Content Objectives
Sestinas have had quite a turbulent history; Medieval Renaissance writers lauded the complicated artistry required to produce one and the way the form allowed, almost mathematically, to "devise an elegant solution" to a problem. 6 Late nineteenth and early twentieth century writers, up until the 1950s, used the poem as a call to tradition and a representation of the professionalism of their craft. 7 At the same time, others have lambasted the form, calling it "as obvious as an ear," and suggesting that it is the playground of bad "creative writers." 8 The sestina generates considerable poet-on-poet hate, particularly on the question of whether the lines should be free or metered verse. 9 To put it in a different way: the sestina is that friend you keep around who sometimes seems cool, but also serves as the group's punching bag. Despite the torment, however, the sestina doesn't go away; it has experienced a resurgence in the 21st century and, I believe, deserves a place in the high school English classroom.
The sestina has a complicated structure and, historically, was used by troubadours to demonstrate their linguistic chops. A form with particular rules about word placement – as the sestina demands – forced poets to demonstrate their skill with language as they created a piece that still made sense despite the intense repetition of only a few words. Writing a pleasing sestina showed one's mastery of wordplay. Though modern poets have used the sestina to explore different topics and are writing sestinas for different reasons than the troubadours did, the intricate structure remains a playground for language.
The sestina consists of six stanzas of six lines, then a three-line stanza called an envoy, or "send-off." 10 The intricacy of the form lies in the way its end words are repeated; the six teleutons, or the words at the end of each line, will be the end words of the six lines in each stanza; however, the order changes. The six words are then used both in the middle and ends of the three lines of the envoy 11. Take, for example, the opening stanza of Sir Philip Sidney's poem "Ye Goatherd Gods," one of the first sestinas written in the English language:
Strephon.
Ye Goatherd gods, that love the grassy mountains, (A)
Ye nymphs which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys, (B)
Ye satyrs joyed with free and quiet forests, (C)
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music, (D)
Which to my woes gives still an early morning, (E)
And draws the dolor on till weary evening. (F) 12
The first stanza establishes the teleutons — mountains, valleys, forests, music, morning, evening — in the pattern ABCDEF. The remaining six line stanzas will mix up those teleutons in this order: FAEBDC, CFDABE, ECBFAD, DEACFB, BDFECA.
To make this pattern clearer, here is the second stanza of Sidney's poem:
Klaius.
O Mercury, foregoer to the evening, (F)
O heavenly huntress of the savage mountains, (A)
O lovely star, entitled of the morning (E)
While that my voice doth fill these woeful valleys, (B)
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music, (D)
Which oft hath Echo tired in secret forests. (C) 13
Sidney's poem is a double sestina, so there are twelve stanzas of six lines before the envoy. It, however, mimics the typical "send off" structure of three lines with two of the teleutons in each line: AB, CD, EF.
Strephon.
These mountains(A) witness shall, so shall these valleys(B),
Klaius
These forests (C) eke, made wretched by our music (D),
Our morning (E) hymn this is, and song at evening (F). 14
Older versions of sestina, including Sidney's, were very rigid in the requirements for the teleutons — they were repeated in strict order in the stanzas following the first and were nouns with a trochaic form (in which the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed). 15 Sidney typically adhered to lines of iambic pentameter, while Italian writers Petrarch and Dante manipulated the meter to include eleven syllables. .
The sestina was "invented" by Provencal writer Arnaut Daniel in the late medieval period. Daniel was "highly regarded as a traveling troubadour," so much so that he was immortalized by Dante's Divine Comedy as the model of a vernacular poet. 16 After Sir Philip Sidney introduced the sestina to English, it was used frequently up until the late 19th century. The sestina then fell out of fashion in the early 20th century only to experience a resurgence in the 1930s, led by W.H. Auden. 17 The 1950s has been called "the age of the sestina" — it was widely used then and, because of its intricate form, was seen as a kind of "professionalization" of poetry 18.
The scholar Stephen Burt asserts, however, that the use of the sestina form in more contemporary poetry expresses dissatisfaction with that professionalization 19. Poets in the late 20th century assumed that their work would have some larger meaning in society — that it could "disclose organic preverbal truths," incite movements, link writers to tradition and empower the writer. When this promise was not delivered, the use of rigid, arbitrary forms like the sestina was in reaction to the fact that poetry largely served only as entertainment. 20 Burt argues that contemporary writers choose the sestina because it allows them to revel in craft and technique while disavowing "tradition, organicism and social or spiritual efficacy." 21 The sestina fits this need particularly well because its form, though it contains specific and intricate rules, doesn't mimic a natural logic or conversational pattern. Because it doesn't seem as natural, it appears as more of a game. By playing this game – writing poems in which the structure seems to be used just for fun – writers can satirize the kinds of poems where form is a "logical consequence of the poem's content." 22 By appearing to make a conscious choice about form – rather than it seeming to flow naturally from the content – was a way for writers to mock these "serious" poets whose work was attached to a higher purpose, whose sonnet form seemed to arise naturally because of what they had to say.
As a result of this almost mocking attitude toward poetic tradition, the content of contemporary sestinas is often whimsical and sometimes hilarious. Writers have embraced the playfulness of the form and its demonstration of a mastery of craft that still entertains. And entertain they have. Contemporary incarnations of the sestina run the gamut from serious to playful and are, at times, irreverent. The web-based literary magazine McSweeney's Internet Tendency ran a sestina column for several years, with titles like "The One Where the Cake Ignites" (the narrative of a lost Friends episode that uses the six main characters' names as the teleutons), "Sestina for the Q Train," "Francis Bacon Sestina," and "Hitler Sestina." There are some in this anthology that play with the sestina form, including "WTF Sestina," with each stanza an electronic chat conversation and teleutons including omg, lol, hahaha and, of course, wtf.
The sestina has also met with other "newfangled" poetry techniques that further confound the idea that this poetry could ever be taken seriously. Sharon Mesmer, known as a "flarf" poet (one who uses search engine strings to generate found poetry) wrote a sestina (a flarftina, if you will) called "Super Killer Rooster Assault Kit" based on end words scavenged from Urban Dictionary — the tamer ones including "crapsauce," "Orville Redenbacher" and "maximum nacho." 23
While the content of some of these sestinas are probably a little bit too inappropriate for the high school classroom, they echo the larger point that Burt made above: if poets feel that they can no longer do something "important" with their poetry, then it might as well do something fun. The contradiction that the sestina presents — a rigid, formal structure that allows, and has been used, for lighter topics and tone — is what makes it perfect for the high school classroom. Additionally, despite the seeming silliness of the form's repetition, it still allows for a deep analysis of the way that form can support content and create sound and feeling in a poem. Try as contemporary writers might to avoid and mock the form-from-content tradition, the playful, intricate structure does seem to naturally align with and support the content of the poem. The "game" in the sestina still allows students an opportunity for deep analysis — integral to the high school language arts education.
The light-hearted treatment of the sestina in contemporary poetry partially conceals its ability to be a form that contributes to the meaning of the content it communicates. One of the first questions we ask students at the onset of a poetry unit is what is a poem? This question often results in a back-and-forth of unsuccessful answers: lines instead of paragraphs? Rhyme? It's about feelings (my personal favorite)?
James Cummins claims that one of the things the sestina does particularly well is create sound, and this is one of the elements that I believe makes a poem a poem. 24 Though he uses a rather vibrant image to convey what it is — like a "large, wounded, bleating animal" – he claims that while other poems are busy being "good," the sestina has room to make sound, whether or not it is pleasing in a traditional way. 25
Another valuable aspect of the sestina, according to Cummins, is that it "calls attention to its existence in time." 26 While many poems (he focuses on the sonnet) attempt to hold time in its place, to express a certain moment, the sestina has way of eschewing the moment and allowing a change or development to happen. Cummins refers to this effect as a "mirror" — though the same words appear in each stanza, they always appear in a different way. 27 The reader never experiences the exact same feeling and is, in fact, forced to interpret a change because the words do not appear the same way they have before.
This resistance to stasis can also be attributed to the number of stanzas and the way that the envoy concludes the poem. The development of the sestina comes from a "number mysticism" that was important in the Medieval Renaissance, but that most poets and readers do not consider consciously when reading today. The number six was considered a weak number while the number seven represented mystical wholeness. If the sestina had a complete seventh stanza, the movement of the end words would revert back to the ABCDEF order it assumed in the first stanza. Instead, it has six stanzas and ends with a "conclusion" that, while it wraps up the poem, does not complete the cycle. It literally does send the poem off on a continuation of its journey. 28
A poem that demonstrates the way content and form in the sestina suggest movement in time is Elizabeth Bishop's "Sestina." She opens the poem with the setting of a scene — a bucolic home:
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. 29
This opening stanza's content establishes time in many ways — time of year (September); time of day (failing light); a person's place in the progression of a lifetime (grandmother, child); even the naming of the stove places it in a specific time. The almanac places the poem in time in a complex way: it is a book that prognosticates the future for farmers and can also be a book that records statistics about the present (which quickly becomes the past).
Because of its placement in the order of the teleutons, the almanac quickly begins to take on a different life and move the poem forward. Though in the first stanza it is an object that the grandmother reads from, it moves to the end of the second stanza and is now called "clever" — it has assumed a typically human characteristic. In the third stanza it will now be the end of the first line — it must quickly go through another change or the poem will grind to a halt. The lines read:
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…
The almanac has gone from a static object, though imbued with a sense of time, to "clever," to an animated thing that looms ominously over the child and the grandmother. The rapid repetition of the teleuton as it moves from last position to first creates a moment in the poem for each of the teleutons to develop. Though each makes some change in each stanza, I believe this rapid repetition facilitates — almost forces — the progression of the poem.
Cummins wrote that in some of the first verse that used repetition there is an early version of the sestina; though the form has changed, even then there was a sense of "circularity and completion." 30 Repetition can do more than emphasize. This is extremely important for students embarking on poetry analysis to understand and is a difficult concept to grasp. Because the words must move and serve different functions, the changing positions and therefore relationship of the words to each other allows this form to contribute more through repetition than emphasis.
Though there is not a clean completeness — we don't get a repeat of the teleuton structure of the first stanza — the envoy serves as a conclusion that sets the scene in the poem on its way:
Time to plant the tears, says the almanac
The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house. 31
The almanac has become the agent that "solves" the problem, albeit not completely (the child will continue to draw houses that cannot be interpreted, suggesting that the problem in this poem is not completely solved). This still moves the poem off on its journey beyond the page, giving a sense to the reader that more will happen and time will continue to march on.
In his discussion of the ways that the sestina form has been looked down upon by other poets, Cummins quotes Richard Wilbur's opinion that one of the few topics "suitable" for the sestina is obsession. 32 While Wilbur makes this claim pejoratively, I believe that it is a positive aspect of the form. The repetition of the teleutons creates a feeling of obsession, but the journey the poem forces the reader to take allows that obsession to develop and carry importance beyond the negative connotation we typically associate with the word obsession.
One way that this idea of "obsession" is highlighted is when authors manipulate the teleutons — instead of choosing six different words, some choose to use the same word more than once or, in some cases, for all six of the end words. One poem that masters this strategy is "Like" by A.E. Stallings. As you may have assumed, the lone teleuton is the word like:
Now we're all "friends," there is no love but Like
A semi-demi goddess, something like
A reality tv star look-alike
Named Simile or Me Two. So we like
In order to be liked. It isn't like
There's love or hate now. Even plain "dislike" 33
Though this poem clearly obsesses over the idea of "like" — the way we approve of something, the way it punctuates our speech, the way that we are all the same, the author avoids stasis and redundancy by adjusting the way that "like" appears in each line and from stanza to stanza. Above, it is used as an idea, a preposition for comparison, a compound adjective, a verb, and its opposite idea, dislike.
These forms of "like" do not rotate through the poem in the same specific pattern as the teleutons normally would. For example, "Like" - the idea, given a name almost as if it were a Greek goddess — resides at the end of the first line of four of the stanzas. In the second stanza, the author introduces uses of "like" that were not present in the first:
Is frowned on: there's no button for it. Like
Is something you can quantify: each "like"
You gather's almost something money-like,
Token of virtual support. "Please like
This page to stamp out hunger." And you'd like
To end hunger and climate change alike,
The "like" in the second line recognizes a modern usage associated with Facebook — in addition to merely approving of something, it involves the physical action of clicking a button.
As the poem progresses, "like" springs up in places other than the teleuton, most noticeably in the first line of the third stanza: "But it's unlikely Like does diddly. Like…" and after, there is a veritable frenzy of "likes" that supports both the idea of the author's (and our culture's) obsession with liking and being liked — it begins to feel like winds whipping into a tornado that we cannot avoid, so we must acknowledge. The envoy reads:
But as you like, my friend. Yes, we're alike,
How we pronounce, say, lichen, and dislike
Cancer and war. So like this page. Click Like.
We've ended up somewhere that we weren't before. Although the poem obsessed, it did not stagnate — it began a journey and almost returned to the ideas in the early part of the poem, yet did not quite complete the circle. We started out with artificial friendship and connection ("friends" a reference to the superficial relationships we hold on social media that are often not replicated in real life), but we've ended on a point that demonstrates the connection that we all do actually have, which this "liking" highlights to the chagrin of its critics.
The ability of the sestina to tolerate precise repetition (when the teleutons remain in the same form) and linguistic variation is one of its most dazzling qualities — for meaning as well as entertainment. This ability also lends itself well to vocabulary development in the classroom and showing students that poetry can do fun things with words and ideas — that it need not be stilted and stagnant, old and stuffy.
My favorite sestina – the one I mentioned in the opening of this paper, one that throws old and stuffy vigorously out the window — is "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape" by John Ashbery 34 The obsession, in this case, is a scene in the cartoon character Popeye's apartment in the city, and the sestina unravels a narrative rather than a direct meditation on a subject.
Ashbery also relies on the manipulation of the teleutons to give the poem a sense of movement and development. In some cases, the word is merely altered linguistically — the word "scratched" takes on multiple shades of meaning — but in others, words are used in a metaphorical sense to convey a difference from their previous incarnation. In the first stanza, Popeye "sits in thunder,/ unthought of" and later on, Popeye's "duplicate father" throws "bolts of loving thunder" that disrupt the family's happiness 35.
Happiness (or unhappiness) is an important thematic idea in this poem, but the poem itself plays so artfully with language and narrative that it seems to almost resist a more specific "meaning" or takeaway. While this quality is certainly frustrating, particularly to student readers who are accustomed producing a deeper meaning of poetry on demand, it allows the reader to forget deep meaning and revel in wordplay. In the very practical sense, students could use this poem for vocabulary or word connotation development or to help stretch the words they use in their own writing.
Students can also investigate the way that language can contribute to the creation of a feeling in a poem. Part of this poem's dazzle is the way it combines mundane, natural language (country, spinach, thunder) with the more ornate (salubrious, unavailing). It also mixes formal language (henceforth) with informal and slang ("en la casa de Popeye" "out of earshot"). The way that these words dance around each other in the sestina's form holds them together despite their disparate meaning and formality; it also uses the juxtaposition of modes of discourse to make us aware that everything is said in a particular manner of speaking.
Another sestina that uses different modes of language to contribute to its meaning is "Bilingual Sestina" by Julia Alvarez. This poem documents Alvarez's struggle to master the English language and come to terms with her identity as a bilingual gringa dominicana.
In addition to exploring the predicament of being a bilingual woman, Alvarez uses the sestina not only to demonstrate her command of a non-native language, but also that she could master a traditional English language poetry form. In the case of a diverse classroom in which students may enter with language norms that are not the same as the "mainstream" Standard written English, this poem's content as well as Alvarez's ability to master the form and language will empower students as writers and participants in a language classroom.
Alvarez uses lexical variants — say and said, for example — to "flex" the form and truly show that she had mastered not only the language but one of its highest art forms. 36 She selects her teleutons — said, English, closed, words, nombres, Spanish — in both languages and thus they work together to form "a singular aesthetic goal." 37 They change their meaning and form to show the movement of time and her growth as a speaker and writer, as well as highlight her obsession with this element of her identity.
The idea of identity that arises in each poem leads into this curriculum unit's thematic topic — what things form our identity and how can we reflect those in our writing as well as use writing to develop them?
Students will read the poems above, focusing on the ideas of repetition (the effect of the repeated teleutons) and the way structure can reflect content (both through movement in time and the way that the form can reinforce an obsession that changes). The four poems will form the basis for the unit, but can be supplemented with other examples of the sestina that deal with identity. The end goal of the unit will be for students to write their own sestina that reflects some aspect of their identity and the way that aspect has changed recently in their lives.
While writing the sestina will present a considerable challenge for most students, I believe this meets many of the needs present in this class that I've outlined — the need for diverse perspectives, content that engages a diverse group of learners and high-level analytical exercises. In addition, creating the final poem will allow students to begin the individual's journey that the rest of the English 1 CAS curriculum focuses on.
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