About

About Senanis

Senanis is a reflective poetry project built around Senanis Moments: brief six-word poems that invite attention, interpretation, and pause.

I created senanis as a way to explore how constraint can open meaning. A Senanis Moment is small, but not simple. Six words can hold an image, a feeling, a question, or more than one meaning at once. This site brings those Senanis Moments into different poetic forms, including Senanis Moment Fields, Quantum Senanis Moments, and Senanis Sestinas.

The Senanis Hexagon, Honeycomb, and Sphere form a progression from ring to field to surface. A Hexagon places six words in one continuous cycle, allowing any word to become the beginning. The Honeycomb joins hexagons along shared edges. Each hexagonal cell holds a Senanis Moment, and neighboring cells share the two words at either end of their common edge. Those shared words also open paths across the wider field, where each route can produce a different six-word reading.

The Sphere carries this shared-edge structure into three dimensions. Twenty hexagonal Moments curve into one surface inspired by fullerene geometry. Each word belongs to two Moments and also takes its place in a longer sixty-word poem. At each stage, the structure grows while the six-word Moment remains its foundation.

This progression draws inspiration from traditions of constrained and combinatorial poetry. The Oulipo, founded by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais and later shaped by writers including Georges Perec, treated constraint as a source of literary possibility. An earlier inspiration is fourth-century Chinese poet Su Hui's Star Gauge (Xuanji Tu), a poem arranged as a grid that opens into many paths and readings.

I'm Alvin R. Lebeck. My work and interests span technology, ideas, and creative exploration, and Senanis grows from that intersection. It is a personal space for experimenting with reflection, language, structure, and interaction.

For a broader view of my personal and professional work, visit my homepage.