HOW TO WRITE POETRY

#4 - HOW TO WRITE A SESTINA

Hold on to your hats! The sestina is a bit long – it’s got 6 stanzas (verses) of 6 lines each, plus a final verse (stanza) of 3 lines. That makes a grand total of 39 lines. Crikey! On top of that, instead of rhyme or iambic feet or stuff like that, it uses what’s called “lexical repetition”, which is a fancy way of saying “repeating words”. It’s going to take a while to explain the sestina’s basic structure, so you might want to fix yourself a stiff drink.

While there’s no rhyme, you can use syllable counting and that kind of nonsense if you want, but you don’t have to. In fact, you can use any length of line, and even mix long and short and in-between if you feel like it. Of course, if you fancy a bit of iambic pentameter no-one will stop you, but the lexical repetition is probably tough enough, as we shall see. It’s up to you. I’m not your Mum or Dad or Social Worker.

So, what about this lexical repetition thingy? What it means in the sestina is that you choose 6 “end words” (words at the end of a line) and the lines of the first 6 stanzas have to end with those words in a pattern decided on ages ago by the United Sestina Association (USA for short). Let’s deal with the pattern; please move on to the next section. You can have a rest for a couple of minutes first if you feel the need.

The pattern the line-ending words follow can be explained thusly: the first stanza will have 6 lines and 6 end-words. The following stanzas take their pattern based on a bottom-up pairing of the lines of the preceding stanza (i.e. last and first, then second-from-last and second, then third-from-last and third).

I copied that from somewhere and I don’t really get it. It’s about as easy to understand as string theory, so I’ll try to make it as simple as I can. If the first stanza lines are 1-2-3-4-5-6, the second stanza uses the end words in the order 6-1-5-2-4-3, the third is 3-6-4-1-2-5, the fourth 5-3-2-6-1-4, the fifth 4-5-1-3-6-2, and the sixth 2-4-6-5-3-1. This might make more sense when we use words instead of numbers. Unfortunately, using words can be quite tricky, as we shall see. Some people have written poems using just numbers but that’s avant-garde. Let’s push on. It’s taking ages to get to some actual poem . . .

The sixth stanza is followed by a tercet (a 3-line stanza (verse)) that includes all six of the line-ending words of the preceding stanzas, with two of the words in each line. Strictly speaking, these should take the pattern of 2–5, 4–3, 6–1; the first end-word of each pair can occur anywhere in the line, while the second must end the line. However, this order can be changed if you want to and, believe me, you might want to! But you do have to have the second word at the end of the line; it’s a rule you’re not really allowed to break unless you see yourself as some kind of poetry maverick.

Like I said, this pattern will become clearer when we use words, but there’s the rub. You might think choosing 6 words ain’t so difficult, but you’d be wrong, oh so wrong. Repeating a word a couple of times might be easy enough, but in the sestina you have to repeat 6 words 7 times, and when you try to do it you will soon find it ain’t so easy, assuming you want to make some kind of sense or not just keep repeating yourself. If making sense doesn’t matter and you see yourself as the next J. H. Prynne (look him up) it’d be a piece of cake, but let’s assume you do want to make sense. If you don’t, we might as well go home now.

So let’s choose some words. How about these: Celia, gone, heart, left, broken, selfish. All these are words I could use in a poem telling how I gave Celia my heart and she left me and broke it, but if I use the name Celia seven times in my sestina it could get tedious as hell, and there’s only one way I can think of using the words “heart” and “gone”. The same goes for “selfish”. I might get away with using these words for two or three stanzas, but by the time verses five and six arrived I’m pretty sure I’d be struggling and saying the same thing over and over again, which is what Celia did when she moaned about almost everything, but it’s not what you want in a poem.

That’s one of the real pains about writing a sestina: you choose your 6 words, you get halfway through the poem and it’s all going jolly well, then you realize you can’t think of a different way to use the words again, and you wish you had some better ones to play with.

Frankly, the words I just chose feel kind of limiting even before I begin writing the poem, even if calling Celia selfish a thousand times wouldn’t be enough in real life. But this is poetry and not real life, so instead I need to find some words to use in the sestina that can either be used in more than one way, or that can be used in more than one context, which will give me the chance to use the same word but with a slightly different sense or meaning. And, of course, some words can function as a noun with more than one meaning, and also as maybe a verb e.g. “bitch” is a noun, and “to bitch” is a verb. On the other hand, you might be lucky and find words you can use which always have exactly the same use and meaning and everything goes swimmingly, in which case you’ve hit a kind of sestina jackpot and you can forget most of what I just said, at least for now.

I have a handy hint. Until you get the hang of it, you could try borrowing the end words of a sestina someone else has already written. In that case, you start off knowing they can “work” – if someone else used them and pulled it off, then so can you. Like I said just a few moments ago, there’s nothing worse than getting half the way through your sestina and realizing you’ve set yourself an impossible task by choosing your end-words badly. Even one wrong and badly-chosen word can fuck the whole thing up, pardon my French.

Anyway, I’ve nicked some new end words from someone else, and for my sestina I’ve decided to summarize the story of yours truly and Celia. Here is my first stanza, which in good narrative style sets the scene:

Celia and I met on a day of storm. Thunder

was in the air. I had just moved in to my apartment

in the city, newly arrived back in the country

and very miserable. What had been my pleasant

life had become the opposite. I scratched

around in metaphorical dirt and lived on spinach.

You might think the end-words here are not very promising because at least four of them seem pretty much to have only one way of being used. For example, I wish “to spinach” was a verb, but it isn’t. But you’ll see how in this case it’s not a problem if you’re imaginative and inventive. It helps, when you write poetry, to be imaginative and inventive. I don’t know if I’ve mentioned that before.

10.

Here’s my second stanza:

Oddly, I really rather enjoyed living on spinach;

Celia said she didn’t like it, nor did she like thunder,

but it was like we each had an itch and we scratched

one another. She came back with me to my apartment

after we had hit it off drunkenly during a very pleasant

party at a mutual friend’s place in the country.

You can see how it works. The word “scratched” is used in a different context from in the first stanza, and “country” in the first stanza meant England, whereas in the second stanza it means the countryside. Imaginative. Inventive.

11.

Here’s my next bit:

I didn’t feel much at home back in this country

and probably, indisputably, ate way too much spinach.

Celia said she liked everything to be pleasant

about her, saying again how she disliked thunder.

Before too long she was living with me in the apartment

and our itches no longer needed to be scratched.

The poem’s going well. And all of the end words are being used pretty straightforwardly. I might have struck sestina gold!

12.

On to the next bit:

Itches are not the only things can be scratched.

I’d always had an inexplicable soft spot for country

music, and I spent loads of time in the apartment

playing it loud while pigging out on spinach

sandwiches and beer. I didn’t notice a local thunder

brewing, and how Celia was not always so pleasant.

Do you see how clever I’ve been with “country”? Imaginative. Inventive. I really cannot stress that enough. And the discerning among you will see that some of the other words are used in a slightly different context, and everything is hunky dory.

13.

Frankly, I’m getting a bit bored now and want to finish this so here are the next two chunks:

When I say Celia was not always pleasant

I mean she deliberately and wantonly scratched

my records. She said she really didn’t like thunder

but it was a zillion times better than country

music. Hearing that, I almost choked on my spinach,

telling her it was me who chose the music in my apartment.

I also very much like Phil Collins, and the apartment

often reverberated to the beat’n’bounce of his pleasant

ditties while I munched on more and more spinach.

Celia liked him too. His records weren’t scratched

but anything she regarded as remotely country

she had it in for. The atmosphere indoors was like thunder.

I’m thinking I should’ve used more difficult end words to show you how tricky things can be, or how you can use some words in more different ways than is happening here, but what the hell. Nobody asked me to do this. It’s all voluntary.

14.

Now we come to the final verse/stanza/tercet, where you have to use the end words like I explained earlier up there somewhere. Here it comes:

Celia left me and the apartment, taking her dislike of thunder

and my “The Best of Phil Collins” CD. I’ve overdosed on spinach

and scratched

till my heart bled. It’s not pleasant. I might leave the country.

You can see (a) I’ve put the end words in red so you can see them, and (b) I didn’t stick to the strict word order for the same reason as in (c) thank Christ you’re allowed to use any length of line you want. These lines are quite long and it took me at least five minutes to figure out how to use the words, and long lines made it way easier than it would’ve been if I’d had to stick to shorter lines. Whew!

15.

I’m knackered. I’m not sure I want to do this any more. Writing the actual sestina only took me about half an hour, but explaining how to do it has taken longer than I expected, and I’ve missed the start of the football on the telly. Anyway, here’s the whole poem: