One of the best things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one simple idea. One of the worst things about loving words, writing and poetry is the unlimited number of ways to convey one single idea.
A couple of weeks ago I came across a reference to the sestina, a kind of poem that I remember writing as a class assignment a long time ago, one of many creative exercises that only the best kind of teacher mandates. Sestinas are tricky for their structural difficulty and to be true to form must consist of exactly six stanzas with six lines per stanza concluding with a tercet. These thirty nine lines are not only supposed to be written in iambic pentameter, but follow a strict form whereby each line must end with only the same six words repeated in a different, but structured (retrograde cross) order.
If this sounds part poem part crossword puzzle, it is but it isn’t. The formula is this:
Stanza 1=123456; Stanza 2= 615243; Stanza 3= 364125; Stanza 4= 532614; Stanza 5= 451362; Stanza 6= 246531. The tercet repeats the six ending words but in three lines in the order of line 1 (6 and 2); line 2 (1 and 4) and line 3 (5 and 3). And if you don’t care to know how it works but want to see one in action, here is a link to Elizabeth Bishop’s blandly titled but beautifully written "Sestina"
In writing my first sestina, I recall plotting out those crucial six ending words that I would have to use over and over again and how using concrete objects was the easiest way to go in terms of having a product that flowed and meant something. Bishop’s Sestina does the same, using nouns as her finishing lines.
This time I took a different route and, while difficult, was worth the exercise. In doing so I found that the one thing I miss in the adult world of having to work for a living and spent less time on a writing life is not having Mrs. Kernutt’s challenges and creative daily assignments to force me to find more of these kids of assignments.
If anyone else wants to accept the sestina challenge, please forward your poems and I will post them here at Treegap.
Journalistically Speaking
In your new life who
do you go to and how
do you behave when
they ask about us what
do you say in that moment where
you’d rather die than ask yourself why.
Detectives are unsure why
the driver of the pick-up who
careened through six lanes of traffic where-
by striking the cyclist or how
impossibly tragic the timing in what
began as a normal day. Odds are when
we’re not looking, taking a routine ride when
feeling just fine wondering why
the life you chose is not exactly what
you intended and ends up being about who
time is spent with when no one is looking and how
lovely it would be to live in a place where
we take care of each other’s fingers and toes, where
fellow passengers on a train say something when
the unbreathing man in the next seat needs to know how
to get help before he expires and why
hundreds of thousands of commuters who
went in and out of that car all day cared not what
his life meant, more interested in what
the latest news has to say of the weather and where
to get dinner that night and maybe who
to share it with if we’re lucky enough or when
we’ll see someone we love. But why
has it come to this for us and how
unfixable is it? I still don’t know how
to be the new me around you and what
I want to be without you or why
the corners of the fitted sheet never round where
they’re supposed to only when
I make the bed without you. But who
cares that it’s my bed, why not ours instead, or how
it looks to the ghosts who sleep there and what
it means to mummify in sheets where a person lived back when.
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