If we're looking for instruction, there's always this piece from The Barefoot Muse. When I tried the form, I found it useful; the key thing is to plan the envoi first and choose the repetends based on the punchy envoi.

Here's the essay: How to Write a Sestina

The issue it's in has some examples.

James Merrill wrote a sestina entitled "Tomorrows" in which the end words are "one, two, three, four, five, six". He allows himself the usually liberties so that, for example, "one" can become "won" and "six "Sikhs". Not one of his greatest poems, but very helpful, if you're trying to learn the rules of the sestina.

Signifyin' Monkey
by Michael Donaghy

'Never write a check with your mouth your ass can't cash.'
- Zach Newton

O.K. I'll tell it, but only if you buy lunch.
One summer I worked nights for Vigil-Guard,
the Chicago security firm. The work was easy:
sitting. And close to home. Ten minutes on the train.
And every night I passed the same fluorescent sign
somewhere in Chinatown: FIGHTER MONKEY.

I paid it no mind. It was the year of the monkey.
I thought I'd try it out one day for lunch.
Risky, I figured, but it's always a good sign
if the sign's in English. I wasn't made chief guard
for nothing, you know. It takes a week to train
on half pay so don't think it's all that easy.
Security's an art. I just make it look easy,
like the day I walked home past Fighter Monkey.
Looking back, I wish I'd caught that train,
but I was after a cheap pork feng shui lunch.
Something out front put me on my guard,
though, something about that Day-Glo sign,
the smell, and the cages in the windows, and no sign
of a menu anywhere, which made me a little uneasy,
when out steps this whtie guy built like a bodyguard
wearing a T-shirt showing a shrieking monkey.
He just stands there, chin out. 'Still serving lunch?'
I ask. 'This is no restaurant,' he says. 'I train
animals' - He's got this tight whisper - 'I train
Barbary Apes using American Sign
Language.' O.K. I figure he's out to lunch,
a potential situation. 'Take it easy,'
I tell him. 'I made a mistake. You train monkeys . . .
I represent a firm called Vigil-Guard.'
Turns out he once trained dogs for Vigil-Guard.
And he pays me there and then to help him train
one of his babies, a kind of Rottweiler monkey
that took her orders and talked back in Sign.
I swear she must have weighed forty pounds easy.
And teeth! She could have had me for lunch.
Shit, she could have had me and lunch!
Then he hauls out this heavy, padded armguard.
'Put that on,' he says. 'This part is safe and easy.
She's going to come at you like a freight train.
Freeze.' I remember he laughed as he made the sign.
The asshole. Lost a thumb to his own monkey.

It's easy. Look, he'd been her only trainer.
Guard or no guard, he'd signed 'I'm lunch.'
The blood! Of course they had to shoot the monkey.

Anne seemed to be asking about how to write a sestina, so I thought I'd post a link to this oldie-but-goodie thread:
http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtm...ML/000469.html

A note on the order of repetitions: The pattern is mathematical.

If you annotated stanza 1 of your sestina like this:

1
2
3
4
5
6

. . . then the annotation for both stanza 1 and 2 would be:

1 6
2 4
3 2
4 1
5 3
6 5

The pattern shows itself in S2 - three even numbers in descending order followed by three odd numbers in ascending order. This accounts for why the last end-word of a stanza always appears as the first end-word of the next.

It also suggests another interesting facet of the sestina, one which is apparent if you keep sketching out the repetends. The first six stanzas would look like this:

1 6 5 3 2 4
2 4 1 6 5 3
3 2 4 1 6 5
4 1 6 5 3 2
5 3 2 4 1 6
6 5 3 2 4 1

Now, here's what it would look like if instead of an envoi a seventh stanza were added:

1 6 5 3 2 4 1
2 4 1 6 5 3 2
3 2 4 1 6 5 3
4 1 6 5 3 2 4
5 3 2 4 1 6 5
6 5 3 2 4 1 6

The seventh stanza would go in the same order as the first, implying that the order would repeat forever. I find that very suggestive. It's a commonplace to say that sestinas (like villanelles and other repeating forms) lend themselves to obsession, but I think they lend themselves equally well, and maybe uniquely, to cycles, and broken cycles. FWIW!

[This message has been edited by John Hutchcraft (edited May 05, 2008).]

Thanks John (and Maryann)

Anne

". . . then the annotation for both stanza 1 and 2 would be:

1 6
2 4
3 2
4 1
5 3
6 5"

John, that's not my understanding. This is what the first two stanzas of most sestinas I have seen looks like:

1 6
2 1
3 5
4 2
5 4
6 3

Then the same pattern continues. The first line of each stanza ends with the same word as the last line of the preceding stanza. So far we are in agreement. But the second line of each stanza ends with the same word as the first line of the preceding stanza. And the third line of each stanza ends with the same word as the last word of the second to last line of the preceding stanza, etc.

Hell, Roger, I might've misremembered it. Or there might be two methods. Yours is still a circular pattern, and very mathematical if I'm understanding it right. Descending "high numbers" 6, 5, 4, alternating with ascending "low numbers" 1, 2, 3.

Interesting to contemplate that there might be more than one way to skin this particular cat.

You misremembered, John. Roger's is the correct format.

How about if instead of saying I misremembered it, Michael, we just say I 'invented a nonce sestina form'? That has such a nicer ring to it!

I've invented the curtal sestina. Each of the first six lines ends with a different word, and then the poem is over.

I just love nonce forms. Probably because I seem to be a master at creating them when I've intended to write a roundel, a rouneau, a sestina, or a villinelle. http://www.ablemuse.com/erato/ubbhtml/smile.gif

Curtal Haiku

Surprisingly, spring.

[This message has been edited by John Hutchcraft (edited May 09, 2008).]

I've invented the curt

. . . but it met with dismissal.

I've gone back and revised this. I think it is better than the original draft.


- The Watering Gate -

Two people stood atop a distant hill
I saw them as I left today from work
as soon as I had closed the wooden gate
behind me and had drunk a cup of water.
There was no place I really had to go,
and so I took my time. I didn’t run


the way I sometimes do – I often run
as if life were a race. But on that hill,
the silhouetted couple stood. I go
and come the same way every day from work,
taking for granted earth and sun and water.
Familiar things get lost. Sometimes a gate


will make me pause and think; a creaking gate
especially so, and sounds of things that run
like trickling brooks, that peaceful voice of water,
its liquid echo circling down a hill
by clouds that just released their burdensome work,
and like me, found the peace of letting go.


The lie of time says moments come and go
as fast as little lambs run toward a gate
in search of freedom. There is always work
enough to keep us feeling ‘on-the-run’.
The move toward pleasure seems to be up hill,
against the laws that govern moving water.


But nothing is alive where there’s no water
that’s troubled – living things must ebb and go.
Stagnation lies beneath a silent hill
of graves, behind the locking of the gate
of wrought iron coldness. Living things must run.
An idle body has no means to work,


to keep the spirit flowing. Life needs work –
and workers need a living well of water
to keep the heart from fainting as they run.
Recycling is the only way to go.
Our life’s a circle and each of us a gate
that God has set upon his lovely hill.


I bike to work near waterfalls that run.
They’re brisk and full of life and through the gate
I drink the sun-rise lilting on the hill.

I noticed when reading yours, Anne, that the first and last stanzas were the ones that stayed in my mind with the two people on the hill in the first stanza and the biking near the waterfalls in the last one while the narrator goes from and to work. Nice images.

Maybe the sestina form can be salvaged by expanding on Roger's invention of the "curtal sestina" of 6 lines, each ending in a different word, with the final 3 lines having the original sestina pattern.

Call it the "expanded curtal sestina" form?

And if the end words just happen to rhyme, call it a "rhymed expanded curtal sestina".


[Edited to provide an example of a rhymed expanded curtal sestina.]

Wine and Truth

There's wine enough to help the world look right.
Our flesh though proves the worms will get their way,
But we ignore that now since we can say
We love the beauty of the stars tonight,
Though when we reach for wisdom in our books,
The pages crumble while the demon looks.

Perhaps we are not right to go this way,
Since some say we are lost in this dark night
Though ancient books still hint some angel looks.



[This message has been edited by Frank Hubeny (edited May 24, 2008).]

Frank,

This a quite lovely. I really love the opening line. I was listening to a book, "The Power of Now" (which I have mentioned several times recently - sorry if I sound like a broken record), and the narrator mentioned how much more violent the world might be if people did not have their various medications, sedatives and alcoholic mixtures to soothe the savage beast within. The author believes that humanity has a general collective insanity going on because we don't know "who we are" and are addicted to creating scenarios in our minds - unable to allow our minds to ever stop thinking (perhaps that is the bottomless pit). Anyhow, back to your poem. I like the ideas expressed in it.

Warm regards -
Anne

Thanks, Anne. I'll have to check out The Power of Now.

The more I think about the extended curtal sestina, the more I wonder if it is much improvement on the sestina except for being shorter.