Thursday Poetry Forms (Poetry for Dummies) Week 27

Leaning up against the olive tree this Thursday CC Champagne is here again to explore the white areas of the poetry form map with you all.

Today I wanted to talk about a form I've been holding back specifically for this time of the year. I didn't find it on Wikipedia either, but still think it deserves a mention since, to me, this is the kind of poetry form that is truly inspirational. We have previously talked about counting syllables and how a specific number of syllables to a line or a poem is often part of the rules of a specific form. With Haikus the traditional seems to be the 5-7-5 line distribution, and today's poetry form uses a similar system.

Pi-poetry (or Π-poetry) is so named because of the 3-1-4 structure, where the first line consists of three syllables, the second of a single syllable and the last line of four syllables. The form seems to be yet another attempt at merging mathematics and the 'hard' sciences with the 'soft' art of poetry. Pi, or the number 3.14, is famously a mathematical constant which is the ratio of any Euclidian circle's circumference to its diameter. Exactly what that really means is something I probably did know for about a week prior to some math test in High School, but have since quite definitively (and happily) managed to forget.

The reason I've chosen to bring it up now is that this form also seems to be connected to the Americanized way of writing the date March 14 2012 (or any year), namely 3.14.2012, which is also known as Pi-day.

So with this little mathematically inspirational nugget I leave you for now, urging you to add any poem you've created, whether it happens to be Pi-poetry or not, to our Poetry Picnic Week 26 where the topic is Seven Deadly Sins, or why not put on your reading glasses and join us at Hyde Park Poetry for Thursday Poets Rally Week 63. With this I raise my glass of bubbly spumante to you and hope to see you back here again next week!

*Cheers*