On Monday the 20th 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 20th 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.
