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The Sestina as Interlocutor A high school English teacher assigned our class Dylan Thomas’ villanelle “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night.” When I was ten I’d lost the hearing in my left ear, and I identified with Thomas’ perseverance in the face of loss. The repetitions in the poem acted as a soothing balm. And the repetitions urged courage. The poem was reassuring in the way it rocked like a canoe, its two repeating lines the canoe’s curved sides. “Poetry is a form, reaching out,” Edward Hirsch wrote in “Beyond Desolation” (American Poetry Review 1997), “a disembodied hand—a voice—coming from darkness into light. . . .” As an undergraduate I studied Auden’s sestina “Paysage Moralise,” Pound’s “Sestina: Altaforte,” and sestinas by Ashbery, Bishop, Blumenthal, Hecht, Justice, Klappert, Kees, Lattimore, Meredith, McPherson, Turco, Van Duyn. The form’s six repeating words are called teleutons, and the teleutons’ repetition seemed an ideal tool for plumbing emotional depths. This repeating form, I thought, would cultivate perseverance, and infuse my oeuvre with nuanced depth. I was drawn to Marilyn Hacker’s facility in “Towards Autumn.” As in Auden’s “Paysage Moralise,” her teleutons were nouns: daughter, friend, bread, mother, lover, myself. Hacker intensified the poem’s music by repeating the teleutons, and also repeating two of them, friend and mother, WiTHin the lines. Arguments about whether fixed forms should be varied were moot: variations were happening. In Renee Ashley’s “The Light, The Dark, The One Stone, And the Bird Looking On,” long became prolong, altar became alter, alteration. In Dan Bellm’s “Book of Maps” the teleuton boy alternated three times with girl, and in the envoy became girlboy. And in Lynn Domina’s “Thursday”—a modern take on the psychological ambience of Christ’s Last Supper—five of the six teleutons were names of Christ’s disciples. The sixth was also a name, but in each stanza this sixth name changed. Now, after three decades of intimacy with the sestina, I say huzzah to this ornate and ingenious form. It intrigues me in the way it mirrors life’s rhythms. We experience expansion in our lives as an upsurge of wellbeing . Then that surging energy weakens and contracts to “zero”—and that zero acts as a pause between the contraction and the next expansion. INTRODUCTION xiv The pause reminds us that we are time-bound. No instant repeats because each is a new instant. In an analogous manner each new encounter with a teleuton elicits further insight into the poet’s subject. Yes this is the most obsessive of forms, and more power to it. For the form does not refer to a character defect, as in obsessive-compulsive. It’s obsessive in that it’s painstaking, patient and thorough. Americans are an aspiring, determined people, bent on designing better and better mousetraps, which for poets means poems that articulate human truths, no matter how hard it may be to face those truths. The sestina is the most ingenious and thorough form we have with which to accomplish this goal. Why? Because to write powerful poems we must explore deeper and deeper emotional terrain. The sestina’s repeating thoroughness is designed to discover what is buried deepest in us, and the teleutons keep asking us one more time to go beyond what we imagined was conclusive. To this end the six teleutons appear obsessively and perform seven times, each time urging yet another probing “revisioning.” Context is not only crucial. Context is all. Though the teleutons repeat faithfully, their changing context renders each instance a “new” word. This word may be familiar in one instance, but in others the context changes the teleuton into something new and strange, profoundly altering the subject matter and altering the sestina’s progress. Context leads us down avenues we could not have anticipated. In this process what might have seemed mere repetition becomes a key that opens our psyches’ locked doors. Thanks to the insistence of the teleutons, we become athletes going for the gold. Examine the teleuton “foot” in Robin Becker’s accomplished sestina. Sad Sestina for Susanna Kaysen Today’s sadness is different from yesterday’s: more green in it, some light rain, premonition of departures and the unpacking of books and papers. It’s not a bad thing to be sad, my friend Susanna says. Go with it. I’m going by foot into this sadness, the way we go as children into the awful school day and...

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