Obsession: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century

Class Assignment: Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem

MAURA STANTON Class Assignment: Thirteen Ways of Looking for a Poem for Wendy Bishop, 1953–2003 Today let’s write our first sestina, repeating end words, not two refrains like the villanelle. We don’t need the rhyme scheme of a sonnet or the quatrains of a pantoum; instead, let’s celebrate and praise as loudly as any ode to mark the death of someone famous in an elegy. Farewell, Wendy Bishop, you deserve an elegy sweet as a teacup of tears in a sestina. You put the Oh! back into the Ode and helped us climb the fearful villanelle after we’d stumbled up the pantoum, amazed at the view, and rushed to write a sonnet. You taught us thirteen ways of writing that sonnet. I hear your cheerful voice in your chapter on elegies talking us through the pantoum, and explaining the intricacies of the sestina. Last week we all wrote surprising villanelles and soon we’ll attempt the marvelous ode with its strophe, antistrophe, epode or step again into the airy cage of the sonnet trying to get our breath back after the villanelle with its singing rhymes. This poem is an elegy written in the shape of the sestina for the woman who understood the secret of the pantoum and showed us how to turn the slow pantoum into a braid of words. She loved odes stuffed with okra and cheese and watermelon, and this sestina stumbles to think of the 169 sonnets she’ll never write now. Why should a stranger’s elegy unfold in stanzas, when her next villanelle might have dazzled us? She made the villanelle democratic, giving us the courage to try the pantoum. But all I can offer her today is this elegy celebrating her joy of form in this invented ode (which fits her better than a boxy sonnet) listing again the forms she loved in the cat’s cradle of a sestina: quatrains of sweet birds, fiery villanelles, couplets, hungry odes, rosy-fingered aubades, pantoums, scented ghazals, sonnets like pool nets catching oak leaves and centipedes, an elegy inside a sestina. SESTINAS ABOUT SESTINAS ...