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Lecture 12: Sestinas

I. Sestina: A fixed form, developed in Provençal by the Troubadours: six end-words are repeated in an interwoven order through six stanzas and in a final three-line envoi (also called tornada) which contains all six words. (The Poetry Dictionary, John Drury)

II. How the Sestina (Yawn) Works (from Vow to Poetry, 2001)

Anne Waldman

I opened this poem with a yawn
thinking how tired I am of revolution
the way it's presented on television
isn't exactly poetry
You could use some more methedrine
if you ask me personally

People should be treated personally
there's another yawn
here's some more methedrine
Thanks! Now about this revolution
What do you think? What is poetry?
Is it like television?

Now I get up to turn off the television
Whew! It was getting to me personally
I think it is like poetry
Yawn it's 4 a.m. yawn yawn
This new record is one big revolution
if you were listening you'd understand methedrine

isn't the greatest drug no not methedrine
it's no fun for watching television
You want to jump up have a revolution
about something that affects you personally
When you're busy and involved you never yawn
it's more like feeling, like energy, like poetry

I really like to write poetry
it's more fun than grass, acid, THC, methedrine
If I can't write I start to yawn
and it's time to sit back, watch television
see what's happening to me personally:
war, strike, starvation, revolution

This is a sample of my own revolution
taking the easy way out of poetry
I want it to hit you all personally
like a shot of extra-strong methedrine
so you'll become your own television
Become your own yawn

O giant yawn, violent revolution
silent television, beautiful poetry
most deadly methedrine
I choose all of you for my poem personally

III. Brief Discussion with Personal Anecdote

Anne Waldman's sestina—which is simultaneously an ars poetica, a poem that comments on the poetic art, and a comic poem that makes a serious argument and works that argument out in a form—teaches the fundamentals of this form quite well, I believe. Look at the first stanza:

I opened this poem with a yawn 1
thinking how tired I am of revolution 2
the way it's presented on television 3
isn't exactly poetry 4
You could use some more methedrine 5
if you ask me personally 6

The end words—yawn, revolution, television, poetry, methedrine, and personally—circulate in a very predictable way. The last word of the sixth line of this stanza, which I have numbered 6, becomes the last word of the next stanza's first line. The second line of the second stanza ends with the last word of the previous stanza's first line, the third line ends with the last word of the previous stanza's fifth line, the fourth line ends with the last word of the previous stanza's second line, the fifth line ends with the last word of the previous stanza's fourth line, and finally, the sixth line ends with the last word of the previous stanza's third line. Each stanza derives its structure from the previous stanza, moving from the last line of the previous stanza to the first, then the fifth, then the second, then the fourth, and lastly the third, to order the end-words.

You can analyze the rest of the poem and see that it works exactly this way, recycling the end words in an utterly predictable and elegant pattern, resulting in a dance of repetitions which concludes in the envoi—the send-off—where the poet repeats all six words one final time. (Waldman's sestina adds a final line to this envoi.)

I figured out by accident that there's a very straightforward way to write a sestina. If you can come up with a six-line stanza with six interesting end-words, ones which might allow you to play with the sense—to pun—then all you have to do is set down the pattern of the rest of the stanzas, which is easy to do. Then, you simply fill in the blanks. It's like poetry mad-libs. I'll show you with a sestina I wrote a few years ago. Here's the first stanza:

The cat lies on the tile, a furry sphinx,
Both long front paws stretched forth, formally.
Everything I’ve planted outside has had it.
Verbena’s frazzled, hydrangea leaf’s crisp.
Yesterday hot, today hotter. The fan
Ticks overhead, and it’s not yet July.

With this stanza, the structure of the sestina is immediately available: all I have to do is write out the end words in the order that they'll occur as predicted by the form. Here's how that looks:

July
Sphinx
Fan
Formally
Crisp
Had it (I decided that "had it," a phrase instead of a word, would be the end-word here)

Had it
July
Crisp
Sphinx
Formally
Fan

Fan
Had it
Formally
July
Sphinx
Crisp

Crisp
Fan
Sphinx
Had it
July
Formally

Formally
Crisp
July
Fan
Had it
Sphinx

And then I'm at the envoi, which can recycle the words in any order.

It's not exactly a piece of cake to write the poem from here on out, but the structure is immediately apparent. So I fuss with lines, trying to get some sort of sense out of it, trying to apply wit so that a poetic kind of humor might be one of the effects, punning, sometimes substituting words that either are synonymous or homonymous—words that sound alike or similar. My second stanza turned out this way:

It’s two weeks until the fourth of July,
when fireworks go off like Leon Spinks
on Ali, though I’m not such a fan
of the sweet science, at least not normally.
It’s just like this heat, a left jab, crisp
as you please to the temple. I’ve had it.

(The "sphinx-Spinks" substitution is actually pretty much the whole reason I wrote this poem—I was watering my hydrangea, the cat was lying on the walk, I thought "sphinx," then I thought, what rhymes with "sphinx?" and there, dear reader, lay the beginnings of the poem. I did have to check up to make sure that I remembered the right facts about Leon Spinks—because I'm really not such a fan of the sweet science [boxing], at least not normally.) You can see that I also substituted a homonym—"normally"—for formally. Here's the whole poem, just so you can see how it all came out (I know, you're breathless with anticipation):

My Plan

In June, I made a plan. I thought I had it
well in hand, to be complete by July
31 st, but now it’s just as fried, crisped
dry like bacon rendered to boredom. A sphinx
is no doubt less brittle, formally
posed, than my plan, which I’ve pleated fan-

style, fluttering. I’d like to be a fan
dancer like Sally Rand. Nude, she had it
covered, her plan tossed off informally
as her clothes. It was as hot as July
behind her coy fans—yet she a calm sphinx.
I’d like to flirt my way back to a crisp,

Intelligent thought. Just one, please, crisp
As new money. But no—I’m only fan-
atical about staying cool. Half-man, half-cat:
your pyramid gaze couldn’t have it
any hotter than me right now, with July
around the corner, waiting formally.

I’d like to state my complaint formally,
Please. No more swelter. Let’s start with crisp
Mornings and a cooler than planned for July.
If I work hard, starting now, I can fan
my ambition’s flame. I haven’t had it,
Not at all. The cat’s paw twitches—that sphinx:

She thinks she has the goods on me, endured July
ennui before. Her formal, crisp judgment:
Fancy that, planning again. She yawns. And blinks.

IV. Why write a sestina?

When I was a young student of literature, I remember being taught about sonnets and "sonnet-shaped ideas," by which my teachers meant, I've come to believe, the kind of argument suited to the question-answer, proposition-refutation, or example-example-example-punch line structure of the sonnet (depending on which kind of sonnet you're talking about). What, if anything, is a sestina-shaped idea?

Strand and Boland suggest that the point of the sestina is inherent in its beginnings with the Troubadours, who were, as they say, "famous, celebrated, much in fashion, and eventually very influential on the European poetry of the next few centuries." These poets produced highly wrought, difficult, and elaborate forms, of which the sestina was one of the most difficult (the canzone, which we won't discuss, is another; if you feel unchallenged by your life as a poet, look up the canzone and give it a whirl). So part of the point of the sestina is to be impressive. A well-written sestina is a thing of beauty and high artifice. Even chatty sestinas like Waldman's exhibit a high degree of artistry and control.

But beyond that, I would say that the sestina also mirrors one kind of human thought—the obsessive. I have heard this form and others like it—the pantoum and the villanelle, for instance—described as obsessive, meaning that rather than opening new discursive regions, such poems, by virtue of their repetitions and recyclings, circle around a more limited discursive space. A sestina can open a window to the clearing, but it does so by wringing every bit of sense out of the same six words in various juxtapositions that it can.

A note about meter: while the Provencal poets, whose poems were always accompanied by music, may have used some sort of regular meter, you can see that there's no metrical requirement among contemporary poets. Some poets try to give the line some kind of regularity; others, like Waldman, feel free to lengthen and shorten the line at will.

V. A couple more sestinas for your delight and instruction

[Note: Although this next sestina uses the sestina's pattern of repetition, with each repetition, Justice uses a slant rhyme, so that the poem metamorphoses, as it were. One of the most lovely sestinas ever, I think.]

The Metamorphosis (from The Summer Anniversaries, 1960)

Donald Justice

Past Mr. Raven's tavern
Up Cemetery Hill
Around by the Giant Oak
And Drowning Creek gone dry
Into the Hunting Woods
And that was how he went

At his back the wind
Blowing out of heaven
And at his feet foul weeds
That it was like to hell
And scarcely could he draw
Breath and the ribs did ache

No rest got under the oak
Nor water for the wound
Yet kept the wan and drew
How at length to haven
And the familiar hall
His key into the wards

Then owls cried out from the woods
And terrors of that ilk
So that the bitch at heel
A little moaned and whined
As she some fit were having
That back her long legs drew

Whereat his mouth stood dry
And without any words
Despite his heart heaving
And tongue working to speak
Some name to cast the wonder
Straight from his heart whole

Then bent he to the keyhole
Nor might his eyes withdraw
The while the hall unwound
That thing which afterwards
No man should know or its like
Whether dead or living

Spice Night (from 1-800-HOT-RIBS, 1993)

Catherine Bowman

It was your best friend's birthday, 9:00 and late July. By the time
I got there wearing shorts and a T-shirt everyone was pretty spiced
on Corona and Lite. What's-his-name Ramirez started telling jokes
about German Shepherds and Girl Scouts and then someone hurt a knew
trying to somersault and play volleyball with only the light of the moon
and oh yeah Joe Herder drove his '64 Cadillac right over the grass.

I think you had a date but you were sitting with me on the grass
and I didn't feel guilty, in fact I was worrying about the time
because the night would end soon and I had come just to see you. The moon
was drenching the Balcones Fault Flood Basin with a pollen, a spice,
it happens every twelve years, and that's when you put your hand on my knee
and that's when Ramirez started telling a series of dead baby jokes.

Even Joe Herder and his crowd were getting tired of the bad jokes
because they started telling stories about smuggling heroin and grass
up from Mexico and I looked down and your hand was still on my knee
and they were talking about gunrunning, Mayan treasures, and doing time,
and the Hilton in downtown San Salvador as if they were modern day spice
pirates instead of Alamo Heights kids who had been given the moon

and suddenly the sky had changed and I realized that the moon
was using its comic sensibility to fool around, to make a joke,
just by being round and fat, it played up, it complemented the spice
of the lawn, a punchy waltz with the blunt edges of the grass,
without really thinking we were moving our toes, our teeth, in time.
This is when I decided to put my hand on your knee.

So there we were in the yard with our hands on each other's knees,
watching the party, watching the crown, and of course the moon.
I was tired but didn't want to leave so I asked you about the time
your high school class went camping at Big Bend and you made a joke
about people who ask a lot of questions and then we left the grass
and went into Mrs. Schue's house and down the hall where there was a spice

cabinet filled with, what else, hundreds of unlabeled jars of spices.
We opened all the bottles and played a game, our sweaty knees
shining in the dark. I guessed caraway, tarragon, and lemon grass;
you guessed others as we closed our eyes and inhaled the bottled moons.
Outside the volleyball game continued and the jokes.
We knew we had found that spice cabinet just in time.

Knees. Spice. Jokes. Moon. Grass. Time. Forever and ever. Amen.

***********

In The Making of a Poem (Strand and Boland), you should read all the sestinas—if Renaissance language makes you feel more confused than enlightened about the form, you can focus on the more recent ones, the Romantics or Victorians, or the moderns (starting with Ezra Pound's). If you're having a hard time understanding the architecture of the form, go through and outline the pattern of the repetitions. Once you get it, you'll get it forever, and it's like a little poem-inventing machine.

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