A Brief History:¹

From The Making of a Poem, by Mark Strand and Eavan Boland: The inventor of the sestina, Arnaut Daniel, belonged to a group of twelfth-century poets—the troubadours—who needed, for their fame and fortune, to shock, delight, and entertain… The troubadours first appear in southern France in the twelfth century. Their name is most certainly extracted from the verb trobar—meaning “to invent or compose verse.” They were famous, celebrated, much in fashion, and eventually very influential on the European poetry of the next few centuries… They sang—their poems were always accompanied by music—for French nobles like the Duke of Aquitaine or the Count of Poitiers. They competed with one another to produce the wittiest, most elaborate, most difficult styles. This difficult, complex style was called the trobar clus. The easier, more open one was called the trobar leu. The sestina was part of the trobar clus. It was the form for a master troubadour.

Its Form:

The sestina is a French form, syllabic originally but often adapted to accentual-syllabic lines in English verse. It consists of 39 lines divided into 6 sestets and one triplet, called the envoi. It is normally unrhymed—instead, the six end-words of the first stanza are picked up and reused as the end-words of the following stanzas in a specific order. In the envoi, one end-word is buried in each line, and one is at the end of each line. Lines can be of any single length.

Nuts and Bolts:

Each stanza repeats the end-words in the order 615243. The easiest way to describe the repetition is through a list; the actual reason or meaning of the repletion has been lost. The end words repeat as follows:

Stanza 1: A B C D E F	Stanza 4: E C B F A D
Stanza 2: F A E B D C	Stanza 5: D E A C F B
Stanza 3: C F D A B E	Stanza 6: B D F E C A
	Envoi ECA or ACE (end words) with the other 3 words, BDF, embedded in the lines

Some Writing Tips

• Choosing your end-words: a few ways to do this is to simply choose 6 of your favorite words, or, ask a couple of your friends at random to write down some of their favorite words—until you have a “pool” to draw from.
• Try to choose words that can serve as both nouns and verbs, or verbs that have a variety of interesting conjugations, so you can play more with meaning as you repeat the words.
• Bring something “new” to each repeated word—even if it is very slight.
• For some, laying out the skeleton of your poem by placing end words where they need to be and then filling in the lines works. This DOESN’T work for me, but it might work for you.
• Treat your first sestina like an “exercise.” Tell yourself, I’m gonna try it, and if it doesn’t turn out a sestina, no biggie. It’ll be something else.

All of the above tips spring from my own experience with writing sestinas, and I have tangible proof that the final tip can and does work! As I was preparing notes for a craft talk on the sestina—to be delivered to a class of senior-level undergrads—I decided that I wanted to do more than just read sample sestinas; I wanted to climb into the form’s skin so I could speak from first-hand experience. The results—

From: “Excerpts on Pirates and Birdsong”

We seek pieces to charm our stumbled selves
into uprightness: slices of brook, a chunk
of sailed sky, some slime and rope and rocks
to remind us of the children we still are inside
under layers of factory smog, sterile offices,
fishless rivers and trees whose foliage is fled

in spring as well as winter. How far it all has fled
we rarely think to ask, gold-seekers of the self,
noses pressed to the ground in our sleek offices
like obedient hounds, oblivious to the chunks
of horse, mountain and frog in our eyes, galloping inside
us till we think we’re caffeine buzzed and rock

back happily in our chairs, caressing pinky rocks
of our Sigma Tau X successes & presently fleeing,
as only sated lions can, down the street to the Insider’s
Café for a bagel & shoptalk, convincing ourselves
uneasily to and fro that these be-bopping chunks
of light among stray park doves threaten our office

of human dignity, office of responsibility, office
of progress and ultimate success. And so we rock
on, seeking pieces of puddle, forest, chunks
of redbird western sky in our textbooks under “flee,”
(and sometimes “flea”), because our schooled selves
have forced outsides to flee in, and insides

out, until our tangled beings are outsiders looking in—
at what? only plush, plump-chaired offices
full of fish tanks and pictures of our fish-fed selves
spreading across the walls. How can we long for rocks
and eat merely bagels? How to reclaim the fled,
fistfuls of our former selves, sand-in-wind, chunks

of clover hill and spruce and moon? Our chunks,
after all, are tomorrow’s pinheads, and deep inside,
in bellies full of wild-eyed ancestors’ fleeing
ghosts, we dream of razing our offices
and sending our stilettoed secretaries with rocks
in their pockets to free the fish and calm themselves.

We march back, chunks of bagels, to our offices,
giant posted notes glowing inside like ancient rock
we remember fleeing yesterday, our former selves.

 

For Further Reading (from more traditional to more modern variations of the form):

“Paysage Moralise” – W. H. Auden
“Sestina” – Charles Algernon Swinburne
“Sestina Altaforte” – Ezra Pound
“A Miracle for Breakfast” – Elizabeth Bishop
"Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape” – John Ashbery
“Bagdad: The Disappeared Girls” – Marilyn Krysl

Final Word:

Charles Wright, in his book Halflife: Improvisations and Interviews, was asked about what he thought of young poets’ lack of experience with traditional forms of poetry. His reply: “It’s not knowing how 90 percent of the poems in the history of the English language were put together. You may know how, but you never had experience in trying it yourself, and that seems foolish. The more you write in forms the more you discover the felicities those forms have. You see how a brilliant sonnet operates or a brilliant sestina, if such a thing exists;” (I don’t know what that little aside on the sestina is supposed to mean—and I think you’ll agree with me when you read the sample sestinas above, that brilliant sestinas do exist!)

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¹I would like to give credit to Bob King for the first 3 sections on the Sestina, which he compiled, and I simply reshaped/amended.

Copyright © 2009 by Charity Gingerich