by Tom Adam

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I really like to be surprised by what I write. Find, at the end of the page, that I really have no idea what I wrote, have no idea if it’s any good and hope that there’s some sort of crazy image or metaphor that I would never have thought of if I were writing with intentionality. This week, I want you all to surprise yourselves a bit as well.

But to complicate things a bit, I want you to work in one of the more challenging of poetic forms — the sestina. If you keep reading, I’ll share my thoughts on the sestina and some of the parts to watch out for when writing them, but if you’re a sestina expert (and go you! if that’s the case), here’s the prompt:

Grab your favorite random word generator, such as this one at Watch Out 4 Snakes, and generate six nouns. Easy nouns, hard nouns, whatever type of nouns you are comfortable(ish) with, but six nouns. Use those six words as the repeated words of a sestina.

Then, next Thursday when you see the Get Your Poem On post, share it with us. And, because we like poetry even when (sometimes especially when) it doesn’t follow the rules, if you got inspired by something else, share that, too!

The sestina
One of the things I’ll always remember from one of my poetry workshops was the instructor saying the villanelle was the most difficult form in the English language. I agree, it’s tough, but a sestina is not that much easier, although in terms of the rules of the form, it’s not that bad. There’s no rhythm you have to worry about in a sestina and no rhyme scheme.

You do have seven stanzas to write: six sestets and one tercet (six six-line stanzas and one three-line stanza in plain English). What makes a sestina a sestina instead of some random 39-line bit of free verse is the how the ending words of each line are used. Setting aside the tercet, because it’s a little different, you take six words, most properly nouns but that’s a loose rule, and those words are the end-words for each line.

Each stanza then uses the same six words as the last words of each line, but they follow a set pattern to determine the order of the words. It is actually harder to explain it than just to show it, so here is half of my “Sestina for No One” to illustrate:

Though Neruda wrote to a different girl,
The line is true: I like you when you are silent.
Without words I can pretend we are more exotic,
From somewhere they still believe in magic.
As if you were an ornate lamp, an impulse
Purchase, a good deal, just the right color

For the room. Yours was not the color
of ephemera or dream, but that of a girl
I saw one day and on impulse
Set aside my tendency to stay silent.
It seems at times there is a magic
taking these plain lines to some exotic

Locale and flavoring them, these non-exotic
Words. Adding to this black ink the color,
A pastel maybe, or a jewel tone, of magic.
But I build us out of plain words: Girl
Boy, Kiss, and if we both stood silent
There would be no giving in, no impulse

The words I used (generated randomly) are: girl, silent, exotic, magic, impulse and color. If we number them 1 2 3 4 5 6 for the order they appear in stanza 1, they show up in stanza 2 in the order 6 1 5 2 4 3 and then 3 6 4 1 2 5. The fourth, fifth, and sixth would go 5 3 2 6 1 4, 4 5 1 3 6 2, and 2 4 6 5 3 1. Once you write all six stanzas, the tercet, called the envoi, uses all six words, two to a line:

I follow the impulse, and I like you when you are silent.
Yet every whisper is exotic, every play of color
Is magic. I do not like, but love, when you speak, girl.

Honestly, so many people have put the envoi in different orders, it’s hard to say there is one correct way to end it, but 1 4, 2 5, 3 6 is a common scheme.

Really, aside from actually writing the verses, getting the order right is one of the trickier parts of writing a sestina. What I usually do is take the six words and figure out what order I’m going to use them in, then write out the order. If I’m writing on paper, I space them out just like the stanzas in the left margin, and on the computer I write them at the beginning of each line and then put a couple of tabs in where I write that line of the poem.

When writing, the place to really work on is the breaks between the stanzas. The end-words get a lot of weight in a sestina because they are heard so much, but at the stanza breaks the words get repeated very closely and the noticeable repetition can be tricky to work with. If you take a word and use it with the exact same meaning and in similar sentence structures, it gets dull. There needs to be enough difference in how the word is used that it has resonance to the previous line without being boring. It helps to find words that have a lot of meanings so they can be used very differently from stanza to stanza.

For people who like a real challenge, as with most forms that have been around for almost a thousand years, the sestina was written in English for a long time in iambic pentameter. That is 195 iambs, 125 more than a sonnet. Some variations of the sestina exist. You can take almost any stanza length and use that last-first-kind-of-interweaving pattern to generate stanzas of any length.

Some people have written double sestinas: twelve twelve-line stanzas with a six-line envoi (but mathematically, I think that’s more like a quatro-sestina). It is definitely a form open to interpretation and personalization.

Additional Info
Of course, the Wikipedia page.

Seven Sestinas at Poetry Foundation.

If you have a copy of it, Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina” is an excellent example.

And, for anyone interested, the rest of “Sestina for No One”.