A Half-Dozen Words to Bend Your Writing Mind

[Last in a series of posts involving six words. Part 1 asked you to define your life in a half-dozen words; Part 2, your life's work. This one is much narrower in scope.]

This isn’t normally the way I’d start a post — with poetry. (That typically happens only in my regular Friday whiskey river-triggered ruminations.) But I wanted to open with something useful to non-writing site visitors, as well as the writers who stop by.

So let’s begin simply. And if you’re a writer looking for a challenge, keep reading!

Sestina
by Elizabeth Bishop

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.

She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,

It’s time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle’s small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
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
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.

It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.

But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

Pretty great, huh? Yet a certain type of writer regards this with apprehension (if not outright terror).

For a writer of prose, and prose only, the act of writing within poetry’s constraints of formal structure can be pretty excruciating. (True, you can always fall back on the old prose-poem trick. And it’s also true that some prose poetry really can’t be neatly classified as anything else. But for the most part, when I see a “prose poem,” it’s hard not think to myself: Slacker.)

Beyond the basics, for a prose writer surely the most torturous forms of poetry are those which require a particular pattern not just of meter or rhyme, but of the words themselves.

And among these scarifying forms, surely the form known as the sestina holds a special place.

It’s a complicated, challenging form, and not one I’d recommend if you’re just looking to noodle around with something to while away a lunch hour of writing.

But if you’re really jammed up against a classic writer’s block, with a desert of three days ahead of you when you have no freaking idea what to write about — let alone how to write it — try a sestina. Just try one. One.

First, forget forms anywhere nearly as simple as 14-line sonnets.  A sestina contains 39 (!) lines, broken up into seven stanzas. The first six stanzas each contain six lines; the last, three lines only.

As for meter, in theory a sestina’s should be iambic pentameter. But the form frustrates so many writers — poets or not — that this requirement is often (maybe mostly) ignored. Other rules are likewise relaxed from time to time, and alternative “official”  definitions have been introduced over the centuries.

All of that sounds complicated enough, right? But when you consider the sestina’s unique, central requirement, you may (as I do) begin to perspire:

Start by selecting any six words in your native language. Choose them however you like, but choose them carefully: you’re going to be shackled to them for the sestina’s whole 39 lines. (Note too that choosing elementary function words like “the,” “it,” “and,” and so on is frowned on — go back to your prose poetry, you slacker.) Number the words 1 through (duh) 6.

Now arrange the words, and the lines, in the following manner:

• Stanza 1: end its six lines with the six words in this order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Stanza 2: end lines with words 6, 1, 5, 2, 4, 3
• Stanza 3: end lines with words 3, 6, 4, 1, 2, 5
• Stanza 4: end lines with words 5, 3, 2, 6, 1, 4
• Stanza 5: end lines with words 4, 5, 1, 3, 6. 2
• Stanza 6: end lines with words 2, 4, 6, 5, 3, 1
• Stanza 7 (whew (or so you thought)): the first line contains words 1 and 2, in that order; the second, words 3 and 4; and the third line, words 5 and 6

As an example, say I decide to select six words from my six previous blog posts: word 1 will be the first (non-function) word of the previous post; word 2, the second word of the next most previous; and so on. This yields these words 1 through 6:

1. good
2. mothers
3. cartoon
4. draft
5. cable
6. funny

The line endings in the first stanza would be those six words in that order. For the second, the lines would look like this:

… funny
… good
… cable
… mothers
… draft
… cartoon

And so on through the sixth stanza. The final three lines would look like this:

… good… mothers
… cartoon… draft
… cable… funny

The trick of course is to write the thing in some way which sounds completely natural and unforced. You can play around with the end words in a limited manner, either punning on them (for example, if phlegm were one of your end words you might use flim-flam instead, at some point) or by adding prefixes or suffixes (e.g., using illiberally or even liberate instead of liberal).

But try to stay within the spirit of the thing by not regarding the rules too, er, liberally.

I’ve written exactly one sestina in my life . And for a form with so many relaxable rules, the damned thing was still hard to write. All I can promise this time out is that I’ll, uh… try. (Slacker.)

_________________________

Note: For other examples, see the results of McSweeney’s sestina challenge, of a few years ago.

The image at the top of this post is of a so-called “specimen jar poetry puzzle,” based on Elizabeth Bishop’s sestina reproduced here. (Click on the image for more information from the puzzle’s maker.)