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”.
by Tom Adam
How’d everybody do getting Gothic this week? Are we going to get some vampires, spirits of the night and drafty castles? I hope so!
Now’s the time to leave us a link to your work about the Gothic or whatever you came up with. Remember to leave more than one comment if you have more than one link.
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by Tom Adam
Ah, the word gothic. It has so many meanings. More than I had realized as a matter of fact, but the one at issue is: “Noting or pertaining to a style of literature characterized by a gloomy setting, grotesque, mysterious, or violent events, and an atmosphere of degeneration and decay.”
Not really suitable for spring (which is about renewal), or summer (which is all about beach volleyball) or winter (er … snowboarding? OK, winter is the pause, the looking back at the past and the looking forward to the future). Autumn, however, is the season for Gothic. We have the ready-made holiday of Halloween as well as the decline of vibrant life in the world around us.
In honor of this season, and my favorite holiday, Halloween, this week we explore the world of Gothic poetry. (Oh, and to anyone reading us from down under, just play along). Gothicism as an artistic movement is largely part of the Romantic era. The Romantics turned away from the science and realism of the Enlightenment and focused on more subjective areas of experience. Gothic art was toward the fantastic end of what they explored, but spooky. On the non-spooky but still fantastic end was Surrealism.
The realm of Gothic writing is probably most familiar to us in novels such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the later writings of Edgar Allen Poe and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but it had considerable influence in poetry as well. Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” both fit within this genre. The gloomy and the grotesque, with an atmosphere of degeneration. But how did they do that?
Part of it is the environment. Often these tales are at night. Castles figure prominently. If the surroundings are important, they are mentioned early. Coleridge’s “Christabel” begins, ” ‘Tis the middle of the night by Castle-clock.” That lets us know right away it’s midnight and there’s a castle. When the details are not important, they are skipped, but when they become important they get mentioned. Gottfried Burger’s “Lenora” goes 90 lines during the day in some unspecified place, then we get night and most of the story happens. (And by line 235 end up in a graveyard with a skeleton.)
In Gothic literature, fantastic elements (the scary ones) are treated as if they were as real as anything else. “Fair Elenor” by William Blake immediately jumps into the Gothic mode: “The bell struck one and shook the silent tower; / The graves gave up their dead … ” Lord Byron’s “Darkness” has a similar immediacy: “I had a dream, which was not all a dream … ” Sometimes the strangeness takes longer to get to, but even then the author isn’t asking you to believe, he is just telling you what is. Or she: Mary Robinson’s “The Haunted Beach” begins at a spooky beach and soon (lines 25-27): “The fisherman beheld a band / Of spectres gliding hand in hand –- / Where the green billows played.”
Part of this genre’s effect is the spooky stuff in the poem: ghosts, witches, jilted lovers returned from the dead, skeletons, Death, the Devil, fairies and blood (lots of blood), not to mention murders.
And a large part of what makes the Gothic is what masters of terror have known for a long time: isolation. Many of these stories, novels, poems and stories in verse feature a mortal character being swept up the experience of horror. It keeps the reader in one person’s head for the duration. Sometimes the stories are in first person to give even greater immediacy.
Your prompt this week is to write your own Gothic poem. They tended to be on the lengthy side, but I think we can overlook if you lose a line or 200. If you need a little inspiration, here are a few to take a bit of a look at:
For the collaboratively minded, I suggest something the Romantic were fond of: with someone else, pick a spooky story and each write your own version of it.
by Tom Adam
Not too long ago I spent some time talking about rhythm and meter in poetry, but I haven’t yet said much about rhyme, which is the other big thing in formal poetry. And not only is rhyme interesting, it is generally an easier topic to address.
Why rhyme?
In terms of poetry, what does rhyme bring to the table aside from another reference book (the rhyming dictionary)? Harkening back to the days when poetry was still a memorized and spoken art form, it served a couple of purposes. It made for much easier memorization: The repetition of sounds provided a built-in cue for what came next. Also, the highly rhythmic style of accentual poetry emphasized important parts of the lines (especially kennings).
Contemporary rhyme
Now that we tend to “see” poetry more often than hear it, the use of rhyme as memorization tool is a lot less useful (at least in terms of literary poetry, though performance poetry and song lyrics still often include it). For centuries, though, rhyme was an important – no, necessary - element of poetry in most European forms.
In some cases, such as the original villanelle, it was used by troubadours as a sign of their linguistic creativity. More fixed forms such as sonnets use it in conjunction with stanza length to form relationships between ideas.
(A short digression: Anymore, most prosodic devices are used “just because.” While there isn’t anything wrong with that line of reasoning, it being one I myself frequently use, it does make the sweeping pronouncements I favor somewhat less accurate. So, in order to save myself a huge amount of qualifications throughout the rest of this article, let me just say that rhyme used as a prosodic device usually follows what I say, but rhyme is used much, much more loosely as well.)
Rhyme creates connections. The repetition of the sound is a referent to the other items using the same sounds in a way that says, “Hey! You! Remember that other line, two up? Yeah: we’re related in some way.” It’s a delicate act to use the device effectively, yet not distract the reader by too constant rhyming.
End-rhyme and internal rhyme
Rhyme tends to occur in two places in a poem (and I’m not sure if there are any others): at the ends of lines or within lines. End-rhyme is literally that, rhyming at the end of a line. Formal poetry uses this as an element. Internal rhyme, rhyming within a line or stanza, tends to be a less formal effect, used more like alliteration. It still connects elements of the poem, in what can be a subtler way than end-rhyme.
This verse from Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” shows both types of rhyme. Lines two and four are linked by end-rhyme while line three has an internal rhyme between bright and right.
The Sun came up upon the left,
Out of the sea came he!
And he shone bright, and on the right
Went down into the sea.
Types of rhymes
Rhyme has a pretty diverse set of specific types related to which parts of the word or words have similar sounds. Most types are interesting from a view of linguistics, but within most poetry the important types of rhyme are masculine, feminine and slant.
Masculine and feminine rhymes are based on the last stressed syllable of the word sharing the same sound. In a masculine rhyme the stressed syllable is the final syllable of the word. Feminine rhyme has the stress on the second to last syllable though the final, unstressed syllable must also have the same sound.
From Coleridge’s example above, all of his rhymes are masculine: he/sea, bright/right. Feminine rhymes are common in English with verbs: trying/vying, writing/kiting, plunder/sunder; but can be found within nouns as well: cavern/tavern.
Slant rhyme occurs when the sounds being rhymed are not exact matches in sound, but are close: time/fine, meager/seeker, under/candor.
Rhyming on the phrase
In song lyrics, especially in hip hop, but also within performance poetry, there is the idea of rhyming a phrase, often with slant or imperfect rhymes, often using internal rhyme, to rhyme entire phrases. It can be very tricky to pull off well, but the Barenaked Ladies used the technique in their song “One Week:”
Gonna make a break and take a fake
I’d like a stinkin achin shake
“Make a break” and “take a fake” could be a series of four internal rhymes, but the identical structure, later followed by “achin shake” shows that the extended rhyme of the phrase is what they sought.
Fun with rhyme
I don’t think it’s any accident that most people’s first experiences with language tends to come from nursery rhymes. Rhymes have been used in some of the “great literature of the ages,” but they can just be fun. As with anything from Mother Goose, to Jabberwocky, to rhyming slang, it’s OK to play with words just because it sounds cool. So next time you want to rhyme, remember to have fun with it!
Check out Wikipedia’s rhyme article for more information on types of rhymes as well as views on how different languages have treated it.
by Tom Adam
Most formal poetry has rules about how words are arranged on the page. Sometimes they’re based on sound patterns, sometimes on stress patterns, sometimes on counting letters or syllables. These rules are often based on a way of arranging the content of poem, allowing the form to emphasize an idea or a style. While they can be worked against — often in creative and pleasurable ways — it is usually a good idea to follow them.
an easel
in the herb garden –
scent of sage.
As a form, the Japanese renga has rules for both structure and content, including a series of rules about how topics and themes could be addressed. Wikipedia has an excellent page with many of the traditional rules for renga, so I won’t go over the whole of them. Originally, the renga was a collaborative form with different poets adding verses in a linked form. Each added verse related to the one immediately preceding it, but, other than the rules regarding themes, did not have to continue with any other verses. Ultimately, each two-verse section could be considered its own poem within the larger context of the renga. These linked stanzas represented a conversation among the poets and ranged across a variety of topics.
welcome party –
three rabbits lined up
by the station
Structurally, the renga became somewhat standardized on stanzas alternating between a 17-sound stanza and a 14-sound stanza (the “linking” stanza). The 17-sound stanza was grouped into a 5-7-5 structure, the 14-sound stanza into a 7-7 structure. Commonly, English renga are written based on syllable count. Rhyme is not a traditionally incorporated element.
golf course –
lost pet rabbits
run wild.
The first stanza has an especially important place in renga. Known as the hokku, it has to include a season word and a kireji, or cutting word. The season-word generally comes from a traditional list (I find this one pretty good) that refers to the time of year the renga was written. The kireji (from wikipedia):
Kireji have no direct equivalent in English. Mid-verse kireji have been described as sounded rather than written punctuation. In English-language haiku and hokku, as well as in translations of such verses into this language, kireji may be represented by punctuation (typically by a dash or an ellipsis), an exclamatory particle (such as ‘how … ‘), or simply left unmarked.
The kireji in Japanese is a word or conjugation that marks a shift, of sorts, in the poem. In Basho’s well-known haiku masterpiece, the first phrase “old pond” (furuike ya), is set off from the second two lines and marked by the kireji “ya” which is not translated but the shift is felt in the poem, which might be marked by a colon if written in punctuated English.
tall damp grass –
rabbits leap from rock to rock
on the hillside
Renku is a derivative style of the renga. It relaxes many of the rules that are considered necessary in a traditional renga (what words may be included, what references and allusions are permissible and some of the thematic elements it contains). You can call the renku (also called haikai no renga) a pop-culture version of the renga. It maintains the overall form and variable length of the renga, but it allows much greater creative freedom. In fact, most contemporary renga is actually renku. William Higginson has a great, though not recently updated, page about the renku at Renku Home.
dandelions
brighten roadside verges –
missing my rabbit
Although it is more relaxed, the hokku stanza and the concept of the kireji are stylistic elements still commonly maintained. Renku also keeps the concept of the poem as a conversation, even as it has moved from the reaches of high society to everyday life, and only later developed into solo-author sequences, and ultimately, into the modern haiku.
hot pavements –
littered with
tired bees.
Below are some additional links to get you started in your exploration of traditional Japanese forms.
Aha poetry, by Jane Reichhold. On this site you can read a collaborative renga with author notes to see what was going through their minds as the poets responded to each other.
Renga is a site written by various authors from the UK. They have an events page highlighting various renga days throughout the year. Below are two renga from written collaboratively by several participants.
Poets.org offers a short overview of the renga and how teachers are now using the form to teach students how to write poetry and to work collaboratively.
Many of the poets in the Read Write Poem community are experienced in writing haiku, renga, and other Japanese forms. Others might try this type of verse for the first time after reading about it.
In the spirit of the Japanese tradition of collaborative renga, we’d like to start a renku chain here, in the comments section. After you read the first three-line hokku (for our purposes, think of it as a haiku) beginning the series, add your own two-line renku as a response, then the next person will follow with another two-line renku and so on, until the 17th writer ends with a three-line hokku (we get to set our own patterns). We’ll continue the poem until we reach 36 lines, the traditional Japanese length of a Kasen renga.
Read Write Poem contributer Juliet Wilson is the author of the haiku you see interspersed throughout this article. You can read more of her haiku and nature-inspired poems on her blog, Crafty Green Poet.
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read write poem news- read write poem napowrimo anthology
June 20, 2010 | 1:36 pmThe Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology is still in production. Selection, placement, layout and copyediting are taking longer than anticipated. Thank you for your patience. I hope to have the piece completed in July. For those who have emailed asking if they can be included, the May 7 deadline for submission of work stands. Those who met that deadline will be included. Please check the post on this site listing who I received submissions from by that date. If you submitted your work by the May 7 deadline in accordance with our guidelines and your name is not listed, send an email to info (at) readwritepoem (dot) org.
- read write poem napowrimo anthology
May 5, 2010 | 3:09 pmRemember that Friday* is the deadline for submitting work to the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Anthology. Check out the guidelines for submission in the main column (to the left). On May 8, we’ll post a news item listing everyone we’ve received work from. If you submitted work and your name is not on that list, please let us know. Thanks!
*I initially said “tomorrow,” but I meant to say “Friday.”
- napowrimo congratulations, and a reminder
April 24, 2010 | 12:05 pmIt’s the final week of the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge! Just 7 days left. With that, a reminder that Read Write Poem will culminate with the anthology featuring work from those who complete the challenge. A post with details for submitting to the anthology will be published May 1. Be sure you remove any information from the site that you want preserved — such as group content and personal messages. Those elements of the site will be removed May 1 as well. The main site will remain up as an archive.
- ‘underlife’ tour at january gill o’neil’s blog
April 20, 2010 | 8:11 pmJanuary Gill O’Neil’s virtual book tour has moved to her site and is underway now. Check out the lineup at Poet Mom.
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thank you and farewell As of May 1, 2010, Read Write Poem is no longer active.
In late May, an anthology featuring work from those who completed the Read Write Poem NaPoWriMo Challenge will be published here and on issuu.com.
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