Considering the Sestina

 

 

 

On Monday the 20^th of September 2010 I had an engagement at the school where I taught for thirty-one years before my retirement in 1996, the State University of New York College at Oswego, to talk to Leigh Allison Wilson’s “Living Writers” class about poetry and to read from the new collection by my pseudonymous alter-ego “Wesli Court,” some of the poems in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems,¹ that the students had already read. I began with a question I used to ask on the first day of the semester in my Nature of Poetry class: “How many of you studied poetry in high school? Please raise your hands.”

In those days, especially toward the end of my teaching career, if any hands went up they would be few. In Leigh’s class, which was quite large (there were visitors as well), a lot of hands went up. “Wow,” I said, “Things have changed.” That is so partly, I think, because of my The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics, published originally in 1968.² It has become known since then as “the poet’s bible.” For a very long time it was the only text-reference like it in print, it was an easily-available paperback, and it was used by several generations of poets young and old, including Richard Wilbur and James Dickey who in an unsolicited cover blurb wrote, “Belongs in the hands of every poet, student, and teacher, for the greater good of the art.”

One member of Prof. Wilson’s class, a young woman, asked me about my sestina. I asked her which one, because there are several sestinas in the book. She said, “The one titled ‘Sestina.’” That surprised me because it wasn’t one of the assigned poems. A couple of days later, not knowing exactly how many sestinas there actually are in the collection, I counted them. There are seven! — “The Obsession,” which is a variant sestina; “The Dead Letter Office,” a rhymed sestina without an envoy; “The Day We Bombed the Moon (and Barack Obama Won the Nobel Peace Prize)”; “Tsunami”; “Double Vision,” which is a double sestina made up of two originally titled (but not in the book) “The Vision” and “Second Sight”; and, of course, “Sestina.”

What I replied to the student’s question was, “That poem is at the opposite end of the spectrum” (I meant, “technically,”) from the first sestina in the book, ‘The Obsession.’” If I’d had the time, I would have liked to explain myself at greater length, because both sestinas are obsessive, but in quite different ways.

In both my own Book of Forms, Third Edition (2000)² and in An Exaltation of Forms by Annie Finch and Kathrine Varnes (2002) for which I edited the section on the sestina, I wrote that the form is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late 12th century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante from whom it received its Italian name. The popularity of the poem in English is primarily a 19th century phenomenon in the U. K., and a 20^th century phenomenon in the United States.

The six end-words or teleutons of the lines of the first sestet stanza are repeated in a specific order as teleutons in the five succeeding sestets. In English-language tradition the sestina is generally written in iambic pentameter or, sometimes, in decasyllabic meters, though it may also be written in any specific line length. In the original edition of The Book of Forms I wrote, “lines may be of any length.” I meant any single length, not “of any lengths, but people do not read carefully; therefore, I had to be more specific in subsequent editions because I began to see sestinas written in varying line lengths, including once in The London Times Literary Supplement, which astonished me, but before my book came out Donald justice had written a sestina with varying line lengths, as noted below, so perhaps I wasn’t entirely to blame. And, of course, ultimately any poet may use poetic license to do any damn thing he or she pleases.

The thirty-nine lines of the sestina are divided into six sestet stanzas and a final triplet envoy (or envoi). In the envoy the six teleutons are also picked up, one of them being buried in, and one finishing, each line. The order in which the end-words are repeated appears to have its roots in numerology, but what the mathematical significance of the pattern originally was now is unknown. The sequence of numbers is 6-1-5-2-4-3. Obviously, the series is just 1-2-3-4-5-6 with the last three numbers reversed and inserted sequentially ahead of the first three: 6-1-5-2-4-3.

If the end-words of stanza one are designated ABCDEF (the capital letters in this case signify repeated words, not whole refrain lines) and the sequence 615243 is applied to it, the order of repetitions in the second stanza will be FAEBDC. Apply the sequence to the second stanza, and the third stanza will be CFDABE. Continuing the process will give us ECBFAD in the fourth stanza, DEACFB in the fifth, and BDFECA in the sixth sestet. The reader will usually be unable to miss the fact that the last teleuton in the sixth line of each sestet stanza is also the last teleuton of the first line of the succeeding stanza. The order of repetition in the three lines of the envoy is BE / DC / FA.

In his “Foreword” to my First Poems (1960)³ Donald Justice wrote, “…part of Lewis Turco's exuberance, which is everywhere in evidence, is a matter of technique.  No reader can avoid noticing the variety of forms here.  There are sapphics, several of the French forms, sonnets, syllabics, and a number of what this young poet, who originated the form, calls "triversens," or triple-verse-sentences; curiously, no villanelles, no sestinas, fashionable forms at the moment.”⁴ Eight years later, in a collection of quantitative syllabic poems titled Awaken, Bells Falling, Poems 1959-1968⁵ I sneaked into the book my first sestina, “The Forest of My Seasons,” which I disguised by indenting the lines, as the other poems in the book were indented in order to indicate corresponding syllabic line-lengths.² My sestina was written in decasyllabics, so there was no real reason to indent any of the lines except for purposes of deception, and there is no reason for me to indent here. Over the years a few people have noticed that the poem is a sestina, but not many.

The primary problem that poets encounter with the sestina is, generally, that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader's attention away from the repetitions, poets may enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons; or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in "south wind") and wind (as in "wind your own clock"), or even such ploys as repeating one word, such as can, as part of another word, like toucan, as I did:

 

THE FOREST OF MY SEASONS

 

Desire today is a cavern of snow;

ice rimes all limbs with synonyms for wind.

Yesternoon it was goat-time, time for horns

rampant on a field vert under the woods

quartered in a southern compass.  Toucan

tones rose close beneath the surface of shade,

 

threatening rupture.  Poet, draw your shade

today upon a mirror made of snow

shadowed.  Men may hibernate if bears can.

Desire must sleep in a cavern of wind

till it may be harried awake by wood-

pecker beak and Pan's sunsharp or ramshorns —

 

Too many words, like girdles built of horn,

confined in an attic.  How to say “shade”

but make it mean more, as: tiles of the wood

laid for light to walk on; and to have snow

imply more than God's linoleum.  Wind

is wind, but direction matters.  Who can

 

help me?  Where's my muse today?  Shake your can,

you errant Echo, and get home.  My horns

sprout long as the cuckoo's song while you wind

your own clock and make love with your own shade

someplace up a cavern or down the snow

where wild Narcissus buds among your woods.

 

The forest of my seasons grows strange woods

sometimes; this fall of words grows as it can,

not as it ought.  My pen is cold as snow:

its ink runs like chilled honey from the horns

of silence.  Lie you down, lie down in shade,

word-warbler.  Sleep sound with your mistress wind.

 

And while you sleep, dream.  Dream of the south wind

needling you awake with slivers of woods:

birch and pine, maple that sweetens in shade;

oak on the white hillside.  Dream, if you can,

of gray moles, brown mice, winter's hunting horns

blown to silence.  Dream no longer of snow,

 

for time and flesh shall do more than wind can

to blend your words with woodwinds and woodshorns.

There will be tonics.  It's time for shades now.

 

Of course, one can go the other way and use the teleutons obsessively for particular effect, which is what Wesli Court did in that poem Wilson’s student asked about. In fact, I doubt that repetition in the sestina can be carried any further than in this metapoem — “metapoetry” is poetry about poetry — which obviously violates the rule that each of the six teleutons must be different from the others.

  

SESTINA

 

It drives you crazy to write a sestina.

First off, in order to write a sestina

you need six end-words that don’t shout, “Sestina!”

One should hide the fact that it’s a sestina

you’re writing. I mean, why holler “Sestina!”

if you don’t have to? Why give the sestina

 

game away right away? For a sestina

needs to be a subtle thing. A sestina

should lead readers away from the sestina,

make them think, “This is no kind of sestina,

it’s a sixteener, maybe, no sestina

sustaining itself on sestets. Sestina

 

indeed! I don’t believe it. A sestina

doesn’t announce itself, “I’m a sestina,

no less! I live on end-words, a sestina

to end sestinas! I’m a sustainer

of sounds, echoes of a choral Sistiner

bouncing off Michaelangelo sixteen or

 

so ways from Rome to Nome.” A fine sestina

that would be. Thirty-nine lines of sestina

mumbling into the reader’s ear, “Sestina,

sestina, sestina.” Who could sustain a

poem like that for so long? A sestina

ought perhaps to read more like a sonetto

 

rispetto than like what it is. Sestina

end-words are teleutons, and a sestina

should tell you tons about what a sestina

is all about. Certainly, a sestina

is about disguise, subtlety, sestina

reticence, reluctance to be sestina-

 

like. Rather, it ought to be a soul-stainer,

nuanced, a mind-mellower. A sestina

ought not to be the thing, just the sustainer

of thingness in the memory. Sestina

is teleutonals, not end-words. Sestina

is an earful of sense, not a sestina

 

ending in a coda that says sestina,

repeating end-words, sestina, sestina,

sestina, and a final time, sestina!

 

    In 1979 Wesli Court took advantage of the obsessive quality of the sestina's repetitions in "The Obsession," one of the poems in a sequence first collected in The Gathering titled “Letters to the Dead” which rings the changes on the rhymed iambic pentameter sestet. The first line of "The Obsession" contains all six of the end-words, and the same basic line is repeated incrementally as the first line of succeeding stanzas. Each time the line is repeated the syntax is transposed by hypallage, an exchange of words in phrases or clauses as in E. E. Cummings' poem, "anyone lived in a pretty how town / with up so floating many bells down" instead of “anyone lived in how pretty a town / with so many bells floating up, down.” I would use hypallage later on in another sestina, “Tsunami,” where the dislocation of normal syntax is meant to show confusion, but the line repeated in “The Obsession” always makes sense despite the inverted syntax.

Because all six end-words do appear in this line, a particular problem arises at the envoy, for it cannot be of three lines.  Instead, the refrain line reappears a seventh time as a one-line envoy rather than as the normal triplet, but with the sense of the original first line reversed.

  

THE OBSESSION

 

Last night I dreamed my father died again,

A decade and a year after he dreamed

Of death himself, pitched forward into night.

His world of waking flickered out and died —

An image on a screen.  He is the father

Now of fitful dreams that last and last.

 

I dreamed again my father died at last.

He stood before me in his flesh again.

I greeted him.  I said, "How are you, father?"

But he looked frailer than last time I'd dreamed

We were together, older than when he'd died —

I saw upon his face the look of night.

 

I dreamed my father died again last night.

He stood before a mirror.  He looked his last

Into the glass and kissed it.  He saw he'd died.

I put my arms about him once again

To help support him as he fell.  I dreamed

I held the final heartburst of my father.

 

I died again last night: I dreamed my father

Kissed himself in glass, kissed me goodnight

In doing so.  But what was it I dreamed

In fact?  An injury that seems to last

Without abatement, opening again

And yet again in dream?  Who was it died

 

Again last night?  I dreamed my father died,

But it was not he — it was not my father,

Only an image flickering again

Upon the screen of dream out of the night.

How long can this cold image of him last?

Whose is it, his or mine?  Who dreams he dreamed?

 

My father died.  Again last night I dreamed

I felt his struggling heart still as he died

Beneath my failing hands.  And when at last

He weighed me down, then I laid down my father,

Covered him with silence and with night.

I could not bear it should he come again —

 

I died again last night, my father dreamed.

Download The Obsession read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

When I replied to the question posed by Prof. Wilson’s student I meant that the poem titled simply “Sestina” is technically at the opposite end of the spectrum from “The Obsession” because the word “sestina” itself is used like a sledge-hammer in the former poem whereas in the latter poem the sestina verse form is used to show the nature of obsession as it is manifested in a recurring dream or “dream vision.”

 The oldest British example of the sestina — a double sestina, actually — is by Sir Philip Sidney, "You Goat-Herd Gods," from his 16th century Arcadia. It is not merely a double sestina (twelve sestet stanzas rather than six), but a pastoral dialogue or eclogue as well. Here is my own — I should say, “Wesli Court’s” — double sestina from The Gathering, a monologue rather than a dialogue:

  

DOUBLE VISION

A Double Sestina

 

                                    I.

 

It came upon me while I was on the crapper

of my father’s parsonage, my eyes

boring into the porcelain of the tiles

before me on the wall.  The tiles were white.

They spread across the vacancy of time

That seeped into my mind and filled that blank

 

jug of puberty with a vast Mont Blanc

of sorrow and ennui. On that crapper

I saw that I would have to fill up time

with something more than the nothing that met my eyes,

the emptiness that seeped out of those white

ranges of porcelain whose trackless tiles

 

led finally to death. I feared those tiles

worse than I feared my death, that ultimate blank-

ness waiting for me on the snowy white

crest of age. I saw life was a crapper

that had to be filled with something. If I closed my eyes

perhaps I could dream myself to a better time

 

than this one snowing before me. There was no time

to dream. What could I do? I could fill tiles

with words. I could write. I filled my eyes

with reading every day; I could fill blank

sheets with my own words. I rose off that crapper

thinking I might pave my way with white

 

sheaves laden with stories, poems — I could write

my way to death by filling my living tome

with endless lines of type till I came-a-cropper

at last and alas! perhaps, on the devil’s tines,

if I kept my gaze steady and didn’t blink,

and if I did not try to romanticize

 

my life with gods and demons, with the sighs

of wishful thinking, with the little white

lies of religion that covered up the blank

of existence with the stuff that fills a crapper.

I pulled myself out of the abyss of tiles

Ready to take on life and move in time.

 

I’d use my eyes to read. Perhaps in time

I’d use those words to write, to fill up tiles

With something more than blankness on that crapper.

 

 

                                    II.

 

So that is what I’ve done. I’ve been the croupier

in life’s casino to this point, with ice

in my arteries. My column of tales

and songs has risen to a decent height

and I am old at last, although not tame

as maybe I should be. But I won’t blink

 

at this point, for why should I wish to blink?

I’ve been raking in what a good croupier

rakes in — coin of the realm like leaves of thyme,

minutes and moments that one can use to spice

the pot of emptiness when it gains heat

enough to flavor these mortal tales

 

that I’ve been cooking up. There’s nothing stales

a blend of blandishments quick as a blink

faster than losing interest at its height

even as one’s flesh grows crepier

with every year and hour. So, throw some ice

into the mix, perhaps, but never tame

 

the cold gazpacho one swallows nigh the tomb.

Trade the rake for a ladle, but keep those tales

swirling about in that bucket of mordant ice

and, before your readers can even blink,

serve it like a waiter, not a croupier,

when the flavor has hit its tasteful height.

 

Some folk feel that life is just a hoot,

a game of chance played with a friendly team

and not alone with “God” as one’s croupier

dressed in cummerbund and a set of tails

spinning the wheel. Before you can even blink,

the game is done and you are soused with ice

 

dumped on you by the “team.” You make your choice,

and if you manage to gain a little height

you place your bet, the wheel whirrs — if you blink

(or even if you don’t) the suave croupier

pushes over your pile of songs and tales

and you find out there is no game or team,

 

there’s only ice that chills you till you’re tame

and lowered by that croupier from about man’s height —

he doesn’t blink and he will tell no tales.

  

In the 19th century Algernon Charles Swinburne wrote another double sestina titled "The Complaint of Lisa." Swinburne rhymed his poem titled “Sestina” ababab, turning its stanzas into Sicilian sestets and increasing the difficulty of the form, but some of the earliest French and Italian sestinas also rhymed, so this was not really an experiment.

Here is a rhyming sestina without an envoi, also from “Letters to the Dead” in The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems. The italics in “The Dead Letter Office” indicate narrative rather than epistolary monologue as in “The Obsession” which is part of the same series and is not italicized.  It begins with an envelope sestet which rhymes abccba rather than ababab, but of course unlike Swinburne’s Sicilian sestets this rhyme scheme changes as the stanzas proceed, although the rhyme words stay the same:

 

THE DEAD LETTER OFFICE

 

Our Hero has been writing to the dead

Because they have been coming to his room

During his sleep and cumbering his dreams.

They never speak, however, and it seems

That if he hopes to send them back to Doom

He must write missives which must then be read.

 

But how can he be sure they will be read?

He addresses them c/o Office of the Dead,

Stamps them all and sends them to their doom.

But have they been delivered, or is there room

For a sure and certain doubt?  He sighs.  It seems

There's nothing for it but to resort to dreams.

 

He goes to bed and enters into dreams.

He stands before a building made of red

Incendiary brick lost in the seams

Of cobbled streets.  Office of the Dead

Is lettered on the door in runes of rheum

And flaking paint, as though the Day of Doom

 

Had cracked upon these boards.  "Is this the doom

Of writing, then?" Our Hero asks, "of dreams?"

For he has forced the door, stands in a room

Hollow as any novel he has read,

Empty as any poem, and as dead.

There are no letters here, or so it seems

 

At first — but then an envelope that seems

To have been spared for solitary doom

Catches his eye — it is not for the dead;

It is addressed to him.  Our Hero dreams

He opens it and reads.  What he has read

He understands...but only in that room.

 

When he awakens in his own bedroom,

He cannot think of what it was he seems

To have understood in the epistle that he read

There in the cobbled streets where he sought the doom

Of letters full of silence, the sound of dreams

Echoing in the Office of the Dead.

 

Edmund Gosse, a contemporary of Swinburne, also wrote a "Sestina," and, as sometimes was the fashion, he italicized the teleutons. Not long after the turn of the 20th century Ezra Pound returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote the monologue "Sestina: Altaforte"; this, together with his "Sestina for Isolt," set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas in America.

In his "Age and Indifferent Clouds" Harry Mathews deliberately used such words as "hippopotamus" and "bronchitis," thus drawing the reader's attention to the teleutons rather than away from them, and the beginnings of the lines doubled the difficulty by making puns and ringing variations on six herbs and plants, which might go unnoticed because the end-words take so much of the reader's attention. Here is a Court sestina from Gathering that does similar things:

  

THE DAY WE BOMBED THE MOON (AND BARACK OBAMA WON THE NOBEL PEACE PRIZE), A SESTINA

 

October ninth, 2009, we sent

A rocket off to Luna. We meant to bomb her

Into submission? No, our good intent:

To blow up surface dust to test for ice.

On the same day the Nobel Prize Committee

Amazed the world by bestowing its amity

 

Award upon a tyro. A calamity,

It seemed to some — an evil precedent

Imposed upon America by committee.

They gave the Peace Prize to Barack Obama!

Many Republicans needed to ask for ice-

Water and Schnapps, or even an oxygen tent.

 

No one had dreamed an explosion of this extent

Could blow moondust in the face of amity

Around the House and Senate. It wasn’t nice

That those Norse should cause old pols to resent

Explosive love. It was a suicide bomber

NASA sent to ruin comity —

 

If not around the world, the R. N. C.

At the very least. Gaddafi in his tent

Celebrated Luna’s death. “Embalm her!”

Was his battle cry, his enmity

For  global infidelity was sent

To Cocoa, Florida, well-packed in ice.

 

 But NASA said, “It isn’t very nice

To imply we had an impact on the Committee

Rather than the moon! Our bomb was sent

Out into space. We’re not incompetent!”

Meanwhile, a wave of pure tsunamity

Engulfed the Oval Office, and Obama,

 

Although surprised himself, felt like the balm or

Salve of sweet salvation in a trice

Had rehabilitated amity,

Restored a modicum of comity

To the world at large to some extent,

One could sense the very aloe’s scent.

 

Barack Obama, the Nobel Committee,

And malcontents hope NASA finds its ice,

But what price amity amid dissent?

 

Download The Day We Bombed the Moon read by Lewis Turco / Wesli Court

Donald Justice's "Sestina: Here in Katmandu" has no envoy and its line-lengths vary, generally between four stresses and one, and Alan Ansen's "A Fit of Something Against Something" is a “diminishing sestina" which starts out normally but then begins to lose words until in the envoy all that's left are the teleutons of each line. Here is a Court sestina, “Tsunami,” from Gathering that incorporates the rhetorical device called hypallage (defined above) to mimic the effect of the wave:

 

TSUNAMI

 

The world was washed away by a wall of water

That first became the horizon: a rising wall

That pulled the shallows outward and away

From the shores. The coastal sealife washed

Out to sea with the boats. For a moment there was

Stillness everywhere, and then the world

 

Listened to a roar that became the world,

The sound of a thousand thunders, not of water

Merely, but of the fluid earth. It was

Then that liquid turned to stone, a wall

Hard as rock screaming that before it washed

Ashore and tore the rose child away

 

From the whipped, lifted the torsos, mother him away

From the ocean he worked. The place became the world,

Crushed the beaches along the buildings, washed

Limbs and father into the trees. The gristmill water

Filled the wells with salt and gristmill. A wall

Of bricks became a blood grinding what was

 

Paste behind it into a lying. It was

Mud and plants and trees spun away

Into a nothing of single eddies now all

Things, backwashes and polluted and whirled

In items of undifferentiated water

Where everything maelstrom could be washed.

 

What could float, buried, what could be washed

Away was unsafe away, out to sea, was

Washed in a tree that held, held above water

Or drowned or floated in mud or floated away

Into who knew where? It was a world

That was caught ashore, but at sea the wall

 

Did not exist. It was safe above the wall,

On the surface of the wave that rose and washed

Away the earthen world, the solid world,

The world where creatures breathed an air that was

Lighter than liquid. It sent them far away

From breath, from sight, from the living world.

 

Instead, it gave them a whelming wall that was

Scoured into the minds of those not washed away

From the world of earth into the world of water.

  

In similar fashion, this sestina from The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court³ uses the rhetorical device of merismus which expands upon a subject by particularizing each element of it:

  

SESTINA IN INDIAN SUMMER

"Everything is good in its season."

 

After the frost summer returns and settles

Into the orchard.  The sluggish yellowjacket

Describes its ovals over the bright windfall,

And the leaves begin to color our landscapes

The russet of oak and the maples' ocher.

This is no time for us to think of winter

 

And its white song, no time to sing of winter,

Of fires on our hearths, before our settles,

Running along the backlog turning ocher

And crimson.  The chestnut falls from its jacket

Into roots; sunlight lies long on our landscapes.

We listen in the night to hear the wind fall

 

And wonder when it will rise again to fall,

To take the leaves and pile them into winter

Among the stooks that walk across our landscapes.

It is enough for now that the wind settles

Into breeze and the grass removes its jacket

Of frost while the landscapes of maple, oak, or

 

Chestnut put on their robes of russet, ocher,

Saffron, and settle in to wait for the fall.

Asters and cedars have the yellowjacket

Along the brook, and we will not now inter

Our languid hours where the dragonfly settles

Among the rushes.  The warmth of the land escapes

 

Slowly eastward toward the stony coasts, capes

And bays where the vacant beach wears a choker

Of brown kelp, a necklace of shells that settles

Into the sand.  We wait and ignore the fall

Of leaves, the failing summer, and the winter

Impending.  We hear the late yellowjacket

 

Circle, the horsechestnut fall from its jacket

Of thorns; we watch color transform our landscapes,

Knowing that the allcolor of our winter

Is nascent beneath this flowering of ocher.

This renaissance of summer is but windfall.

Soon we will hunker down upon our settles

 

In sweater and jacket.  Backlogs of oak or

Maple will burn; their smoke will stitch our landscapes

To the winter weather that falls and settles.

 

Leigh liked the class I conducted so well that she asked me to do it again in 2011. The creative writing department doesn’t have a full-time poet in its program anymore because the person who holds the position has been out ill for a very long time, so what I did that day nobody had done in years. What a pity.

^___________

¹The Gathering of the Elders and Other Poems by Wesli Court, www.StarCloudPress.com, September First, 2010, ISBN 978-1-932842, trade paperback, $14.95, 115 pages.

 

   

 

² The Book of Forms: A Handbook of Poetics by Lewis Turco, Third edition, www.UPNE.com, 2000. ISBN 1584650222, trade paperback, $24.95, 337 pages. “The Poet’s Bible," A companion volume to The Book of Dialogue and The Book of Literary Terms. ORDER FROM AMAZON.

 

   

 

³ The book is long out-of-print, but this poem and all the other metrical poems in the volume are included in The Collected Lyrics of Lewis Turco / Wesli Court, 1953-2004, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2004. ISBN 1932842004, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 1932842012, quality paperback, $26.95, 460 pages, © 2004, all rights reserved. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

 

⁴I did not originate this form, the triversen; William Carlos Williams did. I merely named it and used it frequently.

⁵ The book has been out-of-print for years, but it is reprinted in its entirety in Fearful Pleasures: The Complete Poems of Lewis Turco 1959-2007, www.StarCloudPress.com, 2007, ISBN 978-1-932842-19-5, jacketed cloth, $49.95; ISBN 978-1-932842-20-3, trade paperback, $32.95, 640 pages. ORDER FROM AMAZON.COM.

 

 

 

 

Great article, Lew!

 

I'm sending this link out to poet friends! And it was good to catch up with recent epitaphs I had not seen.

As for your Facebook page, though, I don't do Facebook, or any of those blogs at all. Just your blog, that's the only one I look at.

Love,

Rhina Espaillat

 

Lew,

SESTINA

“Considering the sestina” — Lewis Turco

 

“Considering the sestina”

Is something I find myself doing from time to time

Thinking that now might be the moment for me to produce one,

Yet my laziness always kicks in

And I think, Just because John Ashbery

Wrote one, therefore should I?

 

What good would it do for a poet such as I

To produce (it’s unlikely!) a decent sestina

Of the kind done by Pound or John Ashbery?

No doubt I have written some good poems in my time

(Some you lose, some you win!)

But I’m acutely aware that other people have done far better

        than I have done,

 

Especially in producing one

Of these complex puzzles I

Always feel so lost in.

Why does anyone write a sestina?

Was it a product of its time,

As interlinking as a poem by John Ashbery?

 

Never would anyone living in the Haight Ashbury

Ever have thought to write one.

But time is time.

I am no longer that long-haired, peace-loving, V-making I

Whose dreams resembled chaos, not a sestina,

And who found no pre-existing structures to put his faith in.

 

All those structures were God (replaced now by John Ashbery?)

Why are we always looking for the One?

Can’t we admit to the chaos of all Time

Using us as it will but then abandoning our I (and eye)

With none of the formal elegance of a sestina

(I wrote a paper arguing that “Time” in Paradise Lost is almost  

       the same as “Sin.”)

 

What monstrous thing should I put my little faith in?

Will I scramble for the nothingness of John Ashbery

(Who wrote, I believe, only one sestina)

Do I think I’m someone?

What is my miserable little I

That it believes that it will live through the fires of time?

 

Time

Is the fire we learn and burn in

(Wrote Delmore Schwartz, a greater poet than I

But perhaps no greater than John Ashbery).

Plotinus searched again and again for The One

But I prefer the random, elegant repetitions of the sestina.

 

They call to mind both time and John Ashbery,

The “god within,” and the many inhabiting the “one”:

And I see to my surprise that I have produced an imperfect

      sestina.

 

Jack Foley

 

Thanks, Lew.

My "sestina" should perhaps better be called a "septina" since I have seven stanzas instead of six.  The product of a septuagenarian recently released from being a sexagenarian!

Jack

 

Too little sex, Jack, and too much sepsis.

Lew

Lew,

    In light of your essay on the sestina, I thought you might be interested in the attached, a sestina (doubled) I wrote several years ago in response to an ad in Poets & Writers (used as an epigraph).  In addition to six given words as end words, it uses a second given list of words medially in the lines, all in the traditional pattern, and uses all twelve words in the envoi.

 

Challenge: Incorporate these words into a sestina: Poetry,Fiction, Exuberant, Divorced, Worldly, Woman. Or try these:Man, Writer, Northeast, Wise, Adventurous, Lively. Just kidding, of course, but I’d love to hear from divorced/widowed male, 55+ for possible long-term relationship. [Personal ad in Poets & Writers.]

Dear Exuberant Divorced Worldly Woman,

Perhaps poetry matters only to the man

at home in fiction, or to that rare writer

who, exuberant only north by northeast,

finds himself divorced from the world (nowise

wishing to be worldly) but adventurous

in his dreams of woman.  She will be lively

as only woman can be—with that liveli-

ness poetry was born for and which man,

if unworldly enough and adventurous,

can image.  Though fiction lie, a good writer

may lie, divorced from the world and wise-

ly so, exuberantly.  But why northeast?

Does exuberance belong but to the northeast?

Is woman languid if she’s but midwest lively,

or midwest man divorced from all things wise

and beautiful?  Is poetry from such a man

a lesser fiction?  Do you think such a writer,

though otherworldly, less adventurous?

And what is worldly?  what adventurous?

Exuberance can be hard if from the northeast

the wind brings a chill fiction to a writer

that his dream of woman—lovely and lively

enough to dance in poetry and bless a man—

is divorced from possibility, that it’s unwise

for him, supposedly divorced from the wise,

true, and worldly good, to feign adventurous-

ness or dare believe poetry.  Yet such a man

might rival in exubernace any northeast-

erner.  Dear woman, let me belie that lively

and hurtful fiction; find in me that writer

who can fiction such truth that no writer

could divorce it from the real, that the wise

would embrace it, and every woman of lively

wit find in it such worldly, adventurous

exuberance as would thaw the polar north. East

of Eden, poetry is still the best of man.

 

Might not a wise woman and such a man, a writer

of exuberant poetry, create a lively adventure — us —

divorced from the fiction of the worldly northeast?

 

Cheers,

Jan D. Hodge

 

Well, Lew,

The first one I tried, following your "lines may be of any length" formula, might be classed as experimental, since the line lengths do vary, and since I played a bit with the end words — you gave a term for them but I'll need to reread your article to get it into my vocabulary...I'll check some others from my sestina folder and see if I have a better offering:

 

SESTINA LENTE

 

Love should be in it, for counting life counts love;

add: one golden raintree, as twig leads to blossom,

as rivulet to river.

Knowing must be in it, that born is to be lost—

loss not of our making

but intertwined with reasons why a clock.

 

We have been true to rendezvous with clocks

since sages tell us time is scant for love

and less for making—

that what's in bud today tomorrow is past blossom

the fallen petal lost

yellow reflection floated down, down river.

 

In my green time the ways were all one river:

only long forever parents knew the clock ...

lost, lost ...

What fastens once-upon-a-Wednesday to today is love

and this day's blossom

is a good given, not of our making.

 

I've seen her mirrored and no: she is not what I was making—

I was making her juniper desert flint river

mossflower, indian paintbrush blossom

bluebell larkspur blackeyed-susan four o'clock...

Sagebrush.  Foxglove ...

but gathered once is all; and the pathways are lost.

 

Death drops abysses: each brink to the other is lost—

can you remember, last time, what that was you were making—?

Whom did you love?

Did her spirit lave you cool and forever a river?

Had you finished when the clock

stopped? when frost blacked and shriveled the blossom?

 

Say time is yet for a twig– one bud, one blossom–

an apple before the good season is lost ...?

Ah, the cold clock

decrees hand and soul have no further kinship with making ...

Soon, soon we will thrust on the river:

Then lost— clocktime and blossom and making and love.

 

Blossoms will no longer be in the world of our making—

lost, wide and wider, swept far and swift on the river:

clocks foraged yesterday, early, on white-blooming love.

 

Ruth L. Harrison 

Lew —

 

Great article, which I had not read — and I love the sledgehammer sestina.

The first sestina I ever wrote — at the Iowa Workshop, of course, I simply slipped one line in each stanza — ABCDEF, BCDEFA, CDEFAB, and so forth. My reason for this is that I didn't know any better. When they asked me why I'd deviated from the normal line inversion, I naturally said something about how this form just seemed to suit the subject matter better, and made a mental note — "read Lew Turco's Book of Forms." Actually, being new and green, I didn't know about it yet, but would discover it soon.

In that same sestina, I came up with an innovative form which Don Justice liked a lot — again, I came up with it because I had no idea it was an innovative form. That was the walking enjambment. In the first stanza, every line was endstopped except the first, which was enjambed (by one word) to the second line. In the second stanza, I repeated the pattern, except that the enjambment was now second-to-third line, and so on down the poem. Of course, by the time I got to the 6th stanza, that was no longer possible, so instead I put a hard caesura at the beginning of the first line. In commenting on the device, Don said, "What do you when you get to the 6th stanza? Tad very elegantly has done nothing — just let the enjambment slide off the bottom." My my, I thought to myself, that is elegant, isn't it? And I rewrote the 6th stanza to eliminate the caesura, which was a failure anyway.

Since then, I've used the “walking enjambment” or walking caesura device from time to time again — most effectively, I think, here:

 

THE MAP OF THE BEAR

from My Night With the Language Thieves

 

The only map is the map of the bear.

Your best hope is to follow it closely,

Closer than dogs. It's engraved with your spoor,

You wake in the night to find it partly

Charred by the dying fire. “The only

 

Map is the map of the bear. Follow

It closer than dogs. Your best hope is

To read the part engraved below

The surface of the fire. Sleepless,

You move by night.  The only map is

 

The map of the bear. Dogs know,

That's why they follow with no hope

The dying spoor.  You're passing through

Fire, you've passed through sleep,

Now the only map is the map

 

Of the bear. Now hope gives up

Its secrets, now you follow where

Dogs won't go, even in sleep.

Above, the route's engraved on fire.

The only map is the map of the bear.

  

 

Here's that long-ago sestina with the walking enjambment:

 

IF YOU'S WHITE

 

"They are developing some very strong feelings about this music  so much so that I have heard some white country blues singers say, `I want to be Negro.'"

 

John Cohen, Sing Out!

  

A young man with dark sweater and a white

Face, in the sidewalk shadows of New York,

Shading his eyes to dim his skin toward black,

A battered (by choice) guitar held in his hands

While in his mind he sees a soulful blues

Moaning along the highways of the South.

 

There is no earth  it's barren in New York. 

He tries to pluck a bass string with a black

Thumb, but the sterile whiteness of his hands

Is not for digging roots and picking blues

That grow along the highways of the South.

He pulls up milkweed, fluffy, dry and white.

 

The woman that he's living with is black,

He sees the race's character in her hands;

The suffering that goes to breathe the blues

Alive, in the fields and road gangs of the South

Whispers beyond the range of any white 

Although she's never been outside New York.

 

He'll tell you, "Man, just look at that spade's hands!

They look like they were born to play the blues!

(You know the way they breed 'em in the South.)

There's nothing wrong with him except that white

Soul, from the shallow spirit of New York

That robbed him of his birthright (which was black).

 

Sometimes a weary voice sings him a blues.

It may have drifted upward from the South,

He scarcely hears it: "Fella, be glad you're white!

You can buy better guitars up in New York

To sing about what happens to a black

Man, with cold iron shackles on his hands 

 

The kind of thing that happens in the South,

And hate the cops  that's safer if you're white,

Yes, fella, even up here in New York.

This is the time, you're thinking, to be black;

Well, if that's so, you have it on your hands."

"Was that an eight bar or a twelve bar blues?"

 

He sits in a White Castle in New York,

A cup of black coffee warming his cool hands

Too frigid for a blues bred in the South.

  

In this one, the enjambment walks from one line to the next, in succeeding stanzas. In "Map of the Bear," it walks from one metric foot to the next on the refrain line, or what would be the refrain line if it wasn't enjambed. It actually does a moonwalk, walking backwards until at the end the whole refrain line is on one line.

 

Tad Richards

 

Tad,

Your “walking enjambment” reminds me of my “progressive hendecasyllabics,” a device I used in a poem titled “A Row of Hedges Revisited” in an earlier posting on this blog called “Reinventing the Wheel: Modern Poems in Classical Meters” which, if you’re interested, you can find below.

Lew

 

 

THE 103^RD BIRTHDAY OF EMMA REGINA DEGRAFFENREID SMITH

 

Great-granddaughter Molly – Annie and Robert’s daughter

I was four years old when we came to the Inner Passage.

It’s heaven here. I don’t remember anything from before.

My favorite things are fishing and blueberry season.

I go alone! Mom says that Granny Em is my first love.

Then Granny Em says “And I’ll be your first broken heart.”

Hurray, Hurray, Hurray! You’re 103 years old today!

 

Great-grandson Tommy - Annie and Robert’s son

Big deal. So she’s 103 years old today.

She’s just wrinkled and old. It’s not like a rite of passage.

When we left Los Angeles it broke my heart.

I’d never even been out of the city before.

I have a girl friend there and we are mad in love.

Plus there’s no TV here. I miss baseball season.

 

Great-grandson Cadmus – Reggie’s son

There is no TV here and I miss LA and its one season.

I can’t believe Granny Em is 103 years old today.

I thought I would hate it here, but there’s things I love.

Last week we saw a bunch of whales out in the Passage!

And I heard there was a tidal wave here once before,

but if we moved back to LA it wouldn’t break my heart.

 

Great-granddaughter Phaedra – Reggie’s Daughter

If we move back to LA again it won’t break my heart.

The absolute worst thing here is the winter season.

I do like this house better than the apartment we were in before.

And it’s really nice that we could come over to town today.

Last time we came Tommy ran away, he’d booked his passage.

Oh, I told my Aunt and Granny Em about my new pen-pal love.

 

Granddaughter Reggie

I told Annie and Granny Em about Lewis, my new love.

I never thought that I’d be willing to risk my heart.

Although these days divorce is like a rite of passage.

I think we’ll be married by the end of fishing season.

It would make him happy if we could marry today.

I told him I won’t be rushed like I was before.

 

Grandson-in-law Robert – married to Annie

I told Tommy we are going to do things like before.

You can’t go rushing off, leave those you love.

We are going to have a good time here today.

There’s a birthday cake with a big blue heart.

Pretty soon we’ll start the long winter season

and he’ll have to stay. He can’t cross the Passage.

 

Granddaughter Annie

We thought we’d lose Granny Em in the passage over or before.

She is in her winter season, but she has all this love.

It’s her strong, strong heart that keeps her with us today.

 

Great-grandson Pericles Emmanuel – Reggie’s son

My dad was my mom’s second husband.

He’s the one she says is drinking himself to death.

He got mean and violent and we had to get out.

I’ve talked to him, but I haven’t seen him since.

I want to go visit. Mom says “we’ll see.”

I know if I go back he won’t be the same.

 

Great-grandson Paris – Reggie’s son

Nothing on the island ever changes. It’s always the same.

I’m glad my mom has found another man to be her husband.

For me there’s nowhere to meet people and nothing to see.

I hate it out there and I’m always bored to death.

You’d think we would take the boat over here more since

there’s no grocery stores and we’re always running out.

 

Great-granddaughter Ariadne – Reggie’s daughter

There’s no grocery stores, but I love running out

in the woods for mushrooms. They don’t all look the same!

We moved away from LA and it’s been great ever since.

I don’t miss Creepy Joe – that’s what I call mom’s last husband.

She says he is trying to drink himself to death.

Whether he does or not we’ll have to wait and see.

 

Great grandson Carleton – Annie and Roberts’ son

Whether we can stay here we don’t know, we’ll have to see.

Mom could lose her job, then we’d have to get out.

I think for Molly to move, it would take death.

It’s heaven here for me, too. I’m just the same.

I like the guy that’s going to be Reggie’s husband.

Maybe he’ll come live with us, I mean if and since…

 

Grandson-in-law-to-be Lewis

I’d be willing to live out there with them, I mean since…

I could probably get to my job from there, we’d have to see.

I’m looking forward to it. I’ve never been a husband.

I guess if it doesn’t work then I’ll just get out.

Of course, I mean, she can do the same,

even though we each will promise unto death…

 

Grandaughter Annie

These kids are going to bug me to death!

I was the one who fought for this job, since

fifty other rangers wanted the same.

For a long time it was wait and see, wait and see,

but then I prevailed and I beat them out!

Got this lighthouse for my kids and husband.

 

Emma Regina DeGraffenreid Smith

I don’t know why I didn’t die when I lost my husband.

I almost did. I’m sure I could have pined to death.

Something on the boat ride out here shook me up and out,

got me moving. I haven’t stopped since!

There’s too much to do and too much to see.

Nothing on the island ever stays the same.

 

When I lost my husband, I thought it meant death,

but then, we came out here and ever since,

what I look at I see and my days are never the same.

 

Alice L. Teeter

from When It Happens to You, Star Cloud Press, 2009