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.

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:

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This isn’t the first time that I’ve written about my Fibonacci poetry on these pages but today, I’m particularly thrilled that I have ten new poems published in The Fib Review #19 which came out over the weekend. These poems, written to a syllable count taking self-imposed rules from the medieval Italian arithmetician, Leonardo Fibonacci, the so-called Fibonacci Sequence when a pattern is seen in the relationship between  numbers written to the pattern 1: 1 : 2 : 3 : 5 : 8 :13 : 21 : 34  etc. etc.  At it’s simplest the pattern means that each number is the sum of the previous two but you can, of course, reverse the order and do a whole number of variations. I’ve loved imposing this discipline on my poetry and now, thanks to the continuing support of The Fib Review‘s editor Mary-Jane Grandinetti, I have been writing ‘Fibs’ for over five years, forty-five of them published in fifteen consecutive issues of The Fib Review, the World’s leading Fibonacci publisher. Heres’ the link where you will find my ten poems plus a whole lot more.  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

This summer I’ve been sorting all my Fibonacci poetry into some kind of order, there are now 62 of them, and found that they sat together happily enough and, without being a literal narrative, they tell the story of my many brief encounters with people in my personal life but also in the years when I worked in television. Sorting them out and writing some to fill the gaps, it was a bit like putting together a photograph album so, it was not much of a struggle to call the collection, Brief Encounters. Some of the latest poems have been about meetings with famous people, some admired, some feared and some disliked. It’s possibly a form of poetic name-dropping but I hope it adds up to more than that. Not all the encounters were with the famous – some are friends, some strangers and, a few, are imaginary encounters with some of my fears and obsessions.

In Issue 19 of The Fib Review,  four of the ten poems deal with my meetings with the famous – vivid memories all. As all four are now deceased, it seemed like a good idea to memorialise those brief encounters among my latest Fibonacci experiments with minimalism. I hope you’ll enjoy them.

The post The Beatle, the Cardinal, the Poet and the Prime Minister – my meetings with famous people memorialised in my newly published Fibonacci poems. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

My love affair continues with Leonardo Pisano Bigollo (c. 1170 – c. 1250) – the man now known simply as Fibonacci. Today sees the publication of the 14th issue of Muse-Pie Press’ journal devoted exclusively to Fibonacci poetry, The Fib Review, and I’m happy to be one of the poets to have a poem, Diplomacy,  published in it. Happy too that I have poetry in each issue since I first submitted my work there in 2009.

 So a big thank you to editor Mary-Jane Grandinetti for her support over these, actually all the years since I started writing poetry. She has been a supporter and a guide through this period and as helpful in what she has rejected as she has been encouraging in what she has selected. Now I’ve been in there long enough to feel paranoid each time I submit awaiting the moment when I break this very lucky run.

Click here to see my new Fib  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/colin_bell1.html

Click here to see the writers’ archive where you will find links to all the Fibonacci poems I have had in this impressive journal  http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

And click here for the Fib review’s home page so you can read the wide variety of poetry that can be, as Mary-Jane says, ‘squeezed into’ what is often seen as a rigid poetical form. http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/index.html

No time then for me to put up my feet and relax, Mary-Jane Grandinetti is a tough editor so I am already thinking about what to write next.

The post I make it again into The Fib Review but I never take it for granted. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.