OULIPOST #4: Tiger Power

Every day this April, nearly 80 poets will write one poem per day by applying constrained writing techniques sourced from the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle — or “workshop of potential literature”) group to text sourced from their daily local newspaper. This is the fourth of thirty prompts in the Oulipost project.

The found poem below is in response to this prompt:

OULIPOST #4: FIBONACCI (VARIATION)

In a Fibonacci sequence, each term is the sum of the two terms immediately preceding it; typically with 1 as the first term: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5,8, 13, 21, 34, 55 and so on.


Select an article from your newspaper and create a poem using the words that correspond with the numbers in the sequence. Your poem will take the form of first word, first word, second word, third word, fifth word, eighth word, thirteenth word, etc. You can continue until you’ve run out of words in your article or until you’re happy with the poem’s conclusion.

Words from the article: 1 we 2 watched 3 in 5 as 8 up 13 over  21 awe 34 eyes 55 Njeru 89 six-inch 144 we

We watched Njeru

in six-inch eyes,

awe over we.

We up.

Who is Njeru? "This is Kenya's strongest man, Conrad Njeru Karukenya, better known as Tiger Power..."

REFERENCES

Mburu, Kinuthia. "Being run over by Land Rover does not bother him." The Daily Nation 4 Apr. 2014: pg 3.