Poetry Jam 2020: the sestina
Feb. 15th, 2020 10:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lunabee34The sestina is composed of 6 stanzas of 6 lines with an envoi of 3 lines. It is generally, but not always, written in iambic pentameter, and it's unrhymed.
The six end words of the first stanza are repeated as the end words of the next stanzas in the following pattern:
Stanza 1: ABCDEF
Stanza 2: FAEBDC
Stanza 3: CFDABE
Stanza 4: ECBFAD
Stanza 5: DEACFB
Stanza 6: BDFECA
The envoi puts one end word in the middle of each line and one at the end.
Envoi line 1: BE
Envoi line 2: DC
Envoi line 3: FA
Some quotes from The Making of a Poem:
"How easily it accommodates itself to conversations or plain style discourse" (24) because of the repetition.
"It often provides the groundwork for a circular narrative, often of questionable meaning and amounting to little more than variations on a theme--a theme dependent upon and perhaps developed around the six words chosen for repetition."
Possibilities for subversion: chop the envoi,vary the line length
Sestinas I like from this section:
"The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina" by Miller Williams (my favorite sestina I've ever read)
"The Book of Yolek" by Anthony Hect (Holocaust)
I'm working on a sestina right now, and I like it way better than the villanelle. I'm not worrying about the meter. IDGAF enough to try to write in iambic pentameter LOL, but since there's no rhyme, I don't have to worry about it scanning weird.
Any thoughts on sestinas you'd like to share?
The six end words of the first stanza are repeated as the end words of the next stanzas in the following pattern:
Stanza 1: ABCDEF
Stanza 2: FAEBDC
Stanza 3: CFDABE
Stanza 4: ECBFAD
Stanza 5: DEACFB
Stanza 6: BDFECA
The envoi puts one end word in the middle of each line and one at the end.
Envoi line 1: BE
Envoi line 2: DC
Envoi line 3: FA
Some quotes from The Making of a Poem:
"How easily it accommodates itself to conversations or plain style discourse" (24) because of the repetition.
"It often provides the groundwork for a circular narrative, often of questionable meaning and amounting to little more than variations on a theme--a theme dependent upon and perhaps developed around the six words chosen for repetition."
Possibilities for subversion: chop the envoi,vary the line length
Sestinas I like from this section:
"The Shrinking Lonesome Sestina" by Miller Williams (my favorite sestina I've ever read)
"The Book of Yolek" by Anthony Hect (Holocaust)
I'm working on a sestina right now, and I like it way better than the villanelle. I'm not worrying about the meter. IDGAF enough to try to write in iambic pentameter LOL, but since there's no rhyme, I don't have to worry about it scanning weird.
Any thoughts on sestinas you'd like to share?
