Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century

Afterword

The verse form which we call the “sestina” is of Medieval French origin, attributed to Arnaut Daniel in the late twelfth century and used by other Gallic poets and by Italians including Petrarch and Dante, from whom it received its Italian name. The introduction of the form into English literature dates from the sixteenth century. George Puttenham (a member of my mother’s ancient family, the Putnams of Salem Village) was the putative author of the first book of prosody written in English, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1588), in which he described the form thus: There is another sort of proportion used by Petrarch called the setzino, not rhyming as other songs do, but by choosing six words out of which all the whole ditty is made, every [one] of those six commencing and ending his verse by course, which restraint, to make the ditty sensible, will try the maker’s cunning. Edmund Spenser was apparently the first to use a form of the sestina in his Shepherd’s Calendar, which appeared in 1579. Roughly contemporary with Spenser’s atypical sestina were three sestinas written by Sir Philip Sidney. The sestina, however, disappeared after these manifestations and did not reappear for more than two and one-half centuries. It is thus largely a nineteenthcentury phenomenon in the United Kingdom, and a twentieth-century phenomenon in the United States, where it was quite possibly one of the five most popular strict-verse forms, including the sonnet, iambic pentameter blank verse, the villanelle, and Sapphics as well. Experimentation with the sestina is a long-standing tradition in the history of the form, as it continues to be today, a fact that may well explain why so many people have used it and its permutations last century and this. Oddly, neither of the great American formalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson, wrote sestinas, though both used many other traditional forms, Frost notably in “Stopping by Woods on a Snow Evening,” the interlocking rubaiyat, and Robinson in “The House on the Hill,” a villanelle. However, not long after the turn of the twentieth century, their contemporary, Ezra Pound, returned to the dramatic mode of Sidney and wrote a monologue, “Sestina: Altaforte”; this, together with his “Sestina for Isolt,” and “Paysage Moralisé” by W. H. Auden, set off a steady trickle, if not a flood, of traditional and experimental sestinas in America. The primary problem that poets encounter with the sestina is generally that the repeated end-words can be obtrusive. To draw the reader’s attention away from the repetitions, poets may enjamb their lines so that sentences and phrases are not end-stopped on the teleutons; or they may use, on occasion, homographs of the end-words, like wind (as in “south wind”) and wind (as in “wind your own clock”), or even such ploys as repeating one word, such AFTERWORD 134 as can, as part of another word, as in toucan. Of course, one can go to the other extreme and, instead of hiding them, use the teleutons obsessively for particular effect. Patricia Monaghan’s teleutons in “Loaded” send a message: loaded, shot, gun, hidden, children, safe. Although the writing contained in Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century is very good overall, the editors and I are bemused by the fact that writers of many of the sestinas seem to have either no regard or no ear for meter. Although there are places where meter is suspended because the poet is varying the form on purpose or for an effect, in many cases compelling meter could be present if a word or two here and there were eliminated. Some of these poems, however, read as easily and “naturally” as prose, thus fulfilling A. D. Hope’s dictum that one must reconcile the rhythms of ordinary speech with the lyricism of verse if one aspires to be a bard. There are all kinds of experimental sestinas collected here. Let me mention at least a few that I think are fine examples not merely of the form but of poetry: “No Swimming” by Michele Battiste is as thoughtful and intelligent a poem as one might hope to find anywhere, and it helps to jet-assist the takeoff of Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century. Shaindel Beers’ “Why It Almost Never Ends with Stripping” is a wholly believable exposé of the sex trade, and Dan Bellm’s “Boy Wearing a Dress” looks...