn before moving on to Mark Mardell’s cynical report on the Obama visit to New Jersey that was followed by an update on the storm damage on the American East Coast, before a brief announcement from the anchor woman that if we wanted to catch up on other areas effected by the storm we could go to the BBC website. She was referring, of course, to the “forgotten” victims of Hurricane Sandy, the people of the Caribbean Islands where 66 people died. Britain seemed very parochial all of a sudden.

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It’s a pleasant, slightly breezy Autumnal morning here in Lewes, UK, but enjoying it is a guilty secret on the day that Hurricane Sandy is on its perilous journey towards the coast of the USA. I’m hoping that it won’t be as serious as all the forecasters are projecting. They are expecting a gigantic storm when Sandy meets a huge area of high pressure in the mid Atlantic that will divert it, at full strength straight onto New Jersey, New York and Washington D.C. My thoughts are with everyone over there at this dramatic time.

Even if there was anything us Brits could do to help, a quick look at the departure board at London’s Heathrow Airport shows us that we are truly cut off from our American cousins.

So we can only watch and wait on this side of the storm and hope that Sandy will be kind.

The only hope I can offer is that, Wizard of Oz style, the Presidential campaign could benefit from this stormy interlude. If I were to click my red shoes together and wish, then maybe Mitt Romney might get blown away, as safely as Dorothy was, to a land where he could learn to see things differently somewhere along that Yellow Brick Road.

Let’s hope then that he’s the only American to have a bumpy interlude over the next few days and that he returns enlightened by his time with Dorothy and her friends. So, even if my wish doesn’t come true, here’s that clip to cheer you all up and afterwards, if you dare, there’s the twister scene too:

Keep safe everybody!

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