The sestina form is something genius

Well, it isn't often I do form poetry, but one poetic form I do enjoy is the sestina. The joy of the sestina lies not only in the satisfaction of successfully fulfilling the form's requirements, but also in the surprisingly strong sense of obsession the poetic form weaves within. This sense of obsession, a sense that one is chasing circles in memory, is unavoidable in the sestina because the principle requirement of the sestina is that the poet must end on the same end-words for each six-lined stanza. The six special end-words of each stanza must be reused in every following stanza in a specific order. With each stanza composed of six lines (a sestet if you will) and the poem itself composed of six stanzas, followed by a three-lined envoy that uses each of the six special ending words in a specific order, the sestina forces the poet to dwell on subjects, attacking and reattacking the a subject anew with the same words (taken from different angles if you're really good with your words!)

Wikipedia explains the specific ordering of end words in the sestina form pretty decently:
 "If we number the first stanza's lines 123456, then the words ending the second stanza's lines appear in the order 615243, then 364125, then 532614, then 451362, and finally 246531...These six words then appear in the tercet as well, with the tercet's first line usually containing 6 and 2, its second 1 and 4, and its third 5 and 3..."

If this isn't making very much sense, I apologize; it is late and I am making this post on 5 hours of sleep (wah wah! I'm a whiner at times I know). Anyhow, here is a Wikipedia article to clarify things if my explanation still doesn't make sense.

For an example. here is a popular one by the dear Elizabeth Bishop. We all probably read this in high school:

Sestina

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac

on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Elizabeth Bishop

* * * * * * *
Aw, wipe those tears from your face dear reader... anyhow, this post is ultimately about the first sestina I ever wrote. I spent 7 hours on it--on and off--in about 2 to 3 hour increments. Crazy, right? But I never even felt the time passing. It's moments like that that convince me that I want to be nothing more than a poet...Alright, anymore of this and this post will come to uncannily resemble a can of Cheese-Whiz (it's a lot of cheese compressed into a small space, get it?) This sestina is about some childhood memories because they are the things of all our obsessions, no? It was published in Inkstone Magazine, the Asian-American magazine at UVA, and I had to give an awkward reading of it to like 25 people... by that time I had come to sort of dislike this poem, but I guess people liked it. The reading was super awkward because I was just standing on a hill in the beating sun reading about intimate things from my childhood...to a crowd of people that I really didn't care for eating fake Chinese food.

Deconstruction

Imagine how the Chinese boy could know

to ignore the double-u in “answer”.

It was impossible in first grade, not

saying he thought that “ants were” wasn’t wrong

so he asked a girl, “How to say this word?”

and she taught the sound of double-u through silence.

Years ago, the boy had constructed a riverside palace in silence

when on the first day of school they asked “Do you know

what you want for lunch?” He knew the color of bok choy but not the word

so seeing lettuce, he pointed and that was his answer—

for a week—it was salad and it tasted wrong.

Even if he knew the concept of dressing his greens, he did not

because he was used to vegetables being naked and Asian, not

unlike in the kindergarten bathroom where there was no silence

and anatomy was louder than three boys giggling in one stall. It was wrong,

but why they giggled while he peed the boy would never know

and nonetheless he was almost proud because his silence was answered

with giggles, the only understandable words.

There was a time when the boy could toss words

like rough pebbles in a yellow river, but not

across the river, where yellow pebbles weren’t answers.

So he swallowed jagged rocks in silence

and played alone, because the kids he didn’t know

enjoyed throwing boulders, while he could only chew gravel that tasted wrong.

Years later, the boy learned the shades of left, right and wrong

long before they washed up as yellow pebbles. These were English words.

The girls in the class began to lose their markers, not knowing

the boy was shepherding them after they rolled off desks and were not

found so he took them in and painted his palace in silence

and one day they looked accusingly, waiting for an answer.

Years later the boy would wittily jest and answer

that the markers were MADE IN CHINA, so it was not wrong

for him to rescue them and redefine the silence

of colors, where red should have meant fortune, not the word

bravery, and yellow would later be the shade of his tunic at the funeral, not

just an obscurity like the grandmother he hardly knew.

Imagine the silence of childhood deconstructing like words

and the boy knowing that it all sounded wrong,

but not hearing it until years later, like the letter double-u in answers.

10/18/09

1:15 AM--June 16th, 2010