Posted tagged ‘sestina’

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Another Sestina? Yes! “Seeking”

September 27, 2011

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I have been thinking a lot about poetry lately. This is partly because I’m supposed to be working on a novel! But also because I’ve been in contact with a couple of very supportive websites for online poets. This poem is written for the “open link” night of dVerse Poets Pub, which also inspired the form.

The sestina, for those who don’t know it, is a form consisting of six six-line stanzas whose lines end with the same six words, repeated in a somewhat confusing cycle. The last three-line stanza, called the envoie, also uses all six words.

Seeking

It was heat so hot it cut the air
into panels of swaying bend and warp,
her gaze into off-set swathes of view;
heat so hot that it blotted out the sun,
passing off white noise as summer sky;
heat as hot as any she’d not felt,

for the weather did not burn but lined with felt
her day, her lungs, her movements through the air,
enclothing its tight fist around the sky.
So very hard to breathe a weave and warp
that were weighted not with light but sun,
which, even as it seemed to hide from view–

only a smear in the red-orange view
of dusk, the pink of dawn–made itself felt
as a chemical ball of flame, a sun
of some far planet that in time/space warp
had circumvented the Earth’s true sky.

Oh where, oh where, she wondered, was the sky?
Its hue, its blue, the newness of each view,
the healing that could ease the twist and warp
that tugged at all she thought, at all she felt.
Oh where, oh where, she wondered in dull air,
was he who once was called her only son?

In truth, of course, he still was called her son.
The names of things not found under the sky
remain their names, like lyrics to an air
whose tune is lost, like paintings of a view
long since blocked out (by trees, let’s say, who felt
their limbs took precedence). In the warp

of her wandering mind, even the warp
of branches that curved and craned for sun
was conduct consciously planned and felt–
for all was sentient, live, under the sky,
while also dead. This special point of view
appears to the human for whom to err

has been divine, who’s felt the loss of sky
that held a son, a point of view
so sharp, it limned the warp of missing air.

P.S. For those interested in process–I did not have a clue of what I was going to write when I started only that I wanted to try another sestina. So I focused on a few good repeating words, and started out with a line (more or less) from the novel I am supposed to be working on (which does not have a story anything like this.) Oddly, I did not think about “err” as a homonym till the second or third draft.

(As always, all rights reserved.)

Categories: iPad art, poetry
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Another Sestina (Sigh….) “Vacuum”

September 23, 2011

(Supposed to be cigarette smoke)

This is a poem,  a sestina, that I’ve posted before, but I’m linking it tonight to the liv2write2day blog of Victoria Ceretto-Slotto, in which she asks for poems writtenabout the dark, or shadowed, self.  I’ve written a lot of dark poems lately, so could not quite bear a new one, but this poem deals with these issues, at least for its characters.

The sestina is a fairly complex form which uses six six-line stanzas, each line ending one of six repeating words, closing with a three-line “envoie” that uses all six repeating words.  (More about the form in yesterday’s post.)   It’s a challenging form; the  goal is to make the repeated words hypnotic, ironic, thought-provoking, meaningful rather than formulaic or forced.

Hah!

I’ve posted another sestina called “Pink” which is really a better poem then the one below.  This one was my first attempt and, although it uses the form, it does so by using fairly generic repeating words.  So, it’s a bit of a cheat.  (See, I’m already going to dark places!)

The poem tells a story, but keep in mind that it’s a creative work, which, in my case, at least, means it has large elements of fiction, dramatization, exaggeration.

Vacuum

When my aunt came to visit, they talked
of old times, my aunt hunching over
her cigarette, her heavy breasts held up
by an arm across her middle, my mother
smoking as well, her cheeks like a vacuum
cleaner, puffing out.  She only smoked when

her sister came, then turned into a teen when
the folks are out.  Gestures sullen, she talked
the rebel, as if to fill the vacuum
of her youth, when she never thought she’d get over
all the obstacles they’d set, her own mother
not understanding, no wonder she got fed up.

She loved them, yes, but everything was up
from there–farm life.  Especially then, when
owning land was something, not, like her mother
thought, everything.  You were still talked
about, looked down on, passed over,
a farm not bringing cash to fill the vacuum

of nice clothes, furniture, rugs to vacuum.
Though what they remembered–that night they stayed up–
was when the government took their land, building over
their farm a munitions plant for the war, and when
their father went north to rawer land, and they talked
of joining him when their own grandmother

was “stronger.”  (So they said.)  Loved by my mother,
the grandma favored her in turn, filling a vacuum
in the heart of the middle child, the child who talked
of appearances, sticking her nose up
the others thought, the grandma protecting her when
they mocked, but sick now, her life nearly over.

They worked shifts at the plant, then each took over
the grandma’s care–aunt, their mom, my mother.
‘But who was with her,” my aunt asked, eyes round, “when
she died?”  My mother thought: “I had out the vacuum,
I remember that.  Pulled it out after ringing up
the doctor,” my mother smoking hard now as she talked.

“So it was you,” my aunt said, “when—” “I tried to vacuum
fast.”  But slowly my mother spoke, smoke rising up
like traces of what could not be done over, slowly she talked.

 

 

 

P.S. I am also linking this piece to Imperfect Prose for Thursdays.  in the hush of the moon

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Sestina – “Pink” – and Little “How-To”

September 22, 2011

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This is an old poem that I am reposting as part of dVerse Poets Pub formal poetry exercises and also for Jingle’s prompt re color. It is a sestina, one of my favorite forms (though I don’t do them enough.)

I’ve included a little information about my take on the form below.

Pink

Trees full of blossom, the night smells pink
though it’s black, a thick summer darkness
barely held back by window screen.
I hear dishes in the sink, a familiar clatter,
and think of the summer kitchen
of my youth (my grandma’s), where the women wiped

the dishes, too many for the rack, wiped
the oilclothed table too; the men, skin pink
from glossy food, escaped the kitchen
glare, slinking into the darkness
of the den, the chatty t.v. clatter
a sound fluorescence against the dim screen.

There too, we were protected by a screen
from bites, buzz, wing, and the wind that wiped
that stretched-flat land, a soft clatter
of night and grass and damp that blew towards the pink
edge of dawn, an engine of chill darkness
that was only truly blocked by the glow of kitchen

yellow. I watched one aunt in the kitchen,
amazed that she never even tried to screen
her keen sense of life’s darkness.
When she looked at my grandmother, she often wiped
her eyes, and sniffing, face too pink,
cleaned with a banging clatter.

Though she was always a center of clatter,
that aunt. She had a kind of two-walled kitchen
in her own house, open; and wore hot pink,
played jokes, charades, a half-hearted screen
of despondency, still, the good housewife, she wiped
the smallest speck from her counters. Her own darkness

seeming inevitable, it was a darkness
she hurried towards, smoking, drinking hard, the clatter
of uncertainty (as to timing) wiped
her out. In the meantime, she cleaned-—my grandma’s kitchen
after her death, and, at the Funeral Home, made a quick screen
of the corpse. “That lipstick’s way too pink,”

she hissed, then wiped my grandma’s lips like a kitchen
stain. Despite the clatter in my brain, I served as screen,
a guard in the blossomed darkness, as she rubbed off pink.

(All rights reserved. Karin Gustafson – from Going On Somewhere, available on Amazon.)

The sestina is an extremely “ordered” form of poem with a strict line structure that focuses on six repeating “end words,” (that is, the last word in each line.) Thankfully, these end words do not have to rhyme.

There are six six-line stanzas, and six repeating end words. At the end of the six six-line stanzas, there is a three-line stanza (the “envoie”), in which the six repeating words are used again, two per line.

The hard part is not just repeating the six words, but repeating them in the right order; each stanza turns itself partly inside out for the next one. The music of the poem comes from the shifting, and sometimes surprising, echo of the repeating words. If the meaning and tone of the words can also shift through the poem, a kind of irony can be found.

Here’s how the form works:

For notation purposes, I’ll assign each end word a number – 123456. That is the order of the first stanza.

The second is 615243. The third is 364125, the fourth 532614, fifth 451362, and finally 246531. You’ll notice that the last line of each stanza becomes the first of the next, the second- to-last line, the third, etc. It helps to think of the stanzas as interlocking or clasped hands, with the clasp between the fingers moving up the hands with each stanza. (I guess they’d have to be Anne Boleyn-style hands – six fingers.)

There are different forms for the order of the words in the last three-line stanza; my favorite puts the words in reverse of their original order, meaning 65,43,21.

The form is hard, yes. A tip: once you’ve decided on your repeating words, write them down in the prescribed order for the entire poem. (This means that you’ll have a nearly blank page or so, with just a column of numbers and words on one side.) This list will not only help you keep your focus; it will also avoid the frustration of having a nearly finished poem that, you suddenly realize, did not quite follow the rules. (If it’s a great poem as is, terrific. But if you wanted to write a great sestina, this can be upsetting.)

It is useful to pick end words with flexible meanings and usage (meaning words that can be either nouns or verbs, even homonyms). Commonplace words are easier, but less interesting.

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After the Sestinas–Why Bother?

October 14, 2009

As I wrote down the rules for a sestina in the last couple of posts, I have to confess that the question “why bother?” went through my head with the regularity of the six repeating “end words” of that form.

Why bother writing formal poetry?  (Much less blogging about it?)

Seriously, isn’t poetry supposed to be about free expression?

So why bother with all the restraints and requirements of a poetic form?  Why not just write free verse all the time?

Ten reasons:

1.         Writing formal poetry limits your choices.  (If your form requires rhymes, you are limited to words that rhyme.)  This is a big help if you don’t know exactly what you want to say (and if it doesn’t involve oranges.)

2.         Writing formal poetry defines your choices (i.e. once you decide to write a villanelle, you know your poem will have two repeating lines that have to work as a couplet at some point, and will probably not end in “orange”.)

3.         Writing formal poetry terminates your choices.  (If you write a sonnet, you’ll be done by line fourteen.)

4.         Poetic forms provide inherent music and, if you can manage it, rhythm.  This is great if you don’t have a good ear; even greater, if you do.

5.         Sometimes the music of a poetic form, and the cleverness of its dance, can substitute for profundity (which is wonderful if you never found out what exactly you wanted to say.)

6.         Writing formal poetry is fun; there is a game-like quality to it.  (It has rules!)

7.         Even failing at the chosen form makes you more conscious of language, and, it is to be hoped, a more musical and adventurous writer.  (Oh Orange!)

8.         Even bare success at the chosen form puts you in the company of some of the greatest poets of all time.  You, like Shakespeare, will have written a sonnet; like Dylan Thomas, a villanelle; like Elizabeth Bishop, a sestina.  This sense of camaraderie, and the understanding that arises from even a brief turn in the trenches of prosody, will make you a more appreciative and attentive reader.

9.         Finally, it must be understood, and grudgingly accepted, that a good sonnet, sestina, villanelle or pantoum is not good because it follows the rules, but because it’s a good poem.  That said, it’s hard to write a good poem.  Maybe you don’t have it in you one day, maybe not any day.  However, if you follow the rules, which can be done by simple diligence (if not always inspiration), you can write what qualifies as a sonnet, or one of the other forms.  You may not have achieved a good poem, but you will have achieved a sonnet, a sestina, villanelle or pantoum, which itself deserves a modicum of pride.

10.  “Orange” is supposed to be one of the few words that, allegedly, has no perfect rhyme in English.    But it works just fine in a sestina (or mid-line.)   And, if you do manage to rhyme it, well….

If you prefer counting elephants to counting syllables, check out 1 Mississippi by Karin Gustafson at link above.

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First Sestina (Posted as Encouragement) – “Vacuum”

October 13, 2009

In this morning’s post, I explained the rules of writing a sestina, a fairly complicated 39-line poem, which involves six repeating “end words” in a rotating/interlocking stanza form.   I also posted what I consider to be my best sestina.  (See, post re “Changing Gears – a Sestina – “Pink” both for the better sestina and an explanation of the intricacies of the form. )

As encouragement to beginning sestina writers, I’m now posting the first sestina I ever wrote (and definitely not my “best” one.)     Although the poem follows the form, you can see the compromises I made – choosing generic words  – “talked, over, up, mother, vacuum, when” as my “end words” so that I’d be able to easily repeat them in accordance with sestina rules.   (The two posted sestinas are on different subject matters, but I wrote them one after the other, so there is a kind of relationship.)

A tip here:  if you are ever doing a writing or poetic exercise, and need to choose a prompt, and you’re feeling dried out, burned up, and  stumped for inspiration, try something like “mother” or “father”.   Believe me, the words will flow.

As always, pause only where punctuated.

Vacuum

When my aunt came to visit, they talked
of old times, my aunt hunching over
her cigarette, her heavy breasts held up
by an arm across her middle, my mother
smoking as well, her cheeks like a vacuum
cleaner, puffing out.  She only smoked when

her sister came, then she became like a teenager when
folks are away; her gestures sullen, she talked
with a thoughtless sneer, the kind that filled the vacuum
of her youth, a time she thought she’d never get over
all the obstacles they’d set up, her own mother
not understanding, no wonder she got fed up.

She loved them, yes, but everything was up
from there.  Farm life.  Especially then, when
owning land was something but not, like her mother
thought, everything.  You were still talked
about, looked down on, passed over,
a farm not bringing cash to fill the vacuum,

nor nice clothes, nice furniture, nice rugs to vacuum.
Though the time they remembered that night when they stayed up
was when the government took their land, building over
their farm, a munitions plant for the war, and when
their father went north to rawer land; and they talked
of joining him, but only when their grandmother, my mother’s mother,

was stronger.   She was a favorite of my mother,
and favored her in turn, filling a vacuum
in the heart of the middle child, the one who talked
in such maddening ways, sticking her nose up
the others thought, the grandma protecting her when
they mocked, but sick now, her life nearly over.

They worked shifts at the plant, then each took over
the grandma’s care, my aunt, my own grandmother, my mother.
‘But who was with her,” my aunt asked suddenly, “when
she died?”  My mother thinking, “I had out the vacuum,
I remember that.  I pulled it out after ringing up
the doctor,” my mother, smoking hard as she talked.

“So it was you,” my aunt said, “when—” “I tried to vacuum
fast.”  But slowly my mother spoke, the smoke rising up
like traces of what could not be done over, slowly she talked.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

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Changing Gears – The Sestina – “Pink”

October 13, 2009

 I am retreating from the world of politics today  to the more ordered world of formal poetry. The sestina is an extremely “ordered” form of poem with a strict line structure that focuses on six repeating “end words,” (that is, the last word in each line.)  Thankfully, these end words do not have to rhyme.

There are six six-line stanzas, and six repeating end words.  At the end of the six six-line stanzas, there is a three-line stanza (the “envoie”), in which the six repeating words are used again, two per line.

The hard part is not just repeating the six words, but repeating them in the right order; each stanza turns itself partly inside out for the next one.  The music of the poem comes from the shifting, and sometimes surprising, echo of the repeating words.   If the meaning and tone of the words can also shift through the poem, a kind of irony can be found.

Here’s how the form works:

For notation purposes, I’ll assign each end word a number  – 123456.  That is the order of the first stanza.

The second is 615243.   The third is 364125, the fourth 532614, fifth 451362, and finally 246531.    You’ll notice that the last line of each stanza becomes the first of the next, the second- to-last line, the third, etc.  It helps to think of the stanzas as interlocking or clasped hands, with the clasp between the fingers moving up the hands with each stanza.  (I guess they’d have to be Anne Boleyn-style hands – six fingers.)

There are different forms for the order of the words in the last three-line stanza;  my favorite puts the words in reverse of their original order, meaning 65,43,21.

The form is hard, yes.  A tip:  once you’ve decided on your repeating words, write them down in the prescribed order for the entire poem.  (This means that you’ll have a nearly blank page or so, with just a column of numbers and words on one side.)  This list will not only help you keep your focus; it will also avoid the frustration of having a nearly finished poem that, you suddenly realize, did not quite follow the rules.  (If it’s a great poem as is, terrific.  But if you wanted to write a great sestina, this can be upsetting.)

It is useful to pick end words with flexible meanings and usage (meaning words that can be either nouns or verbs, even homonyms).   Commonplace words are easier, but less interesting.

I have to confess I have only written a couple of  sestinas.  They are long poems;  beginning one is a big commitment.  But a completed one is really quite satisfying.  Here’s one of mine:

(As always, keep in mind that pauses are intended to be taken only at punctuation breaks, not at line or stanza breaks, unless punctuated. )

Pink

Trees full of blossom, the night smells pink
though it’s black, a thick summer darkness
barely held back by window screen.
I hear dishes in the sink, a familiar clatter,
and think of the summer kitchen
of my youth (my grandma’s), where the women wiped

the dishes, too many for the rack, wiped
the oilclothed table too; the men, skin pink
from glossy food, escaped the kitchen
glare, slinking into the darkness
of the den, the chatty t.v. clatter
a sound fluorescence against the dim screen.

There too, we were protected by a screen
from bites, buzz, wing, and the wind that wiped
that stretched-flat land, a soft clatter
of night and grass and damp that blew towards the pink
edge of dawn, an engine of chill darkness
that was only truly blocked by the glow of kitchen

yellow.  I watched one aunt in the kitchen,
amazed that she never even tried to screen
her keen sense of life’s darkness.
When she looked at my grandmother, she often wiped
her eyes, and sniffing, face too pink,
cleaned with a banging clatter.

Though she was always a center of clatter,
that aunt.  She had a kind of two-walled kitchen
in her own house, open; and wore hot pink,
played jokes, charades, a half-hearted screen
of despondency, still, the good housewife, she wiped
the smallest speck from her counters.  Her own darkness

seeming inevitable, it was a darkness
she hurried towards, smoking, drinking hard, the clatter
of uncertainty (as to timing) wiped
her out.  In the meantime, she cleaned-—my grandma’s kitchen
after her death, and, at the Funeral Home, made a quick screen
of the corpse.  “That lipstick’s way too pink,”

she hissed, then wiped my grandma’s lips like a kitchen
stain.  Despite the clatter in my brain, I served as screen,
a guard in the blossomed darkness, as she rubbed off pink.

(All rights reserved.  Karin Gustafson)

Categories: poetry
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