Quote:
Originally posted by Anne Bryant-Hamon:
I'm wondering whether you and Barbara and Janet randomly chose 6 words and began writing, or if you thought about what you'd like to write about and then chose 6 words?
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I started with the first stanza and then, painstakingly, tried to figure out which end-word had to go on which succeeding line. That ordering was the most difficult part of the challenge. I kept getting the permutations wrong. So the chosen words were whatever worked in the first stanza.
I did choose the end-words to be simple rhymes to add some repeated sound to the sestina, which I think it lacks. I also shortened the lines to tetrameter and repeated the 6th line in the 1st of the next stanza. All that is not in the original rule.
To me, the sestina is a mathematical pattern that has no sound (metrical/poetic) value associated with the permutation of the end words. And that makes me question whether the sestina is a true form rather than merely an arbitrary rule.
Meter in a language is more than the description of it, that is, more than the number of syllables, accents, alliterations, rhymes, or repetitions that are detected by those scanning the poem. It is something that is pleasing to the ear of many native listeners, which may turn out to be not easily scanned.
The sestina, however, starts with an arbitrary description rather than a pleasing pattern already in existence in the language. Adding the false assumption that the existence of a description implies the existence of a poetic form, one gets the false conclusion that the sestina is a poetic form. To my ear, the sestina, as a rule, is unlikely to succeed as a form in any language.
The rhymed example by Swinburne that Henry Quince mentioned in the thread he cited I thought was interesting, but even with that example, I don't see why the permutation of the end-words was necessary. The arbitrary rule got in the way even there. Nor do I see the benefit of adding this end-word permutation constraint to anything written in free or blank verse.
Thanks for the challenge, Anne. It was the only sestina I've ever written.
[This message has been edited by Frank Hubeny (edited April 20, 2008).]